By Jacob Lillemose

ME, OTHERS AND THE STORIES IN WHICH WE ARE INCLUDED REALITY AS DOCUMENTED IN THE VIDEO ART OF SONJA LILLEBÆK

By Jacob Lillemose

The first work by Sonja Lillebæk I saw, I saw sitting on a barstool. Not because I was in a bar, but because the work was an installation, consisting of a simple bar with matching stools, where you sat to watch a video about bars in Copenhagen. The traditional kind of bars, the ones with regular customers and landlords, with a ‘brown’ and friendly atmosphere. I admit to having seated myself with some scepticism. I guess I found the arrangement to be a bit corny and overdone. However, after watching a few minutes with reserve, I none the less sat down. The feeling of not being quite at ease with the premise didn’t disappear, though, while I watched the video, it rather changed into something more ambiguous. The well-known situation, sitting at a bar chatting away with the person who is serving the drinks, turned strange, or rather, because I was sitting in an exhibition space watching the situation as a work of art, I felt insecure as to my own position in relation to it. On the one hand I sensed an intimacy in the situation from my own bar experience, on the other hand a distance to it, due to my role as a professional art spectator belonging to another social segment than the regular costumers. To define the situation with stereotyped ideas did not make sense. But I soon realized that the work was not about defining the situation, not in the sense of an objective evaluation, as a person not being part of it. Wanting to do so is in itself a stereotyped idea, when you are in a bar as well as when looking at art. On the contrary, the challenge was to engage oneself in a personal way and meet the situation with open curiosity and accept this openness as a chance of reflection, of broadening the horizon of the situation and letting the situation broaden my horizon. Anyway, that’s how I perceived the work, or rather it was the way it worked with me.
Why this preface focusing on me when the matter in question is the work of Sonja Lillebæk? One reason is this questioning of the seen and my own position in relation to it which this work produced in me, and that is always something, which I am intently looking for in art, whether I am being professional or simply privately interested, if it is possible to distinguish between these two positions at all. It may sound pompous, but if art does not challenge, criticize and play with the cultural codes, which involuntarily are programming our view on the world surrounding us, I think it is nothing but a lifelike picture of the world, of no importance because it does not offer new ways of seeing, new positions to look from. As to challenging, I think, her work succeeds, and that is why I am writing this text. Another and equally important reason is that the experience of being urged to question preconceived ideas is recurrent in the work of Sonja Lillebæk. And it is not only concerning me as a spectator, it equally involves herself as an artist when she is filming alone with her camera, in bars, on board fishing vessels, in parks and at her mother’s. Her work unfolds as a series of personal stories about the world in which she discuss the ideas of sanity and truth, the structure of so many social relations. The personal never turns into the solely private in her work, though. By involving herself and staking her own person, she is inviting the spectator to do likewise. Not to establish a common experience, but to create a common space that allows a variety of personal stories, each with notions and ideas of its own, and each with an awareness of own possibilities and other perspectives. It is a space in which the well-known contains the unfamiliar, the common involves the personal, documentary and fiction are integrated. It is wilfully ambiguous, since ambiguity urges us to wonder and on to the creation of new ideas of the world and our relation to it.

