– I still have the keys to his appartment.
– Yeah. but do you still have the keys to his heart, stupid bitch?
Three women and a man fight about love and happiness in an antebellum southern mansion. Kalup Linzy’s film Keys to Our Heart (2008) combines emotional pathos with the quotidian lightness of soap operas. With an obvious reference to the clichéd acting of this entertainment format, Linzy’s work ruptures the empathetic identification of the audience with the fictional characters by exaggerating both the dramatic and comedic components of the dialogues. The investigation of narrative structures at work in soap operas has played a significant role in the practice of numerous artists in recent years. Named after the film by Kalup Linzy, this video program explores the ways in which soap operas disseminate commodified emotion and probematizes the mechanisms that underpin emotional registers generated by consumer society.
Initially produced for American radio stations during the 1930s, the Daily Soap aimed at boosting the commercialization of domestic commodities, like soap. With time, this entertainment format has become an object of both fantasy and familiarity in the suburban consumers’ life. Its specific mode of narration – stories reduced to a succession of equally important occurrences that form a smooth and comforting flow – enables ties to be built with the consumer’s daily life and manages to provide the consumer-viewer with emotional companionship. The narrative structure integrates any kind of event into a generic continuum that paradoxically constrains any kind of significant development in spite of the innumerable twists and turns of the plot.
The streaming program Keys to our Heart takes the form of an internet broadcasting channel that will be accessible online for two weeks. Similar to a TV channel, the project displays a continuous flow of images. An artist’s video will be screened every day of the week at 10 pm. Each of these is introduced by an announcement produced by artist Pauline Curnier Jardin for this occasion. In this frame, Curnier Jardin assumes the role of a television presenter, reminiscent in her style and discourse of the manner of early television announcers. Her character – “lady weather-time” – deploys her cheesy charm and energy in filling the empty waiting time between the videos with more emptiness.
Notions of daily routine, boredom and drama intertwine intimately in the videos. The works of Kalup Linzy, Ken Okiishi, Keren Cytter and Phil Collins feature stories that manage to forge an emotional link with the audience, despite or maybe because of their self-consciously artificial acting style, which resembles that of the soap opera. Okiishi and Cytter both deal with dramas between domestic couples in their videos. They deploy narrative strategies that distort standardized emotional structures, by rearticulating the links between music and image for example. Collins takes the format of the South American Telenovela as a starting point and addresses, in his own words, “the disruptive potential of some of the pains and dilemmas of the private sphere, within a highly predicated framework.” In contrast, Anja Kirschner & David Panos, just like Claire Hooper, put an emphasis on the dramatic dimension of catastrophic events or situations. Despite the pivotal role the characters play in these powerful story lines, they seem helpless and lost. Kirschner & Panos’s scenario follows the aftermath of an apocalyptical natural disaster that the artists recast in clean glossy images, while Claire Hooper confronts an individual’s tragedy with the influences of superior powers. Their subversion of soap opera standards reconnects this narrative structure with more ancient and solemn formats of story-telling and thereby underlines popular culture’s ongoing fascination with human drama.
Recalling the artificiality of soap operas’ approximate or exaggerated décor, some artists place their protagonists in places and situations orchestrated in a surreal manner. Shana Moulton’s carefully arranged selection of awkward objects interact with the artist in a supernatural flow that materializes the energy between the objects and the artist, while Quynh Dong’s precisely articulated décor depicts a kitschy romance set in an idyllic garden. Ryan Trecartin’s edit of grotesque teenage sceneries creates a constantly accelerating pace that leads to unbearable implosion. His self-conscious characters, staging themselves in egomaniacally driven moments of over-exposure, reveal the need for a daily drama that, absorbed or invented, transcends daily reality to mythologize humankind. The keys to our heart seem to have been found.
Program schedule:
- Announcement films on loop: Pauline Curnier Jardin. All other films are screened at 10 pm local time worldwide.
- 14 June, Kalup Linzy, Keys to Our Heart, 2008
- 15 June, Quynh Dong, Paradise, 2012
- 18 June, Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines Part 5, 2005
- 19 June, Ken Okiishi, Eliott, E.lliotT.: Children of the New Age, 2004
- 20 June, Keren Cytter, Four Seasons, 2009
- 21 June, Phil Collins, Soy mi madre, 2009
- 22 June, Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Polly II – Plan for a Revolution in Docklands, 2006
- 25 June, Claire Hooper, Eris, 2012
- 26 June, Ryan Trecartin, The Re’Search (Re’Search Wait’S), 2009-2010
Online streaming project with Phil Collins, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Keren Cytter, Quynh Dong, Claire Hooper, Kalup Linzy, Shana Moulton, Ken Okiishi, Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Ryan Trecartin
Co-curated with Fanny Gonella
Presented by The John Institute in collaboration with LUX(London) and Image Movement(Berlin).