text_modernpainters — TOBIAS BERNSTRUP

Sally O'Reilly meets a real Gameboy
Modern Painters, Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 issue.

Virtual reality continues to provide a free space for experimentation, desire and transgression at many levels and to many ends. You might compare it to the painted realms of pre-Renaissance art, where the laws of physics were warped to convey the transcendence of the profane. In the multimedia worlds of Tobias Bernstrup there is a similar sense of manipulation through desire and a will to believe in the improbable. His videos, interactive works and live performances reveal the malleability of the artist, as he appears to cross gender boundaries and traverse anachronistic cityscapes.

Bernstrup’s videos adopt the aesthetic of computer games; their sci-fi vistas with prominent vanishing points are a familiar, yet nonetheless odd, mix of classicism and gothic noir, or digitized De Chirico. Bernstrup’s live performances, on the other hand, borrow more from the musical trajectory of fin-de-siècle Weimar to Kraftwerk, with a touch of Robocop camp. His video and live works are obviously interrelated, but there is a graphic expansiveness to the videos that is replaced by a pared-down physical contingency on stage. It is as though the virtual space affords room for desires to roam semi-formed, while on stage the presence of the artist identifies its stylistic specificities. It seems contradictory, perhaps, that the external expression of fetish and cross-dressing, of buckles and skin-tight rubber, is entirely generic, cliché even, rather than a reflection of the peccadilloes of the individual.

The empty space of games draws on a history of paranoia and surveillance, from Piranesi's Carceri of 1745 to contemporary thriller film vernacular. Bernstrup infects these regions of alienation with images of himself, inverting the notion of the avatar as a representation of an individual that never existed. Through digital self-portraits rendered in 3D, he creates a conduit between the simulacra of fantastical architecture and the performative artist. Similarly, live performances hint at immaterial worlds brought momentarily into actuality. Rubber gear, with the smooth surface of a computer simulation, emphasizes its own inherent lack: its perfectly glossy surface hints at its own besmirchment and the rough truth that it surely covers - artifice is ingrained with its own eventual demise. Bernstrup talks of such leakage bewteen the virtual and the actual as though there is no sense in seeking authenticity. "Today I see a lot of paradoxes in our concepts of reality, for example when looking at architecture in computer games and in real life. The software developers keep pushing limits to achieve more and more realism in the games; at the same time, architecture and design moves towards fiction, i.e. the skyline of Shanghai's Pudong district looks like a scene from an early sci-fi movie... There's no clear border or difference anymore - fiction or reality, virtual space or real space, it's all blurred."

In the performance Re-Animate Me (2002), Bernstrup encourages the space of video and stage to collude, refexively extending the experience of both. The opening video game sequence, projected onto the stage backdrop, takes the audience on a flight through a futuristic city, the camera's point of view like a rollercoaster simulation. We swoop up the face of a billboard that advertises 'RealDoll - Silicone and steel, it feels so real', through nooks and gullies into a gothic interior emblazoned with a neon 'Bernstrup', where an Amazonian RealDoll in a red fetish outfit rises out of the floor. The screen then fades to black, the stage lights come up and Bernstrup appears, an automaton programmed to perform for the Stockholm audience.

Bernstrup's hermetic worlds, like those of the gaming industry, are developed through current technologies, yet look back to the older dystopian aesthetics of Blade Runner (1982). The cold-war morality associated with technology persists: outcomes are as impossible to adjudicate as thought and invention are to control and, while obviously offering salvation from the destructive tendencies of nature, it also gives rise to horror and and annihilation itself. This is a line that computer games often tread - wavering between the representations of the influential, but culpable, entity and the power-crazed misanthrope. Bernstrup approaches a portrayal of this, performing monolithically in costumes of control - a dominatrix, perhaps, or an intergalatic warlord. The cover of a CD recently produced by Bernstrup and Kunsthalle Nurnberg, Killing Spree (2005), for instance, feature the artist dressed in grim futuristic fighting gear - huge shoulders draped in strips of bullets and ridiculously wide-bore gun. Bernstrup pouts with his lantern jaw and glowers under his heavy brow. This is the vocabulary of schlock theatre, yet it is this element of pantomime that renders the work more immersive. Now that more invisible and virulent methods of domination are extant, previous mechanistic modes have become entrenched in filmic entertainment, affording Bernstrup the aesteticized virtual space in which to pursue the double-edge fantasy of marginalized individuals.