I AM AN OTHER AND THE GENRE IS NOT ITSELF

The approach of Sonja Lillebæk to the documentary does not follow the classic guidelines of the genre, on the contrary it is characterized by a colouring of the genre with elements from the visual arts. The approach is already evident in the early work Mother as Daughter (2001). Two juxtaposed projections are respectively showing Sonja Lillebæk and her mother in their respective living rooms. Over the pictures their names and years of birth are stated. They are both named Sonja Lillebæk Christensen, one of them born in 1944, the other in 1972. At first glance it seems like the two women are telling about their own lives in a quite straightforward manner, their way of upbringing children and their relations to men. But gradually doubt arises as to the formal separation of the two women and the confusion, which the likeness in names – and the title – incite, takes over the two stories to a degree that makes it impossible to resolve whose story and version each of them is telling. The daughter relates about events, which clearly must have taken place in another time than the one in which she grew up, merging with events that occur in the mother’s story. And vice versa. Most of the time both women sit listening thoughtfully to what the other says, but simultaneously they laugh at awkward, almost inappropriate moments, as when the daughter is telling that her husband ran off and was drinking too hard. The sequences of storytelling, listening and laughter are edited together with an effect that resembles a montage with striking and indeterminate jumps in time, breaking up the continuity of the story. In that way the balance between story and picture are disturbed, and the idea about the stories as unambiguous memoirs, stories of what actually took place told by somebody who was there, are being questioned. This touch causes the stories to be told without the pathos of memory and the weight of truth. The work isn’t dealing as much with the memories themselves as with the possibility for complex, humoristic storytelling, which they represent, or rather to which they are forced into adapting. In a more fundamental way the work is questioning the premises of the documentary story, the relations between the documented and the documentarist, especially how a daughter can tell the story of her mother, a story she involuntarily is a part of, without getting involved and colouring the story with memories of her own. In Mother As Daughter the point is the impossibility of a daughter doing that. A story is always being told by somebody and through a media which inevitably gives shape to the story, and that condition is what Sonja Lillebæk lets the documentary reflect, underlining the confusion of the signification implied in this condition and the concurrent potential for meaning contained in it. She plays with signification beyond the genre’s conventions and its ideas of objectivity and truthfulness.
The wilfully confusing play with conventions of the documentary, in particular the direct connection between picture and text and the narrator’s defined position towards the material, takes on a different character in the two ‘music video stories’ Welcome to My Nightmare (2006) and I Feel Love (2006). As far as they can be said to be documentaries, it must be ascribed to the pictures, consisting of documentary recordings of traffic, a railway area and a roadway bridge respectively. Moreover it is about two ‘inner’ stories, two unidentified and invisible narrators remember an alcohol-drenched nightmare and car rides on the back seat of the parents’ Vauxhall. The stories are told in simple text moving across and out of the screen with a variety of effects. Sometimes the text follows the traffic in the pictures, at other times they reflect the content of the story. Underneath music is playing (Alice Coopers’ “Welcome To My Nightmare” and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”), partly as a possible reference to the two situations, this could be the music which was being heard during the drinking of alcohol and during the car ride (“I Feel Love” was released in 1977 when Sonja Lillebæk was five years old like the girl in the story), partly as a kind of self-reflecting remarks, where the lyrics merge with the story. The form emphasizes the constructed character of the stories and their origins in imaginary experiences. They are mediated, narrated realities.
The indirect connection between the pictures and the content of the stories reflects the condition, that the matter which is to be documented are phenomena which cannot be seen or rendered visually, namely something dreamed and a sensation. Lillebæk challenges the innate idea of the documentary about the narrator as a witness to actual events. What does it mean to witness something as personal as a nightmare and a sensation? Can these be documented at all? At least not in any direct sense, but why confine the genre to the visible world? Nightmares and sensations are human realities as well, though they are abstract and goes beyond time and space as specific, measurable quantities. In works by Lillebæk reality cannot be reduced to the physical characteristics
of the world, but must be conceived through the mind of a watching, imaginating and narrating person.
Both Welcome to My Nightmare and I Feel Love discuss the notion of movement on many levels. On the screen trains, cars and aeroplanes are moving in the physical world as literal illustrations of the inner journeys taking place in the two stories. It is a movement towards other places than the social reality in which you are placed, whether you are an alcoholic father with a serious hangover or a five-year old girl in the secure company of her family. Or rather, the movies describe the movement towards the experience of this reality in all of its weird dimensions.
Mother as Daughter, Welcome to My Nightmare and I Feel Love are all symptomatic examples of the widened field that Sonja Lillebæk creates for herself within the documentary genre. She combines an interest in telling stories from reality with art and the possibilities for reflection about the stories that art offers, especially stories in which reality does not fit our ideas of it and therefore urges us to create new ones.

