Bjørn Melhus- Eastern- Western- Park

29 Apr 2005 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Japan

Bjørn Melhus is a contemporary German - Norwegian media artist, whose works provide a critical view on television culture and consumer habits. Analysing America’s deceptive world of TV- shows- he speaks to most of us, who are willingly or unwillingly influenced by the power of American broadcasting. Bjørn Melhus is currently exhibiting a piece for the German Year in Japan, shown at Spiral Garden in Tokyo.

Interview by Uleshka

What is the concept of your exhibition? What difficulties did you encounter when creating a piece about Germany, shown at Spiral?

The exhibition is called Eastern Western Park and refers to both: the East and the West, seen from an outsider’s perspective.

As for me, Spiral was a very challenging space for an exhibition. Art works in the West are usually presented in a space for interested visitors who come for the only reason, but to look at the art. Here, at Spiral, the artwork can be consumed on the side, while eating a piece of cake. That is an entirely new concept for me. I had to adjust my artwork to match the space.

I usually work with language and dialog - which I really had to reduce to a minimum for Japanese visitors, so I also had to adjust my artwork to match the audience. For this reason, my installations turned out to be simple and eye-catching, almost working like a billboard. Another unusual thing for me was that I never tried to make a piece about something German before. It took me quite a while to come up with an idea, that really suits me and fits these special circumstances.

The main piece of the exhibition consists of large scale projections of a cowboy, an American Indian and a Japanese schoolgirl. How are we to understand these characters and how does that lead back to Germany?

Since about 1900 almost everybody in Germany grew up with Karl May, who was the best selling German writer of all times. My generation, of course, watched all his famous stories set in the American West, on television. “Winnetou”, one of the most famous stories, is about this fair, wise apache called Winnetou and his white cowboy friend called Old Shatterhand. They are riding through the wild, wild West and fight for peace.

Choosing their characters for the Eastern- Western- Park does not only stand for German childhood television memories and the link back to my usual work about America - it can also be seen as a metaphor of how I created an art piece about Japan. Karl May wrote his most famous books about far away countries, before ever leaving Germany. Everything was pure imagination, all based on cliches and second hand information. He actually knew about America, what I know about Japan.

What are you trying to provoke with two obviously blunt and false images of two foreign countries?

It makes no sense for me to try hard to understand Japan, because in the end, I won’t. I can look at it and interpret something, but a deeper understanding of a different culture - especially something that is so different to Western culture like the Eastern one - is impossible to achieve without living there for a long time - and even then, it is difficult.

When thinking about Japan from the outside, there are certain images in everybodies head, like the ’schoolgirl’ and ’sakura’. Something, everyone who doesn’t know, “imagines” what Japan must be like. How blunt, superficial and narrow is it though, to look at those cliches when knowing the culture and being in Japan?

If a cliche is so obviously a cliche, the question is: what is real, if this is not? If those kind of questions come up, if a dialog arouses, my artwork was successful.

Why did you choose the cliche of the schoolgirl?

The schoolgirl is the hero of the story. It gets to be quite queer, though, if it is me, a guy in his 40ies dressed up as a schoolgirl. The whole thing almost gets some kind of a surreal themepark character. The schoolgirl is also the one who greets the visitors, which is a common element I like to use in my artwork. While in movies, the actors play with each other and avoid looking directly into the camera, on TV, people pretend to look into your eyes, try to”play” with you, directly.

What happens in the teepee?

The teepee also relates to the Eastern- Western- Park idea. It is build out of bamboo sticks and silver foil. Inside you find a light and sound installation: single coloured TV-screens flickering to sound samples in German, English and Japanese. A teepee again refers to Karl May’s stories and his false, cliched view of America. The German idea of the Wild West - being just as false as the cliches of Japan.

What is behind the idea of single coloured TV- screens?

When I was a child, there were only 3 TV-channels in Germany. We used to live in an area with lots of multi-story buildings. At night time, I would stand outside watching the lights of the windows change in the same rhythm, as people watched the same programs. If there was a soccer game on TV, the lights of entire buildings changed simultaneiously.

In the teepee, light and mood change due to single-coloured monitors. It is an abstract implementation of TV, based on the same idea.

5 Comments

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   Posted by: Nkola on April 2nd, 2006 at 12:38 am

2. interesting subject

   Posted by: Nakliyat on February 16th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

3. hmm nice

   Posted by: nakliyat on February 19th, 2008 at 7:12 am

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   Posted by: Plaket on February 27th, 2008 at 7:33 am

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