Dries Verhoeven: Douchebag of Grindr?

 Parker Tilghman as Pansy (photo by J. W. Ohlert) and Dries Verhoeven‘s Facebook profile pic.

---

By Otis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, October the 7^th, 2014

---

Why Dries Verhoeven is the most interesting artist in Berlin right now.  

The Berlin Agenda inaugurates with a case-study attempting to prove that mistakes are nobler than art, since an artist can only discover a new world, like any other truth seeker, by trial and error.  

What follows is a thesis about a recent controversy surrounding the artist Dries Verhoeven and his “Wanna Play?” installation for the Hebbel-am-Ufer. It’s written with a view towards the systemic barricades that divide the contemporary art-world and its audience, conquering and oppressing both in this alienating process.

It’s safe to say that the majority of the Berlin contemporary art world and a sizeable part of the local gay community has heard about the conflict, or even scandal, surrounding “Wanna play?”, an installation/multi-media art project by Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven, set up and sponsored by the esteemed art institution Hebbel-am-Ufer.

As is increasingly the trend for this and other hubs of artistic innovation, the theme of this project was another complicated exercise in the overlapping plateaus between the digital world and real-life, strained through the emboldening, even provocative, mesh of triggers contributed by the often uncontrollable factor of audience participation.

As his study object, Verhoeven chose the gay dating app Grindr, confessing in his artist statement to the biographical inspiration behind his “Wanna Play?” project which was to be an elaborate, high-tech, multidisciplinary production ultimately amounting to a hyper-modern evolution of a self-portrait, at least on the level of conceptual self-absorption.

---

“Wanna Play?”, Installation view, by Dries Verhoeven, Heinrichplatz, Berlin, Oct. 2014

---

Numbering 90,000 users in Berlin, which is quite a low number compared to the over 350,000 Londoners who partake in the smart phone desire navigator, Grindr is an iconic medium for international gay culture as it carries a message that is essential for the everyday interactions of gay men: the need for human contact.

A free download enables Grindr members to locate each other according to sexualized criteria of psycho-geographical proximity and, after checking each others’ profiles, exchange messages.

The holy grail of these often frantic searches, usually taking place in purpose-free-purgatories-of-inertia such as buses, waiting rooms and supermarket queues, is, ostensibly, a date, which more often than not is a coy euphemism for a furtive anonymous hook-up.

Before continuing, allow me to self-identify as a homosexual man who often enjoys anonymous sex.

I consider this state of being as yet another variable in the innumerable outliers of different, healthy and innocent expressions of human sexuality, and obviously, I am proud of it.

I also believe that posting pictures, nude or otherwise, and personal information on the internet does not automatically endow anybody with the right of using these data for any purpose whatsoever without the written consent of the person to whom the material rightfully belongs as a private matter.

Furthermore, I acknowledge that we live in an age of unprecedented anxiety about the tensions and borders between our public and private personas.

This redefinition of who we are to ourselves and to our loved ones and who we choose to be to strangers, because of the online social media revolution, is undergoing a historically unparalleled process. Society has not yet formed a unanimously accepted protocol when it comes to exactly defining what constitutes the strictly private and the potentially public when mediating identity through the internet. Maybe there will be a resolution to these conflicts; maybe this ambivalence will be a permanent state of crisis; maybe it announces an amorphous ecosystem whose fluidity is a new paradigm to which we, as internet users and citizens, must adapt by devising our own individual approaches, independent of any universal imperatives for a collective digital savoir faire.

When one is confronted with possible breaches of his own privacy, then the limits instinctively seem to be clear-cut since they are self-defined. When it comes to the privacy of others one can immediately sense how urgent this lack of definitive propriety codes is. How acceptable is stalking the profiles of perfect strangers on Facebook, checking out their abs in vacation pics, reading their comments about their children, poring over their life philosophies as they update their statuses?