WHEN A VOYEUR WONDERS

A recurrent figure in the work of Sonja Lillebæk is a woman, or rather herself, who is watching men, young and old, in various situations, while they ride a bike, sit by the water, visits ‘the club’ or dance in front of each other. Mostly she comments on the documentary recordings by revealing her personal thoughts, partly of the men and partly of the relations of her own sex to what the men are doing. She is a kind of voyeur looking with her camera in hand for the places where men are being themselves, alone or together with other men. Those places, where women do not play a part. Not to interrupt the situations and become part of them, but to watch the men at a distance, fascinated and estranged. Different from the classic voyeur, as portrayed in popular culture, her attraction to the other sex is not exactly sexual. Rather than a desire for men as objects, it is a fundamental wonder that urges her on, a wonder concerning the character of the way the men socialise with other men, their attitudes to things and their physical abilities, and not least their ability to exclude the surrounding world and be themselves. The wonder expresses a fundamental love, too. A lot of so labelled feminist art and art theory criticize and ridicule the voyeur as an essential male figure that turns the woman into an object in the way he looks at her but Lillebæk accepts the figure with honesty and a simultaneous awareness of its questionable character. She does more than that, though. She is re-interpreting the figure, introducing a voyeuristic look, which is not about reification, control or ownership. On the contrary it is a wondering look filled with insecurity, pointing back at her self. Opposite to the voyeur who is in a safe position, hidden at the ‘keyhole’, she is exposed (though not in the sense of being visible), in a certain sense more than the men she observes. Through her comments her personal look becomes clear and they make up an equally important part of the works as the pictorial content. It is a look, which is open towards criticism, insisting on an open curiosity as to parts of the world, which you do not understand, because you are not a part of it.
The voyeuristic figure is most evident in On a Slow Boat to China (2005). Here we find Lillebæk sneaking around the bushes in a park by the waterside, while she is filming and taking pictures of men sitting alone on benches around the park. She is imagining who they are and why they are sitting there. Without other information than what she is able to pick up from a distance, what they are wearing, which means of transport they have used in getting there and so on. It is nothing but fantasy, but simultaneously expressing an inquiring empathy, which might contain social prejudice of a rather trivial character but never becomes exactly condemning. Her eager and determined absorption with the men contrasts their self-absorbed and contemplative being. While they are dreaming themselves away to far parts of the world or at least creating a space freed from the realities of everyday life, she is projecting rather unimaginative ideas onto them. Apart from a series of snapshots of the men, the pictorial side mainly consists of filmed surroundings, from the grass swaying in the wind to a helicopter in the sky, as though the camera followed the look of the men gazing at nothing in particular, their quiet, impressionistic observations, in contrast to her voyeuristic look and ideas. On a Slow Boat to China isn’t solely about the men, but also about her. It is a humoristic and critical (self)portrait of the voyeur as an expression of something fundamentally human, the leaning of humans towards ideas of other people formed within a narrow horizon – their own.
In Mad About The Boy (2007) Lillebæk has downloaded a series of video clips from the internet platform YouTube, showcasing young men, alone and in pairs, dancing hard dance, a description applied to different styles of dancing to high speed electronic music with all beats accentuated. Here the voyeur is hidden behind the computer screen, not commenting on the seen either. The story of the work is instead carried by the title melody Mad About The Boy, a popular song from the 1930’s, about a woman who, even though she is well aware how foolish and impossible it is, cannot help losing herself in her love for a young film actor. The melody changes the focus of the video from the seen to the seeing, in such a way that the documentary content of the video clips serves to reflect the fascination of a woman, Lillebæk, and her simultaneous awareness of the questionable character of the fascination. The work discusses in other words a fundamental ambivalence towards fascination, which is countered by the direct and expressive physical activity of the young men in their being together. It renders the female voyeur as a figure, who cannot help her self from acting against her own knowledge, submitted to fascination as she is.
In Fatal Attraction (2008) it becomes evident that a certain degree of sexual attraction is part of Lillebæk’s voyeuristic figure. Here we find her commenting on pictures of men, biking towards the camera along a cycle track. She enumerates lists of the situations and matters in which men have the advantage compared to women, some of these being idiosyncratic, others quite obvious. Several times the video shifts into slow motion and to the sound of a steadfastly beating heart she intimately whispers about their bodies, their hairy arms and napes as something strong and secure that can handle the troubles of this world. The men on the pictures are quite ordinary men, and likewise she is focusing on quite ordinary qualities. It is the ordinary and not the exceptional and ideal man she feels attracted to. The man that thinks and acts like a man without giving it much thought. The work ends by shifting into a view of a group of construction wokers – an archetypal male voyeur – accompanied by a speak on the condition that women looking at men are doing something secret, opposite to men looking at women. In that way the female voyeur in Fatal Attraction challenges a cultural norm and the structure of power in public spaces. She is revealing herself, pointing out that men do not hold an exclusive right to look at the opposite sex, they are being watched as well, mind you, in everyday life, when they are just being themselves.
The least voyeuristic but most pronounced documentary work in this series is In Da Club (2007), where Lillebæk calls on four male clubs, respectively a boat, a dart, a carrier pigeon and a billiards club. She is filming the members performing their activities, sometimes at a distance so a sense of their being together can be grasped, at other times at close up to create a sense of the single man’s preoccupation with his hobby. None of them speak to the camera, though. They do not say anything about the club, why they are there and so on. In place of that the sound track is filled with her comments. She is imagining exactly what the members would say, what kind of club it is, what good the men is making out of it, and not least which part women are playing (usually none). She explains her own attitude towards clubs too, her wanting to become member of a club. But in this culture women do not go to clubs, at least not mature women (that can be proven by statistics). They spent their spare time on charitable purposes, doing something for others. In this way the work implicitly express a wonder, why women do not go to clubs, why they do not create their own, small communities and free spaces around activities without any purpose than the activity itself. It is pointing out a difference, observing without explaining.
The four works are all dealing less with the seen than with Sonja Lillebæk’s personal relations to the seen, and the thoughts she is having when watching the men. The factual world steps behind, making room for personal ideas and projections. As a documentarist she may be at a distance to her material, but it is a voyeuristic and not a scientific distance, and it involves the risk of making mistakes. The figure is not in control of the situations, the control is naturally possessed by the dancing, the biking and the sitting men. And the works are not attempts to gain this control either. They are rather trying to describe, with ironic self-consciousness, the very experience of watching men, as divided as it is.

