Making Things Happen

Polly Staple

In Johanna Billing’s video Where She Is at (2001) a girl poses on a high diving board. Her whole body is tense. She is fidgeting and despondent, consumed by a chronic state of indecision. To jump or not to jump becomes an epic quandary. The girl’s internal dilemma is in sharp contrast to the otherwise picturesque scene: sunny day, open air, water’s edge.

The girl is pretty, and sturdy, wearing a lightly fashionable print bikini. Footage of the girl is intercut with other people who patiently watch and wait. There is a crisp photographic composition to the shots and the sound is reduced to a benign background noise of splashing and seagulls. The placid atmosphere only adds perversely to the tension. The scene slowly becomes intolerable. Eventually, she jumps.

If Where She Is at functions as both a study of the debilitating frustrations of performance anxiety and as a symbolic metaphor for individual action, then Graduate Show (1999), made several years earlier, presents an alternative scenario of collective production.

A group of young people, dressed in an assortment of exercise clothes, assemble in a studio and perform a choreographed dance routine. The participants are Billing’s fellow graduate students from Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, and Billing dances alongside them. The performers are exuberant, awkward or just not very good. The filming and the group’s cohesion, their desire to put on a show is, however, arresting. The soundtrack “Moody” (1981) by the legendary New York dance-punk band ESG is excellent, and it keeps things moving.

Art schools are hothouse environments. Everyone strives to define their own voice, combining fierce competition to be unique with an intense pressure to perform. Graduate Show is Billing’s response to a complex situation, a deft action operating on both real and symbolic levels.

As a community project, it brings a potentially conflicted group of individuals together. The choreography is not so simple and requires group commitment to make it work. The subsequent piece is performed in an atmosphere of concentration and celebration. In Graduate Show, the vagaries of individual expression—here exemplified by rhythm and dance—are productively shown to work together and to be seemingly satisfactory for all involved.

Examining Graduate Show for a moment longer, it is possible to discern a number of formats and scenarios consistently developed in subsequent works. It includes, for example, the use of arrival, learning, and becoming as both motif and dramatic device most often witnessed through a group assembling to perform, or the individual taking their place and performing a role within the group. Secondly, there is a distinct clarity to the camera work and smooth editing—what could best be described as a cinematic-artdocumentary hybrid—conveying a content and tone pitched somewhere between real life and fiction. And thirdly, there is the use of a historically or socially resonant location combined with an equally loaded choice of music.

In Graduate Show, for example, the pedagogical aura of the art school is pitched against the more rapaciously aspirant desire of the talent show and the cult status of ESG’s soundtrack. The opening ‘arrival’ sequence of Graduate Show— where students run down corridors and staircases to reach the studio—has much in common with the assembling of participants for Billing’s more well-known video piece You Don’t Love Me Yet (2003). In the latter, an individual is filmed going up an escalator to arrive at a recording studio in Stockholm where he joins forty other musicians to perform the eponymous track. A similar narrative plot device is used in Look Out! (2003). Here, a group arrives at a luxury apartment development in East London to be shown round; In Magic & Loss (2005), a group arrives at an apartment in Amsterdam and proceeds to pack up the contents. In Magical World (2005), the performance of—again—the eponymous song by a group of children is inter-cut with scenes of them arriving at the cultural center in Zagreb in which the rehearsal takes place. In each case, the group gathers and engages in a process or act of transformation. Making something happen, or conversely not happen, is used as both device and theme.

In two early films Project for a Revolution (2000) and Missing out (2001), for example, both plot and content hinge on the gathering of protagonists caught in a moment of waiting, preoccupied by non-activity. Alternatively, in Magic & Loss, the group is methodically absorbed, occupied with boxing up the contents of an apartment. In each instance, the non-action/action, the waiting and the packing, are relayed by Billing in great visual detail: a man glances aside, a woman shuffles in her seat, or a man takes books off a shelf, puts the books in a box, tapes up the box, and so these small details, this slow accumulation of information, the gestures and nuances between people and things, become the narrative drive, and also creates specific atmosphere. The waiting, in Project for a Revolution, and the work, in Magic & Loss, are equally monotonous and repetitive, but also as carefully organized and seductive.