---

“Wanna Play?”, Installation view, by Dries Verhoeven, photographed by Sascha Weidner, Heinrichplatz, Berlin, Oct. 2014

---

One could argue that ogling the lives of strangers online today is as innocent a pastime as social voeyurism always has been in the past, for instance when staring a beauty on a beach or accidentally overhearing a conversation in a café. But there is a crucial difference: the overflow of information inadvertently or even unavoidably shared in any society heretofore has never before been internationally broadcast, and even more importantly, not been documented, archived and easily accessible for all eternity.

These shifts in semantic scale are seismic, and one could argue that pre-digital social mores have not yet evolved enough to clarify the techniques, tools, etiquette and schemes that would enable the ethical balances to be satisfactorily redefined. It is debatable whether contemporary societies have clearly established the new equilibriums between what is intrusive and what is respectful. I would argue that we are far from defining delineations between the public and the private, border lines that would be relevant to how we live today, an age where it is quite possible to involuntarily see pictures of your landlady masturbating or read all about a colleague’s sexual predilections, as blatantly advertised in their dating site profile.

 In this foggy landscape of risk-taking, unwittingly according to his claims of naivety, Verhoeven proved himself to be a cunning manipulator of sensationalism dressed up in so many layers of minority-specific polemicizing.

His project, “Wanna play?”, either by design or negligence, has become easy to discredit as the work of a wily impresario who usurps the male homosexual experience, thus simultaneously, and one could suspect cynically, making an autobiographical statement as well as a marketing choice. The romantic elements of the piece, i.e. the self-examination involved in exposing his personal experience as a homosexual man using dating apps, is sadly moot, as it is now swamped in a mire of scandal and protest.

During the fracas, Verhoeven kept insisting that the core concept of his research is modern indecisiveness about the fluidity of what yet remains undefined as legitimate boundaries between private and public identities of homosexual men as they relate to each other in today’s electronically agitated moral universe.

The arbitrary presumption of sociopolitical legitimacy accorded to his focus on homosexuals is attributed to himself being a self-avowed gay man. Such an alibi is quite flimsy, as membership in a minority does not automatically guarantee credible representation of the multiple individual identities that any group of people includes. After all, homosexuality is the lowest common denominator when addressing a multi-faceted variant of human nature, as well as a social group as intrinsically diverse as any other. Claiming to represent homosexuals just because one happens to be one is obviously an autocratic statement.

Verhoeven’s piece hinged on the pivotal event of the artist meeting members of the public through a specially designed Grindr profile, which already placed him, as well as his interaction with the audience, in a plateau removed from actual reality. When inviting his unsuspecting audience to meet him, ostensibly to satisfy each other’s non-sexual needs, the rendezvous was set at an address disingenuously described only as Heinrichplatz, a meeting arrangement that revealed a radical and non-consensual shift of the parameters back to actual reality and a very public aspect of it.

The hotly contested aspect of Verhoeven’s practice was that, when negotiating the rendezvous with his potential Grindr dates, he consciously withheld information about this geographical designation relating to a container fronted by a glass façade and parked right in the center of super-busy Kreuzberg.

Just this fact of occlusion alone qualifies as criminal, if not in motive then definitely in consequence, as it constitutes entrapment by fraud, in every sense.

The unaware Grindr user, deluded by Verhoeven into thinking that he was on his way to an ordinary date with a random guy, climbed the Ubahn stairs only to see a glass vitrine fronting a projection on the inside walls of the container.

---

Onlookers outside the Verhoeven glass fronted installation at Heinrich Platz, Berlin, Oct. 2014

---

What was screened, for the entire world to see, were the dialogues precedent and negotiating the meeting, i.e. personal information of a very delicate nature. Also screened where Grindr profile pics relevant to the upcoming tryst. The images were insouciantly treated with an X-Ray effect, in an unsuccessful attempt to make them look unrecognizable. Everything was plainly visible for any passerby to gawk at through the glass vitrine and easily identifiable for anybody familiar with the victims of this ruse.

The potentially catastrophic parameters of such an arrangement are so evident, in their legal, ethical and safety implications, that it seems hard to digest that neither an established, sophisticated institution like the HAU nor the artist considered the ensuing outrage clearly visible beforehand.

