By Jacob Lillemose
Lars von Trier
After being aggressively threatened at gunpoint by Smuck, who wanted to see her bra, Mimi goes to the toilet and vomits. In tears she exits the toilet and is met by Job, who encourages her to change her rugged way of life. It seems like there might be hope for Mimi, but suddenly she and Job are stopped by an alarming sound and a blinking red light placed in the corner of the room. They remain frozen for six beeps and blinks, then resume their conversation. But the situation has changed. Or rather Mimi and Job have changed. As if suffering from amnesia, Job walks out the door, saying that he cannot help her. Mimi says she is okay before sitting down on the bedside and nervously snorting a line of cocaine.
This schizophrenic situation was one of hundreds of live theatrical scenarios in Lars von Trier’s Psychomobile #1: The World Clock, realized by the Copenhagen exhibition space Kunstforeningen in 1996. The installation remains a little-known, one-off experiment in Von Trier’s artistic oeuvre. But nearly two decades after it attracted huge audiences to Kunstforeningen, its ‘psychosocial aesthetics’ still offer a challenge to contemporary art’s understanding of and engagement with the politics of human interaction.
Von Trier conceived the concept and set-up of Psychomobile #1 from 1994 to 1995. His idea was to create a radically heterogeneous cast of 53 characters – played by as many actors – who inhabited 19 differently designed rooms – such as ‘The Terminal’, ‘The Archive’ and ‘The Hippodrome’ – over the four floors of Kunstforeningen and in its outdoor courtyard. The three documents that dictated the core of his concept were all presented in the installation for the audience to read. Document 1 listed the age, gender, character traits, dreams and possessions of each of the 53 characters, as well as the physical characteristics of the 19 rooms. Document 2 outlined ‘Rules and Guidelines for the World Clock’, while Document 3 explained ‘The Logic of the World Clock and its Placement in Kunstforeningen’.
Still from Von Trier’s ‘The Idiots’ (1998)
From these three documents Von Trier, together with scriptwriter Niels Vørsel, developed a 270-page manual describing each character in detail, as well as stating his or her relation to each of the other 52 characters and the 19 rooms. The stage instructions for each of the actors were delegated to Morten Anfred, Von Trier’s co-director on his TV mini-series The Kingdom (1994–7). Using this manual, each of the actors had to develop his or her character in an ongoing process of improvisation. Though they had to stay true to the character as described in the general guidelines of the manual – in most cases a few sentences on their psychological make-up – they could also explore and elaborate on their characters. Moreover – again with the framework of the manual – they could move between the different rooms, which sometimes resulted in heavy traffic in the exhibition space.
The fox in Von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’ (2009)
True to his shrewd interest in the intricate dynamics of rules and chaos, Von Trier added an extra challenge. In the entrance hall of the exhibition space, the audience was met with a live video feed of an anthill located in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Superimposed on top of the image were 19 small squares. Each square corresponded to one of the rooms in Kunstforeningen. Whenever four ants would pass through one of the squares, they would trigger a lamp in the corresponding room to change to one of four possible colours. The actors who happened to be in that room at the time would then freeze, waiting for the blinks and beeps to stop, before continuing the interaction in accordance with the altered state of mind that the manual ascribed to the new colour. In this way, the installation was actually dictated by a distant, non-human force, which not only incorporated a principle of endless variability but also involved an element of loss of control (Von Trier’s number-one fear, according to himself) that ushered in a reign of chaos (the true state of affairs in the world according to the talking fox in Von Trier’s 2009 film, Antichrist).
Still from Von Trier’s television series ‘The Kingdom’ (1994–7)
The installation ran for three hours a day, six days a week, over two months. During that time, it developed into a dramatic and intense experimental mix of soap opera, reality TV and absurd theatre, taking place around visitors who could walk freely among the rooms, frequently bypassing or bumping into the actors. Quite quickly the distinction between the fictive universe of the installation and ‘reality’ broke down for many of the actors. A schizophrenic collective state of mind ensued. Relationships of animosity and love continued ‘off-screen’ and fed back into the acting. One actor became so dedicated to his character that he refused to follow the rule that said he should die from a gunshot wound. Instead, he rose from the dead to go on a vengeful killing spree. Another actor concluded, ‘We had become insane, it was a good thing it ended when it did.’
Psychomobile #1 coincided with a general interest at the time from other directors, such as Peter Greenaway, in exploring the exhibition format as a way to expand cinema into a three-dimensional and non-linear experience. However, for Von Trier, the installation was not conceived as an attempt to predict the future of cinema but rather as a further investigation of the dark energies that he believes are at work in the dynamics of human interaction.
At the time Von Trier was preparing the second season of The Kingdom, which also depicts a multi-person universe caught in an evil spiral of malevolent intentions and destructive intrigues. His next film, The Idiots (1998), made two years later, tells the story of a collective of people that falls apart, haunted by inner demons as well as external circumstances. In that sense Psychomobile #1 is a direct continuation of the thematics underpinning his filmic oeuvre.
Still from Von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’ (2013)
A less obvious but nevertheless significant reference, however, is the installation’s connection to so-called relational aesthetics, which characterized much contemporary art at the time. While many art works associated with this label nurtured the idea of open-minded, inclusive and democratic social spaces, Psychomobile #1 presented a nightmare of a social space, infested with aggressions, antagonisms and a vicious will to power. It debunked the modernist myths that social space can be designed and planned and that systems work according to laws of balance. As a perverted paranoid vision, it challenged the utopian promises of relational aesthetics with a view of society in a state of escalating psychosis beyond institutional repair by either government or art. To believe that things can be changed for the better is an illusion. That is just not the way the clockwork of the world ticks in Von Trier’s mind. As his recent film Nyphomaniac (2013) shows, he believes we are at the mercy of a complex chaos generated by the dark drives of human interaction.
Jacob Lillemose is a writer and curator based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Since the fall of 2013 he is chief curator at the research project Changing Disasters at the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research.