Sick chimp

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Ronnie van Hout is often characterised as the joker in New Zealand contemporary art. His work is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and he has a fondness for sight gags and silly puns. As one writer has observed, van Hout ‘uses the polite interior of the contemporary art gallery as his foil or straight man, ruffling its seriousness with pratfalls, Andy Kaufman-like silences, animal antics, impersonations and sick jokes’.1

Like a jester in a royal court, van Hout’s comedy act allows the artist to raise topics many people find hard to talk about. Part of a generation for whom ‘even the idea of being successful seemed like a position that was undesirable and unattainable’,2 he has made use of every medium that comes to hand — from painting to video to embroidery — in his ongoing tussle with the concept of success and its dark twin, failure.

Van Hout’s work abounds with self-replicas: plastic head casts, life-sized body doubles, videotaped monologues. The artist notes that he has always ‘liked the idea of someone standing in for me, so I can be absent (and irresponsible)’.3 This simultaneous presence and distance is emphasised in the titles of works, such as Be someone else, 1997 (private collection), and exhibitions, including The invisible man, 1997, and I’ve abandoned me, 2003–05. Sick chimp is one of the many manifestations of van Hout’s most favoured alter ego, Monkey Madness, which first emerged in a 1998 video work in which van Hout donned a monkey mask and gloves to break through an attack of artist’s block. A tragicomic figure, Sick chimp leans forward, clutching his stomach, a pool of fake vomit at his feet. What is up with the chimp? Nerves? Misjudged limits?

The chimpanzee, our closest genetic relative, is often used as a stand-in for a person to signify stupidity. It also acknowledges the cynic’s refrain: ‘You call that art? A monkey could have painted it’. But van Hout’s caricatures give him the freedom to do more than just poke fun at his anxieties. Like the fool or buffoon, he is also playing the role on the viewer’s behalf, offering that freedom to all of us.

Charlotte Huddleston

1 Justin Paton, Ronnie van Hout: I’ve abandoned me, exhibition catalogue, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, 2003, p. 10.

2 Ronnie van Hout, quoted in Andrew Paul Wood, ‘Attack of the clones’, Urbis, no. 24, Winter 2004, p. 45.

3 Ibid.