Man Stripped Bare by Stories of Love, Loss and Loneliness
by Jacob Lillemose

Stripping fully clothed.
Role-play and masculine identity in the works of Jesper Just
by Kristine Kern

Kein Mann ist eine Insel

Ein älterer Mann tanzt in einem Park, bewegt sich schwebend leicht. Eine ansteckende melancholische Leichtigkeit. Auf einer Bank sitzt ein junger, verzweifelt heulender Mann, bei dem der Tänzer auf seiner Schweberoute vorbeikommt. Oder spielende kleine Jungs kreuzen seinen Tanz, Stationen und Begegnungen innerhalb seines Bewegungsablaufs. Die Zeit scheint aufgehoben, das tanzende "Alter" schwebt als heitere Verbindungslinie zwischen unterschiedlichen (Männer)-Generationen, die für sich, oder in sich gefangen zu sein scheinen. Emotionenunterdrückung und Verdrängung als "männliche" Überlebensstrategie, kanalisiert in Formen des Spielens oder der Bewegung begegnet dem noch immer tabuisierten Bild des heulenden Mannes.



Man Stripped Bare by Stories of Love, Loss and Loneliness
Jacob Lillemose

A young man, eyes moistened with tears, croons Roy Orbison’s love song Crying to the accompaniment of backing vocals provided by four elderly men. Two men locked in an embrace roll around on the floor between chairs and tables to the sound of an ever increasing heartbeat and the angelic vocal of a choirboy. A woman, seated on the very edge of a sofa, memorises passages from a fairy-tale while a man dances before her stripped to the waist. All these situations are taken from Jesper Just’s three latest videos – No Man is an Island II (2004), The Sweetest Embrace of All (2004) and A Fine Romance (2004), all produced for the exhibition A Fine Romance - and which are all set in strip clubs. These scenarios are not, perhaps, in any way typical of the strip club milieu. Strippers in provocative postures are only present on posters and paintings hanging on the walls of the club. And only one item of clothing – a t-shirt – is removed in any of the three films.
In replacing the strip-show with these three scenarios, Jesper Just transforms the character of the strip-club, complete with its socio-cultural connotations and the relations obtaining between performers and clientele. He makes it a space – or a stage – in or on which another “show” can take place; a show which is less about strippers or the relationship between stripper and audience, and more about the audience and the relationship between its individual members. Just fixes our gaze on the strip-club audience – not their appearance as such – but on their gaze and the inner-lives of these spectators. The act of stripping thus becomes symbolic. In the place of the traditional physical strip-tease - the logic of which leads to a revelation of the naked body - Just’s videos speak of a psychological strip-tease driven by an alternative and far more complex and less predictable alternative logic of revelation; a complexity and unpredictability that, incidentally, also characterise the roles and internal reciprocal relations of those implicated in the show itself. In other words, Just is less interested in any superficial corporeal nudity than he is in a deeper, subcutaneous nakedness of heart and mind. A formless nudity more difficult to define than the kind strip-clubs seek to entertain their audiences with. Rather than providing plain enjoyment of physical beauty, the nudity that interests Just demands empathy and self-recognition on the part of his audience. In this sense, the strip-clubs in the three videos provide not only a concrete physical environment for the situations he depicts, but also an abstract psychological space, which, in turn, serves to create a general tenor, a certain mood or emotional ambience.
Unlike the traditional strip-club audience, the characters in Just’s videos have not sought out the strip-club as a place for the visual gratification of their erotic desires. They are people who, on entering the context of the club, have invested something of themselves and their personal histories. These investments consist in a reaching out; the hopeful invitation to others that also entails a self-exposure and the intimation of doubt and insecurity to the audience and to us, the viewers. The strip-club thus becomes an ambivalent space in which presence and absence, intimacy and estrangement are spontaneously interwoven, and where hope, a sense of security and fascination are followed by sorrow, vulnerability, misunderstanding and insecurity.
The three videos all trade on the notion of the strip-club as a magical space, liberated from the realities of the world outside; a theatre of illusions, a make-believe world in which everything is possible, where dreams can be realised, if only momentarily. The main characters in the videos often seek out the club as this magical free space, characterised by the dreamlike glow created by the songs, music and fairy-tales. They do not, however, wish to buy a pre-packaged, uniform form of fiction. They wish to play out their own private fictions, their unique versions of reality, and by so doing, influence unhappy states of affairs in the world outside through the power of imagination.. That the conflation of fiction and reality can, however, lead to problems, pain and even death seems to be the common experience of the characters depicted in the videos.

 

Stripping fully clothed.

