I Wait, You Wait, He/She/ It Waits

Some Notes on Johanna Billing’s Pulheim Jam Session by Lisa Marei Schmidt

 It’s early one Saturday morning in June 2011, and I’m sitting on a regional train bound for Stommeln, the village in which I grew up, northwest of Cologne. My reason for this weekend excursion is an invitation from the city of Pulheim to take part in a film project, Pulheim Jam Session by Swedish artist Johanna Billing, as part of their Stadtbild. Intervention series. The artist and the city’s cultural department were looking for volunteers to participate in a fictional traffic jam on a country lane via ads in the local paper and on the radio for “people who have a car and would like to be in an unusual artist’s video.” My father had signed us up, and now he’s waiting for me in his old red Golf. I get in, hug him, and then we join the absurdly long queue of cars that has formed on a road usually only frequented by residents. A friendly assistant in a neon vest hands us two food packages. We then drive slowly, in a queue of more than 60 cars, along a narrow path that cuts a straight line through the landscape.

Johanna Billing’s (born 1973, Jönköping, Sweden) artistic work brings people together. Whether it’s a group of youths in Iaşi, Romania for I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009), musicians in Edinburgh for This Is How We Walk on the Moon (2007), or the citizens of Pulheim for Pulheim Jam Session (2011), Billing creates situations and incidents which then serve as the starting points for her video installations. For her final graduation piece at the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Graduate Show (1999), she filmed herself and her fellow students in a choreography she initiated, in which, although all of the participants followed the same guidelines, the individual personalities of the performers were each made apparent in the performance. Billing’s work has, fundamentally, less to do with collective experience and much more to do with the social dynamics between the individual and society. Set against the background of the pressure to perform, Graduate Show reflects the position that university graduates find themselves in—Billing’s own situation at the time—shortly before they take the step into independence after the end of their studies. Her videos oscillate between real-life scenes and fictional amplifications, simultaneously documentary and highly aesthetic. The specific poetry of Billing’s filmic language is to be found in her development of narrative scenarios using documentary material from real-life productions and the often stirring use of music.

After a short drive the cars in front of us stop without any apparent reason. So this is the traffic jam from which we can no longer escape. It starts to rain. We give a journalist shelter and share our provisions with him. 

The “actors” with whom Johanna Billing works are not professionals.(1) They will usually only follow a rough narrative with no detailed script. By this method, she creates open-ended situations. She sees Pulheim Jam Session as a public performance whose purpose is to “look into the differences and possibilities of the live event.” (2) As such, the action itself is as much an autonomous artistic work as the film that is created from it. There is an intense engagement with music in Johanna Billing’s complex video productions and other artistic work. The project You Don’t Love Me Yet , for example— for which the artist invites local musicians to cover the pop song You Don’t Love Me Yet by Roky Erickson—has been on tour since 2002.(3) Live music also connects the two strands of artistic practice in Pulheim Jam Session : the Swedish songwriter and pianist Edda Magnason was filmed, in a separate shoot, performing an improvised solo piano jam (4) in a barn in Stommeln. Billing’s films are often the result of commissions from museums, art institutions, or galleries. Through such invitations, including most recently in Pulheim, the artist gets closer to a particular place and its people. Her artistic practice is, as such, both site-specific and subjectively founded. Her perspective is that of an outsider, who shines light on socioeconomic relationships inherent in a place and its landscape through the people and their interactions. For Billing, it is ultimately about inspiring a social condition: “Everything is about a society that is changing and people in it.”(5)

So we’re stuck in a traffic jam on a country road and we wait for five minutes, half an hour, two hours—nothing happens. A curious situation. And yet, how familiar the phenomenon of the traffic jam, the car as waiting room. 

The Germans’ special love of cars fascinated Billing during her first visit to Pulheim. The city of Pulheim, to which Stommeln belongs, is a heterogeneous conglomerate of incorporated villages and countless new-build areas very close to Cologne. Most of the inhabitants commute to work in Cologne every day by car. The rural-suburban infrastructure—busses usually only run once an hour—along with a mostly wealthy population may be the reasons that every household in Pulheim owns, on average, 2.7 cars. The area seems to have been planned primarily for getting around by car.

My thoughts wander. I think about how much my school friends, who are still living here, rely on their cars. They complain about the price of petrol, the other road users, and all the traffic jams, but at the same time can’t imagine a life without their car. A recent forsa survey (6) has confirmed the Germans’ special love of cars. Almost one in three Germans in the study stated that they are “proud” of their car. For around 19% this love is so great that they give their cars names. The close affinity between humans and cars was addressed by the French director and comic Jacques Tati around 40 years ago in his film Trafic (1971). Tati was struck by how people change behind the wheel of a car. Johanna Billing names Trafic , in its almost surgical interest in cars and their peculiar humanisation, as an inspiration for her project in Pulheim.(7) It caricatures modern mobility and reveals that human contact can only achieve any depth once the car has come to a stop.

We gradually adjust to this unstable/stable condition of waiting, eat chocolate, listen to Maria Callas, and follow the waves the wind blows across the wheat fields. We sit in silence, talk, and watch some of the other participants exploring their surroundings. Eventually the artist passes by with her film team, greets us, and films the microcosm of our car.