EMANCIPATION IN FRONT OF THE TELEVISION

Sonja Lillebæk’s work within the documentary is many-sided and besides the formal experiments it contains a series of more straightforward portrait videos. Here she acts with a camera, interviewing the characters, describing environments to which she has some kind of relation, be it her native place, her neighbourhood or family. It is not like it is the relations themselves that are being examined, but it is typical of the personal approach that serves as a pivot, around which all her work revolves. She is not a documentarist with the distance of an anthropologist. In more than one way she is close to the realities, which she portrays. Without simply identifying herself with it, she is involved in it, biographically and through her artistic method. A condition which the films and her other work constantly reflects, with humour and self-criticism.
Lillebæk’s focus is not on the exotic or radically different properties of the characters or their environment. She is focusing on the realities of ordinary everyday life. And her description of these are respects them in their own right, addresses them in a straightforward manner without prejudice. Thereby she challenges stereotypic ideas and urges us on towards a more subtle understanding of these realities.
All the movies portrays social phenomena, traditionally low ranking in social status: The life on board a fishing vessel, the television habits of a senior citizen, homeless people and bartenders in bars with a ‘brown’ atmosphere. But they’re not victims. That is not the point. On the contrary. The characters are being depicted as people with their own story, views and dreams, free from ideas of status. They are presented complex and difficult to place within sociological categories and stereotyped ideas in the culture. Rather than assimilating and subordinating the persons to social systems, the movies are letting the characters go beyond and question such systems, both as blueprints of thought as well as political structures.
Emancipated – My Mother (2002) is a portrait of Sonja Lillebæk’s mother, which discusses ideas of being emancipated, taking off from the television habits of the mother, especially her daily watching of The Wheel of Fortune. The mother lives alone in a small house on the western coast of Jutland, and every day she sits down in her armchair to watch the program. She is hooked on it (or was, because the video has been made after the programme stopped) as a form of pop cultural meditation, through which she excludes everything else, for instance she does not answer the phone, and her close relatives are well aware of it. She identifies completely with the show, pleases herself with the winners and entertains qualified opinions as to the size of the prizes. The video crosscuts between the living room and the program, and a kind of dialogue between the mother and the studio host takes place. It is a slightly comic relation, but to the mother completely without problems. The Wheel of Fortune secures a possibility for her to exclude the surrounding world and be at one with her self, and that is what matters. Thereby the video raises the question of the purposes of entertainment. Is it possible that it is actually a road to something as existentially profound as emancipation? That seems to be the case with the mother. In many ways she is a counterpart to the modern woman, who seeks and embraces a life in emancipation through her education, income and social status. Compared to these women the emancipation of the mother is somewhat prosaic and trivial, but maybe therefore all the more real. To her emancipation is not a project, not mediated by fashionable cultural ideals but simply a question about relating to oneself and the near surroundings, whether it is in front of the television screen or during long walks along the coast of the North Sea, where she lives. It is about having reached a point in life where she is able to say that she has nothing to regret. As such she is a living example of the fact, that emancipation not necessarily is to be found in sophisticated cultures, and that such cultures do not have the exclusive right to emancipation, and not least that a person apparently can be emancipated in different ways.
