ONCE A CLOSELY GUARDED SECRET, DE ATELIERS, AMSTERDAM, 2019

Frieder Haller’s ARCHITECTURE is a film whose backdrops and details recur in the surrounding environment, where it was primarily filmed. This ambiguous delimiting is appropriate, since Haller’s deadpan film tracks a narrative – in which a domineering architect switches from designing public spaces to designing his love life, with fatal results – that, as it progresses, assumes an autonomous life. The viewer watches a storyline unfold in which lines are tactically blurred between what is meant to be ‘real’, what is fantasy, what was planned and what is chance, and who is a real actor and who is not, the script’s mix of bathetic comedy and seriousness further destabilising one’s reading. The audience may feel part of this layered confusion themselves, having navigated Haller’s mazy constructed architecture (and seeming examples of work by ‘the architect’ himself) in order to arrive before the screen, the question of where the space itself rests in the artist’s formal hierarchy – backdrop? installation? – being left pointedly open. Beyond its Brechtian overtones, all of this twists self-reflexive. It suggests an artist, using an invented architect as proxy, meditating on the ‘god complex’ as it plays out both in artistic authorship and in daily life, in relationships. Here Haller creates a situation in which meaning spins out of the maker’s grasp, its complexly intermingled truths and falsehoods to be navigated by the viewer, the narrative itself suggesting the limits of control. Standing in his show, particularly among others, one may additionally find oneself inhabiting a mise-en-scène b oth real and theatrical, and thus opened up to questions of performativity and presentation of selfhood in everyday life. In an ironic twist, it’s Haller who has staged this transfer of interpretation from artist to viewer, creating the conditions for his own undoing. Who here is pulling the strings?‘ 

 Text by Martin Herbert

↳ films shown in this exhibition: 'Architecture'