Harsh but fair words were spoken both from the community targeted, but also from members of the Berlin art world intelligentsia, like Ashkan Sepahvand, a curator in the Department of Literature and Humanities at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, who wrote an open letter scathingly criticizing the critical validity and ethical conscience of Verhoeven’s practice.

The most obviously devastating factor of this exercise is the inattentiveness towards the wellbeing and safety of the audience members participating in a public spectacle that uses their private lives as fuel for art world rhetoric and priorities.

Is it really necessary to remind established art institutions of the fact that anybody taking part in an art project has an inalienable right to informed consent and that this protocol is absolutely crucial for any form of interactive art practice and most especially for any kind of it that deals in private information?

Apparently yes, even the toniest of institutions need to be monitored on such a basic level of ethical conduct, as proven by fact that the HAU persisted from the opening on the 1st to Sunday the 4th of October in its refusal to close down Verhoeven’s show, even as angry protest was mounting, both from the gay community and the art world.

Condescendingly to the victims of this elaborate and callous prank, the vehement opposition was at first taken into account only by some minor adjustments to Verhoeven’s practice, devoid of any clear signifiers of repentance or any credible volunteering about reparations.

In effect, the initial reactions from the artist and the institution were some further abstraction of the projected images to render them decisively unrecognizable and a belated concession to ensure authorization from participants.

---

Installation view, “Wanna Play?”, Dries Verhoeven, Heinrich Platz, Berlin, Oct. 2014

---

These, however, were formal changes applied begrudgingly after the fact of causing severe psychological damage to at least one individual, which resulted in a heated contretemps between the understandably enraged participant and Verhoeven. Said altercation also generated major publicity for the project at the expense of a person harmed by Verhoeven’s bad judgment and the HAU’s careless curating.

It was barely the second day of the show that the inevitable explosion happened, blowing up this highly volatile mix of academic carelessness and over-wrought moralizing about the techno-libidinal homosexual experience.

The catalyst of the ineludible detonation was Berlin-based American artist Parker Tilghman, better known locally as Pansy, his anarchic drag-queen alter-ego which is lately causing quite a sensation, both as a nightclub act as well as an artistic phenomenon lauded for its extreme attenuation of burlesque audacity fortified with a particularly de rigueur stridency about queer politics and an unquenchable thirst for grotesque ‘80s aesthetics.

Aptly, and very ironically for a situation where variegations of homosexual identity are the contested issue, when Parker “Pansy” Tilghman arrived on the scene of Verhoeven’s installation he was not performing as a semiotic double agent cross-fertilizing his private and public identities as he does with his artistic work, but was “only himself”: a gay man mentally and emotionally prepared to meet the guy-next-profile for a date probably as forgettable as any other, potentially life-changing but certainly not expected to develop as a case of institutional abuse.

What the “real, everyday” Parker Tilghman surely did not expect was the shock he felt upon realizing that his private conversations with Dries as well as his profile pictures were being broadcast live for all of Berlin to see.

Tilghman confronted Verhoeven and a minor scuffle ensued. Later, on Facebook, Tilghman posted a justifiably irate yet coherent status, describing the unfortunate episode as a victim of what he terms a “digital rape”. Needless to say, this post went viral and triggered a chain of reactions that ultimately closed down Verhoeven’s exhibit.

---

Angry protesters and security around Verhoeven in Heinrich Platz, Berlin, Oct. 2014.

---

Pansy, Parker Tilghman’s performance persona, it must be stressed at this point, is an authentic construct whose presence represents, by appointment, an edge of artistic life in Berlin that pioneers a particular focus on contemporary queer discourse as an ideal plateau for generating ideas and explorations beyond the theoretically compartmentalized problematic of gender studies, ultimately striving towards an ecumenical dissection of human differentiation.

