Lars Laumann

Still from "Berlinmuren" (2008). Double-channel video, 24 min. (Pictured: Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer takes her model of the Berlin Wall for a sleigh ride.)

Photo by Benjamin Alexander Huseby

Lars Laumann in Video Fun, Berlin, November 2008

Pietro Antonioni

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Lars Laumann’s first video, Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana (2006), meticulously narrates how the Smiths’ 1986 album, The Queen Is Dead, presaged Princess Diana’s demise 11 years before it occurred. The opening sequence features clips of Alain Delon in Antonioni’s The Eclipse while the narrator explains with amateur scientific precision, "For the cover of the album [...] Morrissey chose a photo of a Frenchman named Alain, the actor Alain Delon. The public announcement of Princess Diana’s death was also made by a Frenchman named Alain — Dr. Alain Pavie, head of the cardiology department at Paris’s Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital." As the video proceeds, other uncanny connections are strung together and contrasted with film clips, until by dint of their sheer accumulation, Morrissey’s supposed act of necromancy begins to take on a certain cogency. Then, however, the narrator launches into an equally well-researched exposé about extraterrestrials, vegans, the sci-fi film Contact, and Melville. After having won the most reluctant form of your credulity, this last part of the video suddenly squanders it by sending the whole enterprise definitively off the deep end.

Although Laumann spoke of this conspiracy — chanced upon on the Internet and collectively elaborated in chat rooms like a piece of open-source software — as a "beautiful, and even romantic instance of cultural expression," it’s hard not to also perceive it as a kind of hypertrophied intellectual monster, in which the conjoined labors of so many minds serve to confirm their own unsettling profligacy. This sort of gestalt appeals to Laumann, whose sensibility is textured by a distinct contemporaneity. Combining a fascination with pop culture, fandom, the Internet, and conspiracies, as well as a proclivity for the strange and improbable, his recent artistic production has been almost exclusively videos. After graduating from Oslo’s Royal Art Academy, in 2003, Laumann, 31, took a hiatus from artmaking and started curating, less out of an interest in being an exhibition maker than an "egotistical" desire to see more art in Oslo, where up until a few years ago, there was little being shown. It wasn’t until around 2005, when he discovered video’s ability to synthesize all his artistic interests, that Laumann started to make art again. From watercolors of mutant pop stars, as in the installation 13 Aliens (2005), to the politically motivated sculpture The Samì Flag in Neon (2005), about the Samì ethnic minority in Norway, he moved into a more obsessive, research-oriented video-making practice. Loosely participating in a film-essay tradition inaugurated by French filmmaker Chris Marker, Laumann’s videos can almost pass as scenes from postmodern novels by Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo, given those authors’ hyperbolic valorization of popular culture, relish for conspiracies, and virtuosic leaps of aesthetic logic.

Indeed, Laumann happily confesses to being more inspired by music, literature, and film than visual art (though he does cite Hito Steyerl, Knut Erik Jensen, Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard, and Patricia Esquivias as artists whose work he admires and responds to). "It was a very liberating moment for me," he explains, "when I stopped concentrating so much on art references in my videos and focused more on exploiting the generosity found in other disciplines." As a child in northern Norway, Laumann avidly read fiction, an interest encouraged by his father, who owned a bookstore. But over time, Laumann replaced this "escapist" pastime with the Internet, which he uses as a research tool and admires for its unparalleled capacity to incubate conspiracies and give voice to the most obscure obsessions.

Laumann unearthed the inspiration for his best-known work, Berlinmuren (2008), one of the highlights of the Fifth Berlin Biennial, while surfing the Web in the late 1990s. In documentary format, his 24-minute film tells the true story of Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer and her love for, and eventual marriage, in 1979, to the Berlin Wall. Berliner-Mauer (German for Berlin Wall — she took its name when they wed) claims she is "objectum-sexual," a condition characterized by a sexual attraction to objects. In her case, she is particularly drawn to objects with "parallel lines, usually horizontal ... such as bridges, fences, and railroad tracks," as well as "things that divide." Not a fetishist, she is rather an animist, one who believes that objects have souls. Laumann’s video begins with photos of Berliner-Mauer in front of the wall, while she explains the history and nature of her unconventional relationship in a voice-over.