A defining factor of Billing’s films is the transparency of the camerawork and the steady rhythm of the editing. Billing will use conventional narrative devices and cinematic strategies to set a scene: carefully posed long shots containing sweeping movement signifying arrival, for example. But these will be followed by a ponderous succession of full frame close-ups of a particular play of light on a surface, a face, or an object. Billing’s meticulously composed cinematography achieves a wonderfully luminous simplicity of form. This oscillation between surface and depth creates a visual tension and emphasizes the relational complexities of the conceptual content. Billing often uses high definition video. This digital medium has a deadpan quality to its image resolution and a flexibility to its manufacture which is entirely contemporary. This is in contrast to the more precious materiality and, hence, fetishistic, dreamlike potential of 16mm or 35mm often employed by others to create a self-consciously high art effect. The presentation of Billing’s films in open gallery settings on freestanding screens also resists cinematic overtones. This method of display creates a walk through encounter, more attuned to the sculptural conventions of the white cube as opposed to those of the black box. The viewer’s experience of the work is underlined as active and physical. This accentuates a visceral relationship with the people and architectural spaces depicted in the films themselves.

The subsequent temporal pacing of Billing’s imagery asserts an ordering system more in tune with anthropological observation, lending these entirely staged exercises a curious air of authenticity. The films are often looped, emphasizing circuitous duration. No one ever speaks directly to the camera in Billing’s films and sound is usually either real-time noise or the performance of music itself. Repetition, so important in the production of music, is used to set both rhythm and tone, as both thematic contents and formal device across Billing’s entire oeuvre. The scenario of the rehearsal itself and music-making is used on multiple occasions. Billing’s entire You Don’t Love Me Yet endeavors for example stems from the repeat performance of one song and evolves into an exploration and celebration of invention, self-expression, and identity, themes developed in later projects such as Magical World and Another Album (2006).

In all of Billing’s films—bar Magical World focusing on a children’s choir—the protagonists are largely young people aged in their early twenties to their early thirties. The films are shot in locations across Europe. The visible cultural differences of these new Europeans may, at first, appear negligible. They all appear to wear the international dress code of “individualistic” young consumers: low key branded trainers, jersey cotton sweatshirts, the odd piece of quirky jewelry, a nose ring, or an asymmetric haircut. This apparent everyday uniformity, however, operates as a smokescreen to complex socioeconomic relationships at the heart of Billing’s work. For example, the minimal modern décor of the characters and the apartment depicted in Magic & Loss could superficially locate you in a confident, creative demographic anywhere from Stockholm to Tokyo. Why then do the protagonists seem to be caught up in a ritual more associated with the blunt reality of those working through grief, and that the carefully composed domestic lifestyle is rendered redundant? There is a disconcerting charge to this apparently quiet, methodical film, provoking, as it does, questions about the reality of real estate or the commitment of friends. Look a little closer. In a similar vein, you notice that the elegant modernist diving platform in Where She Is at is in a crumbling state of disrepair as is the cultural center in which the children perform in Magical World or that You Don’t Love Me Yet is a song about unrequited love, endlessly played on repeat.

It often takes reading Billing’s film notes to clarify the very specific cultural resonance of certain contextual signifiers—the relevance of that particular choice of song or location. This is, however, only after you will have registered a more subliminal, yet very precise effect created through the works themselves. It is those factors which, at first, might appear as touches of local color or disjointed elements muddying an otherwise clean palette, which gives the work both its social and historical charge, and crucially enables the work to communicate so directly to a wide audience.