Four years before Trafic , Jean-Luc Godard created one of the most famous traffic jams in film history in his film Weekend (1967): the camera moves slowly along a long line of stationary cars on a country road and captures various situations of interpersonal communication it has created. The people appear to have become acclimatised to the state of not getting anywhere, and pass the time with ball and card games or quarrelling with each other. However, attention is focused on the trucks, convertibles, and small cars, which are portrayed almost more inventively than are their drivers. Godard reflects the stress of modern, mobile life and the inner emptiness of the protagonists of this film. Godard and Billing are linked by a sociological interest in the phenomenon of the traffic jam and the intertwining of private and public space.

A second film team is lifted up into the air by a large firefighter’s crane to film the traffic jam and its surroundings from above. The turnip and wheat fields around Stommeln are dotted with pylons and the steaming cooling towers of Niederaußem Power Station can be seen in the distance. The next bypass road is never far off. It’s raining and windy and now and then the sun shines. It is the apparently incidental things that become important. Waiting becomes an event.

Johanna Billing is concerned with the motif of waiting in many of her video pieces. In Where She Is At (2001)—the result of an invitation from the Oslo Kunsthall and Moderna Museet Projekt—a girl climbs a diving tower, only to remain standing at the top. The open-air pool where the diving tower is located is one of the few examples of functionalist architecture in Oslo that still exists. Designed in 1934 by Ole Lind Schistad and Eyvind Moestue, it was threatened with closure in 2001 when the state no longer wanted to shoulder the costs of running it. In Where She Is At , Billing shows how a place can illustrate the gap between the present society and the Norwegian ideals of the 1930s, while making waiting the subject of the plot. The girl hesitates, and the situation remains in limbo. The title of the work extends the condition of indecision to the situation beyond the bounds of the swimming pool.In the video piece Project for a Revolution (2000), produced a year earlier, the action takes place in what appears to be a classroom in Stockholm. The room is full of young people. No one talks, one person leaves (and comes back at some point), the others wait. The waiting—which also refers to the opening scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 classic film Zabriskie Point —implies, in its unsuccessful connection between subject and collective, the impression of a failed Modernity. Once again Billing is examining her own social reality: the satiated welfare state of Sweden in the 1990s. In contrast to the filmic references to student debates and activities during the Vietnam War, the revolution in Billing’s work seems to be just a “project.” The viewers of Billing’s work wait, along with the protagonists of the videos, for something to happen. They go through various phases of waiting—from irritation, via impatience, to serenity. At the same time the aesthetics and the temporal vacuum of the film are also pleasurable. Billing additionally strengthens this motif in Project for a Revolution by, for the first time in her practice, making the film a loop—something that has since played an important dramaturgical role in her work. Inspired by the Latin origins of the word revolutio , (“revolution,” to roll back or turn around), Billing uses the loop to extend the waiting into eternity. Events are stuck in an endless loop, without beginning or end. In the calm yet not still artistic work, waiting becomes something we are able to experience as a part of our mobile society, as a straining reflection of our societas, caught between the pressure to perform and constant “upgrading”, and at the same time as a meditative moment in which utopian reversion can still be dreamt.

After more than four hours we start to become restless. We’ve talked about everything, eaten all the bananas, and listened to all the CDs. Some drivers sound their horns. Only the artist can resolve the situation. “Rush-hour traffic isn’t really any different,” my father says. Suddenly we hear the first sounds of motors starting, and then the car in front drives off. We follow. After the brief sensation of novelty through the wonder of movement, enthusiasm evaporates and transforms back into the uniformity of mobility again.

Johanna Billing says, “the loops are, to some extent, about being a way for me to leave things open-ended.”(8) Pulheim JamSession will presumably also be told as a filmic loop, so that we’ll all be stuck in this traffic jam again and again.

It’s early one Saturday morning in June 2011, and I’m sitting on a regional train bound for Stommeln…

 Footnotes:

1. “I work in most cases with people as actors, it is just that they are not professional actors.” Johanna Billing in an email to the author dated 27 November 2012.

2. “I’m gonna live anyhow till I die,” Interview Melissa Grönlund with Johanna Billing, in Flash Art (January–February 2013), 86.

3. For example, on 22 August 2009 as part of the exhibition Everything, Then, Passes Between Us in the Kölnischer Kunstverein, with the following bands and musicians: Peter, seine Tochter und ich an den Drums; LINGBY; Tom Ashforth; Festland; Karlecik/Czybulka/Wratil; Popnoname; Christian Jendreiko; Teresa & Julia; Vert; Early in the Fridge; Olger & Wolger; Stankowski; Donna Regina; and Daniel Ansorge.

4. The title of the work, Pulheim Jam Session, connects “traffic jam” and the musical “jam session.”

5.“More Films about Songs, Cities & Circles. A Conversation between Johanna Billing & Helena Selder”, in Johanna Billing – Look Behind Us, a Blue Sky (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 46.

6. forsa survey for CosmosDirekt insurance, in 2012. 1,011 car users have been interviewed about their relationships with their cars.

7. Johanna Billing in an email to the author dated 27 November 2012.

8. “Forever Changes. A Conversation between Johanna Billing & Philipp Kaiser,” in Johanna Billing – Look Behind Us, a Blue Sky, op. cit., 81.

Translated from German by Tom Ashforth.

Lisa Marei Schmidt grew up in Sinnersdorf (Pulheim). She studied in Marburg, Amsterdam, Berlin, and London and worked at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, among others. She has been a curator at Hamburger Bahnhof– Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin since May 2013.