Jon Mikel Euba

Sometimes what you see on the screen looks like the repetitive gestures of some arcane ritual, although one strangely detached from any actual code or belief. Things can change at any second – an action sequence suddenly becomes a direct address to the audience, or an actor’s pose recalls other, familiar images. Then you are back with the protagonists again, following the pattern of their movements.

Jon Mikel Euba’s videos One Minute of Silence and Neska la Noche (Girl, The Night Belongs to You, both 2005) are in two parts. The former is based on videos shot in the Korean city of Busan, while the latter is set in various non-sites around the Spanish city of Murcia. Both works look like a grunge version of the sweet Verfremdung of an Andy Warhol film: two young men silently manipulate a third person – a man and a woman respectively, consenting or at least unresisting – into a pose that is held, alone, for a few seconds. Then the protagonists return to manipulate the third actor again. In the daytime shots you see the actors through a grubby lens, silhouetted against the sun and with a cityscape in the background. In the nocturnal ones car headlights, spotlights and occasional camera flashes light the scenes. The title One Minute of Silence refers to an appreciation of the passage of time, second by second, through non-action; Neska la Noche is a quote from a graffiti urging women to reclaim the night: ‘Neska translates as ‘girl’ in Basque.

To shoot the videos, two crews – one of them including Euba himself, the other comprising locals with no training in video – worked in parallel. Photographs of rock stars on stage provided a reference point for the actors, who re-enact these dramatic poses without a microphone and dressed in ordinary clothes, reacting to the sunlight in much the same way as the singers in the photos respond to the glow of the spotlights. The sound comes and goes, as the crews’ directions to the actors (‘Put her arm like this …’) have been deleted. When the videos were eventually shown, the images of the rock stars were displayed alongside them in the form of life-size, black and white screen prints, but with the faces erased – all that remains of Patti Smith, Iggy Pop or Joey Ramone is their primordially expressive bodies. These are the images borrowed by one of the people in the videos as they become one-minute heroes in Euba’s ‘image-actions’, as critic Peio Aguirre described them. The key point about these scenarios is that they alter an ephemeral event, lending it significance and duration. Using an artificial situation as his starting-point, Euba seeks to arrive at a real act.

The result is an unmistakable tension between the rhetorical and the raw, as if in some hard-line Dogma film. The point of departure doesn’t have to be a photo of a rock star; the rudimentary score or ‘storyboard’ is that the actors – always in a group – starts with anything from a ‘quote’ from film history (say, a movie by Jean-Luc Godard or Pier Paolo Pasolini) to a set of props (a car, a big piece of black plastic, T-shirts of a particular colour, a bottle of Coke) or the properties of a specific location (the terrain, the skyline, a basement, the time of day). This open-ended structural idea provides the basis for the filmed action, with its delicate blend of expectation, choice and consequence. But, unlike early Performance art, Euba’s scores are not text-based and often flip into pure improvisation around the props.

Like Warhol telling the Velvet Underground to think of their gigs as rehearsals in front of an audience, so Euba’s works record the collective moment of production, the instant of a desire being performed. At the same time the camera is often used not as a framing device but as a microphone, awaiting a sound, orienting itself, establishing the setting; the medium itself is altered in the process.

Euba’s earlier work dealt with the Masonic politics of the Basque country, looking at political or personal traumas. Again a kind of ‘tactile vision’ was produced in the image through people interacting on the screen and through the Caravaggesque handling of light and shadow. The paradox is that, while on the one hand Euba’s image-actions are refractory and negative, on the other they are intimate, almost palpable. The effect is a bit like finding somebody lying on the pavement, and the only way to find out whether they are dead or just stoned is to touch them: a situation where language is not yet relevant and the imagination reels.