In The Idea of the Neighbours: Illusions and Nightmares (2006) we meet the neighbour of Lillebæk, Henrik, who is a newcomer like Lillebæk herself. He talks about how lucky he feels, as a former homeless, to have been given a new chance, but at the same time he is shaking his head, because the municipality in order to save a thousand Danish crowns (about $175) have made him move into a house without any cupboards in the kitchen. This kind of petty-mindedness to which he is referring, is mirrored in the second track of the video, in which Lillebæk relates how the people in a dwelling area with single-family houses, lead by a former football star, try to stop a housing project in their area through the media. The plan is to let three homeless people move into an empty field in the neighbourhood. The residents think that the homeless people will create insecurity in the area and cause the values of their properties to drop. The video is not encouraging compassion, not with Henrik or the other homeless, but discusses in a simultaneously unpretentious and cool way how people’s feeling of ownership can be drawn into conflict with their solidarity with people they get to meet, due to the fact that they are part of a larger society (than the dwelling area). That it often is the people who have most who show the least tendency towards proving their solidarity, is one of those ironic conditions that is being discussed in the video, without moralizing, though. Nobody gets pointed at or pitied. The point is not to define losers and winners, but to urge on to reflection of the premises and motives behind the conflict.
Solidarity is an aspect too in Supply and Demand and a Round of Drinks (2005). Here Lillebæk calls on five bars, interviewing the landlords as to their relations with the regular customers, the business and the kind of social culture that the bar is sheltering. The bare are traditional bars, which means that they, opposite to modern bars and cafés, have customers who come every day and with whom the landlords gradually evolve a kind of friendship, at the same time as the business-like relations is being maintained (no one is allowed to buy on tick). The movie questions this condition and its inherent problems with curiosity. Is it okay to make money on other peoples’ drunkenness, maybe alcoholism, even when you know them well? Do you, as a landlord, have some kind of responsibility towards your customers, beyond making them feel at home and part of a community? The movie is asking in a way that makes the apparently trivial situation turn into something more ambiguous. On another level the movie examines what it means to own a bar. Why do some people choose that for a living? You cannot make big money out of it and there is no cultural prestige attached to it either, but to the landlords it is nevertheless a genuine choice. Thereby the landlords – and the movie – are challenging the idea, that every choice is driven by hopes of rising in cultural esteem. Maybe it is ‘good enough’ to do something that you like to do, maybe there is even some kind of depth and meaning in low-cultural behaviour?
In Just a Man (2003) Lillebæk is again focusing on the sense of community, when she joins a group of fishermen on a weeklong trip on board the fishing vessel. It is hard work, 20 hours a day, with food and sleep as the only pauses. The movie is not dealing with the work, though, but with the male community on board the vessel, serving as an alternative family. They take turns cooking the food and respect each other, because they know they depend on the others, like in a relationship to a woman. And there is a special intimacy between them which might not be exactly female, but ‘softer’ than the relations between men in clubs. Without being outspoken, there is an obvious hierarchy on board the vessel too. It is Buller’s vessel, so he is the alpha male. The community contains traditional male structures as well as behaviour not specific to gender. And it is this double character that the movie examines. The movie also examines the relations of the fishermen to women, wives, girlfriends or ladies, which the bachelors meet in town. Through solo-interviews and shootings by the dining table, the movie revolves around the boyish side to the relations, as when they discuss whether Buller’s wife’s got ‘hooters’ or not, and to the mature and serious side, as when Buller is telling how he missed the birth of one of his children, because he was at sea. In spite of this kind of ‘weekend-relationship’ the divorce rate is significantly lower in the part of the country, where the fishermen live, than elsewhere, not least in Copenhagen. Without getting caught in sociological statistics or romanticizing the fact (after all, we’re only having the men’s version) the movie explores the ‘good’ relationship and the ‘right’ sexual roles beyond the ‘truths’ that loads of literature on the subject and the emancipated culture on the whole are presupposing. It is not like the relationships of the fishermen and their views on women is better or more ‘real’ than ordinary relationships, in which you are together every day, not at all, but the movie indicates that they possess a special ability. However, as to what this special thing exactly might be, the movie does not answer. It is left open as a space of possibilities.
The four movies describe characters and environments in ways that defies socially stereotyped ideas and logics of status. They put the field of the social on trial and on the whole they are urging a development into a more spacious thinking of dynamics in social life, basing themselves on paradoxes, deviations and the inexplicable.