Passionate Glances
- Role-play and masculine identity in the works of Jesper Just

By Kristine Kern

As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions of the ways the unconscious (…) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. (Laura Mulvey)

A middle-aged man dances to the melancholy tones of a sad waltz on inner-Copenhagen’s Blågårds Plads. In spite of his awkwardness, there is a certain grace to the man’s movements. On a bench a young man sits, weeping. Is he weeping over his own fortune, or is it because the other man’s dance evokes a mood of pity in him? These are just glimpses of a scene from Jesper Just’s video No Man is an Island, a particularly poignant title that captures the essence of Just’s latest works; works which emphasize that men do not live in vacuous isolation, but in a dialogical state, in a context of social reciprocity with other men. In his most recent video films, The Man Who Strayed, No Man is an Island, This Love Is Silent and Invitation to Love, the young Danish artist has chosen to focus on relationships between men on various levels. The videos draw on a wide net of cultural, artistic and film-historical references, as well as - and not least - on certain social conventions. In The Man Who Strayed (2002), two middle-aged men act out one of the sad, closing scenes from Verdi’s La Traviata under the ramp of a highway exit, while This Love Is Silent (2003), set as it is in the shadows of a deserted harbor at night, alludes to the film-noir of the ’fifties. Invitation to Love takes place in a baroque room, where portraits of past professors of art witness a drama unfolding between two men. In This Love Is Silent, we see a dark blue Audi draw up on the harbor front. A young man emerges from the trunk and commences a wild, whirling dance while singing the lines of a sad Spanish song. One of two older men in the car then emerges in order to watch, and the scene ends with their both getting in to the back seat, where the older man brings his head to rest on the young man’s shoulder. In Invitation to Love it is the older man who dances, entering the room where the young man is enthroned at the end of a long table. A third man enters and sensuously removes the older man’s shoes , whereupon the first man steps up on to the table in order to dance for the younger man, who is – apparently – responsible for staging the scene. These two videos are staged, narratively arranged and dramaturgically sequenced , albeit with the merest hint of a story, in order to give them the character of a cinematic feature film, thus incorporating the system of symbols and codes appropriate to mainstream films, especially Hollywood productions. This, of course, has ramifications for our understanding of the videos, as we will inevitably interpret them in the light of a variety of clichés; clichés that Just is consciously seeking to explode.

The works of Jesper Just (born 1974) have often been interpreted as homo-erotic, but the word ”queer” with all its connotations would perhaps be more appropriate. The films could perhaps be construed as feminist, at least, to the extent that feminism is about the recognition of sexuality as a social construction, and not merely concerned with the problem of sexual equality. Just as in the dramas of classical Greece, all the parts in Just’s videos are played by men, even the parts that would be played by women in modern Hollywood productions. In this sense, men are presented as both dominant and dominated. This attempt to challenge the viewer’s horizons with regard to stereotypical expectations towards gender roles is a crucial aspect of Just’s artistic endeavor. As, for example, with the moment in This Love Is Silent, where one would – according to Hollywood conventions – expect the young man in the trunk of the car to have a somewhat precarious destiny, but who, instead, ends up dancing and getting into the backseat. Playing on and playing with conventions – both social conventions and those appertaining to film – often in a final bid to invert them, is essential for Just’s implicit critique of the conventional male-role. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the physical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification, writes Laura Mulvey. By breaking the conventions of the ruling ideology of film and making men the object of the camera, the viewer and other male actors, Just opens for a broader – at any rate less constricted - view of masculinity; a view that creates images of men capable of emotion and feelings. In this sense, Just’s works can be seen to confront the images of men presented in cowboy films and gangster movies. Just himself refers to the French director Jean-Pierre Melville as a male icon for whom he has great regard. Seen from the film-historical perspective, Just’s videos can be understood as a form of appropriational art , or, as Nicolas Bourriaud puts it in Postproduction:

The activities of the DJs, Web surfers, and postproduction artists imply a (…) configuration of knowledge which is characterized by the invention of paths through culture. All three are ”semionauts” who produce original pathways through signs. Every work is issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly.

No Man is an Island, This Love Is Silent and Invitation to Love are ambiguous works, which invite manifold interpretations. There is a conscious complexity at work on the psychological level. This can been seen clearly in the homo-erotic implications that seem to be present in longing looks and glances and sensitive touches, for example when the young man begins to caress his inner thigh with the tip of his finger while he watches the older man dance in This Love Is Silent. Beside the theme of male identity as social construct, another central theme intimates itself in the works: The problem of the relationship between generations – or – more precisely, the relationship between father and son, both in literal and metaphorical terms. In this connection role-play, and not least the power relations between those agents involved, is of central importance. In this connection too, social conventions are played with: the father as cruel, unemotional and unapproachable, the son angling for recognition and/or intimacy. This is an old fashioned image of the relationship between father and son, which is depicted in many of the great films of the ’fifties, such as Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955). This division of roles, however, is not reflected in the works of Just, but in spite of this – and precisely because they are anti-images – they play on the conventional images of relationships between father and son. Seen from this point of view, the young man in This Love Is Silent can be seen as the son who wins the love of his father with his dance, a demonstration of vulnerability and an invitation to intimacy. Similarly it is the son who, in Invitation to Love, desires the love of the father, insisting on his exhibitionism in the dance – a role he ends up taking on voluntarily. It seems that dance itself is a central, meaningful element in all three videos both literally and metaphorically. Dancing becomes an image of love; or more properly, a mutual exchange of love. And as such, dance becomes a motif of the broader concept of masculinity that Just espouses in his works: an imagos of identity that opens up a conception of man as imbued with feelings and as sensuality.

Jesper Just is not simply concerned with a representational-critical reiteration of cinematic clichés; he also manages to pose questions of a more existential character, questions that touch on men’s way of being and being together.