This is perhaps most obvious in Look out! in which the glossy new show home contrasts both with the scruffy youths who tour it and the views they guide us to of the surrounding run down area of East London. The enduring force of nature versus culture is writ large. The social strain of gentrification is conveyed most acutely by Billing’s use of sound. The hollow, synthetic acoustics and sealed atmosphere of the interior spaces contrast with the more cacophonous external world. Transformative tensions are also evident in Magical World. Here, the nineteen-sixties’ hippie optimism of the title song and the sentimental charge of the children’s singing are at odds with their stumbling grasp of English, the drab surroundings of the unfinished cultural center contrasting with shots of the splashy advertising billboards in the streets just outside. The utopian modernist project is left incomplete as Croatia hurtles headlong toward the more showy attractions of the European free market. It is certainly not a magical world, but, for a moment, listening to the children you believe it could be.

In Another Album (2006), the tension between intimacy, individual experience, history, production, and real time movie is perhaps most telling. A group of Croatian friends are depicted, gathered over the course of one night in a rural garden singing a succession of pop-folk songs from the Croatian ‘New Wave’ movement of the nineteen-seventies to the very early nineteen-nineties. Here, the repeating of the songs is shown to be a means to retrieve memories and melodies lost during the social and political upheavals which transformed Yugoslavia and wiped out the largely state funded recording and distribution networks as much as displacing the musicians and producers themselves. Alternately melancholic and joyful, this form of recycling is shown to bind this group—a new generation—together.

If in Magical World the process of learning and becoming is shown in all its awkwardness, then Another Album is infused with a nostalgia and enduring commitment to, and rejuvenation of that which may have been lost during a period of transformation. 

This theme of transition, learning, and becoming, central to Billing’s work, is most specifically expressed in her very recent This Is How We Walk on the Moon (2007). Here we are shown in Billing’s usual methodical, beautifully shot, detail the process of a group of young people learning to sail. There is a significant ‘beginning’ to the piece: The student, who embarks on the sailing lesson, photocopies instructions and walks to the sailing school. The film ends at the point at which the students and the boat confidently set out to sea just as a previously bubbling soundtrack reaches a gentle crescendo and the lyrics “This is how we walk on the moon…” take flight.

How Billing sets a scene and builds pace can easily be taken for granted. Here, the editing is so fluid, it appears effortless, belying the struggles that the group endures. The exploration of learning to work together, collaboratively as a group, provides the content and charge to This Is How We Walk on the Moon. This learning—becoming experienced, getting the boat to safely sail—is mirrored by our durational experience of the work itself. Again, Billing’s use of a constant visual oscillation between foreground and background, surface and depth, mirrors the relation of the individuals to the group. The activity of sailing is shown to depend entirely on their collective enterprise. The film presents a calm order: consensus, collaboration, “if we all work together we can produce this journey.” In all of Billing’s work, the process of transformation is continuously shown to be transparent, non-hierarchical, and non-spectacular. Billing’s world operates on an even, horizontal plane implying continuous movement between the individual and the group. Here, making things happen provides both a dramatic tension, and the ethical code dramatized in the production of all her work.

One of the defining features of Billing’s practice is her willingness to encourage and support others in collaborative endeavors. Billing alternately behaves as artist, director, and producer. This is evidenced in the elucidation of subtle performances of friends and associates who are involved in the production of all her films, or the ongoing collective performance project and previously mentioned, stand-alone film You Don’t Love Me Yet (2002–07). The former is an ongoing international live tour consisting of infinite cover versions of the song “You don’t love me yet” (1984) by American singer-songwriter Roky Erickson, and performed by local musicians at multiple venues from Helsinki to Chicago. This is also evidenced in Billing’s role as a music producer/ organizer, since 1997, alongside her brother Anders with their record label Make It Happen and comprehensive website for the promotion of bands, production of music and tours.

What this collaborative action means long term—its Billing’s name featured here in this context remember—is a moot point. I would argue, however, that Billing’s work consistently both pictures the politics of participation as content and embodies the contradictions of collaborative, entrepreneurial enterprise through her distinct methods of production. It is precisely the arising political and symbolic tensions of both content and process which point to a wider, complex social and economic dynamic currently being played out between the individual and the collective, market and state, freedom of choice and control, competition and collaboration— all the buzzwords of Western democratic politics can be conjured here—and it is what gives Billing’s work its contemporary significance.