“I MUST BE VULNERABLE TO CRITICISM”

Saying that Sonja Lillebæk herself is a part of her documentaries may sound trivial, but nevertheless it is a central premise. Choosing not to establish an ‘objective’ view of the material she is working with, she explicitly lets her personal experience be the optics through which the material is formed. However, experience is a tricky entity to deal with and to define. It unfolds in a dialogical process, taking place between the factual situations, that she is documenting, and her own ideas about them, the way she is looking at them. It is exactly this dialogue that is being emphasized in her work, and at the same time urges us to reflect on. She is not soaring above her material as an authority, but takes a position where she, in her own words, is ‘vulnerable to criticism’, meaning that the position is something you may feel free to discuss and question.
Her way of discussing social issues is neither politically correct nor moralizing. And she certainly makes no claim to having ‘solved’ political conflicts. This is not explicit ‘political art’. The political dimension in her work is rather present in a more subtle ways, through the portraits of characters and environments that questions the normative, consensual and normalizing discourse, that characterizes modern politics, especially the discourse that concerns the relations between the cultural upper- and middleclass and everything else that does not fit their values. She employs a (pictorial) language that plays with meaning and information, operating from other premises as to how you can discuss these subjects in a meaningful way. And mind you, she does that by taking off from ‘questionable’ stories.
To describe Sonja Lillebæk as a documentarist would be to reduce her work. Even though it is based on documentary material, it is firstly stories, narrated worlds, as experienced from her position. And she is not hiding the fact that she is taking artistic liberties (but never without respecting the peculiarities of the material), so these worlds are being opened towards themselves and towards other worlds, hers and our, with all the tension and questions that involves. It is a kind of gesture that does not take the world for granted or tries to perceive the world according to a formula. It is a gesture that invites us to engage and reflect in a personal manner within the world, and thereby create a widened mental space for its unfolding.

Translation: Thomas Krogsbøl