As such, Pansy, both as persona, artist and concept, stands worlds apart from the modified and mediated meanings manufactured by the academic processes of institutional laboratories such as HAU, where theoretical mechanisms are meant to be pristinely humanitarian but repeatedly have proven to be only exclusionary, if not decidedly oppressive.

The eye-witness credibility of Pansy as queer scene protagonist short-circuits what ultimately amounts to bureaucratic edifices of social scrutiny and reveals the art institution as an apparatus that synthesizes meaning and defines value systems whose constitution is carefully manicured as to be acceptable for the status quo that funds them.

Pansy’s world, even before the collision with Verhoeven, was gloriously messy. “Her” talons might also be exhaustively manicured, but according to radical reconfigurations of the collective queer subconscious. “Her” deconstructed-dadaism-meets-the-House-of-La Beija conjoins actionism with vogueing contests, contriving an  ahistorical and non-academic tease that excites a hyper-active arousal in the tradition of  late-60s gender psychedelia a la Cockettes, corner pub drag-show antics, grotesque pantomime dames, Ru Paul’s mainstream trans opulence and the orgiastic/pagan traditions of “improper”, i.e. lumpen, homosexual folklore.

Pansy, in other words, is a walking compendium of ferocious realness and bohemian rowdiness, something quite unacceptable in an art world system whose transparency is disappearing behind an ever denser web of arcane managerial rituals and patriarchal privilege.

Pansy, for a brief but resonant moment, personified the people’s opposition to a narrative attempting to be imposed on the gay community of Berlin by an official institution. In this accidental yet meaningful crossing of paths it is impossible to ignore all the uncomfortable political resonances of an encounter invoking a lot of touchy polarities.

Thus, the symbolism of Pansy meeting Dries is too rich not to mine, as it bursts with fecund meaning for anybody with even the slightest awareness of how the art world stratifies hierarchies of validity and draws maps that pinpoint the attendant classifications about what constitutes art worthy of institutional support and state sponsorship versus what is pejoratively termed as outsider art or fringe entertainment.

Pansy, an artist of an entirely different sort than Verhoeven, yet credible in a way that Verhoeven can only dream to be, is by definition an artist embodying the real Berlin underground and an authoritative ambassador about what actually is considered valid, not only as art but as culture itself, in the more chaotic, and therefore creative, niches of the Berlin queer scene.

Pansy happened to be the fateful beau who would crash into Verhoeven’s utopia made of pretty academic intentions and a haughty disregard for prosaic anxieties like privacy.

There is a seductive fatality about this combustible confrontation between a deconstructivist drag queen and a well-meaning purveyor of refined capitalist entertainment.

Pansy, undeniably an original flaming creature, upon meeting Verhoeven, unavoidably was meant to be the disenfranchised comet trailing highly flammable truth which ultimately incinerated upon contact the pretentiousness and indifference of the HAU using gay men as experiment subjects.

Pansy, the idea, burnt established art world critical protocols to ashes, by setting oppressive institutional narratives on fire, and ultimately exploded with a deafening bang on the highly polished surface of the Berlin institutional art world, digging a crater that will forever pockmark the face of its serene coercions.

Recapitulating: the conflict between Pansy’s and Verhoeven’s artistic and actual personas is an occasion worthy of note not only because it draws attention to the general issue of a performance that violates participants’ privacy, thus underlining the need for an explicit code of ethics for institutions and artists alike. This clash is just as important because Pansy, the real face of Berlin queer artistic life, willingly or not, decisively confronted the neo-liberal narrative propagated by a regimented problematic about techno-libidinal dystopias, which in themselves are a turbo-capitalist state of profitable alienation, ultimately a form of repression that is de facto a necessary condition if an experiment like the one attempted by Verhoeven is to exist at all.

Pansy serendipitously uncovered this obligatory co-relation between systemic oppression and Verhoeven’s art practice.

In other words, and confirming that mistakes are nobler than art, Pansy is the reason why Verhoeven is the most interesting artist in Berlin today.

---

Cover image: Preliminary image for “Wanna Play?” by Dries Verhoeven, courtesy of the HAU, Berlin 2014

---