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It’s Valentine’s Day, and Jesper Just is concerned that his next film, scheduled to premiere at the Venice Biennale on June 1, might be misunderstood. He’s not second-guessing himself. On the contrary, Just is determined to protect the ambiguity that he cultivates in his art. Having spoken eagerly about the new work, he’s worried that sharing one detail about the piece—the fact that he shot on location in China—will lead readers to conclude that the work is about China. “I hope people will think about Paris,” he says, “and not necessarily China.” The location is a half-built, sparsely inhabited residential development outside Hangzhou that replicates the French capital, more or less, with a downsized Eiffel Tower and boulevard-proud apartment blocks that rise near palm trees and rubble-strewn fields. It’s a crude approximation, Paris as rendered by a police sketch artist. Just calls the architecture a “performance” of Paris and prizes the imperfect artifice as a device with which he can both convince and unsettle the viewer.
We are talking in the Copenhagen-born artist’s studio in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, on the second floor of a hulking building shared mostly with other artists. Just first came to New York in 2004 for a show at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery in which he debuted two reputation-establishing films, Bliss and Heaven (color) and The Lonely Villa (black-and-white). He was subsequently invited to create a live work for New York’s first Performa Biennial in 2005 and took his return as an opportunity to shoot a new film, It Will All End in Tears. That piece was featured in a second widely acclaimed show at Rubenstein in 2006, by which time Just had settled in New York.
Prominent in his Spartan studio today are an editing monitor and a scale model of the Danish pavilion in Venice. Architectural plans and clusters of small photographs from the three-week-long January shoot in China are pinned to the walls. Just’s piece, Intercourses, comprises five looped black-and-white films of differing durations to be distributed on screens throughout the pavilion. Small photos inserted into the model indicate projection sites. The challenge is to edit the sequence of image and sound in a way that integrates five simultaneous projections of various lengths into a coherent experience for an audience whose movement through the pavilion is unpredictable. Just will tamper with the architecture, too, altering the facade and other features to turn the pavilion into a mise-en-scène for film and viewer alike.
Just was invited a year ago to represent his native country in Venice; his concept for the project was sparked by the multiple meanings of that word, represent, and by the exhibition site itself. An uneasy hybrid of Neoclassical and modernist styles, the Danish pavilion is one of about 30 small buildings clustered in the Giardini that represent their countries like little art embassies. Meanwhile, the city of canals “performs” itself daily for thousands of tourists, while its own monuments have been knocked off in China, Orlando, and Las Vegas. Given the setting for the finished work, shooting in a fake Paris felt right to Just. The protagonists are three French actors of African descent. Themes of national identity and race, place and displacement, and architectural fiction were all bred in the project from the start.
The ambitious undertaking is a far cry from Just’s earliest films, some of them exhibited before his 2003 graduation from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, in Copenhagen. These concise works (generally 6 to 10 minutes long) typically present a tense yet tender situation involving a young man (the Danish actor Johannes Lilleøre, in a recurring role) and older men. In each a popular song is sung, its lyrics expressing the arc of longing and loss that structures these otherwise wordless dramas, which Just characterizes as “micro-narratives that keep breaking expectations.” With their overripe feeling and cinematic clichés, the works have been dissected as studies in homoerotic desire and gender stereotypes, but they also explore the imbalance of power between performer and spectator. Just recounts the story of making Invitation to Love, 2003, in which a gray-haired man mounts a heavy conference table and dances before an impassive young fellow seated at the head. A school bell, perhaps to summon the next dancer, is conspicuous on the table. “That was shot in the Academy,” Just explains, “in a very fancy room. All the paintings on the walls are the old professors. A student goes there only twice—on your first day and on your last, when you get your diploma.” He asked if he could shoot there for his thesis. “First they said no. Then they gave me one hour. Once we were in, we locked the door. I got into a lot of trouble, but I filmed the whole day.”
Only incidentally an erotic game, Invitation to Love can be viewed as a mild revenge fantasy: The graduating artist commandeers the seat of authority and turns the tables on the professor who has compelled him to “perform” for years. The interpretation is not definitive; in fact, open is a favorite word of Just’s. “I work with a lot of open moments,” he says. “My goal is that once you’ve seen the film, you don’t sit there with all the answers. I want you to be uncertain and to think about what you’ve seen instead of having everything revealed.”
Among Just’s most affecting efforts in this regard (and the last one shot in black-and-white prior to the film for Venice) is A Vicious Undertow, 2007. Filmed in a Copenhagen club, it opens like a 1960s spaghetti western with a lonely thread of whistling, but the song comes from the Moody Blues, not Morricone: It’s the plangent and corny “Nights in White Satin.” A middle-aged woman courts a younger woman with her whistling until the arrival of a young man creates an unstable triangle. Each puckers up to whistle and, alternating partners, the three dance to a tinkling music-box tune, the all-but-unrecognizable “Rebel Waltz” by the Clash. Just surely chose the song for its elliptical lyrics, though they aren’t heard in the film: “I danced with a girl to the tune of a waltz/That was written to be danced on the battlefield /I danced to the song of a voice of a girl/A voice that called, ‘Stand till we fall/We stand till all the boys fall.’ ” Suddenly the older woman is outdoors on a crystalline winter night, the lights of a city gleaming below her. She ascends a vertiginous spiral stair toward the black sky, leaving the battlefield to the girl and the boy.
In recent years diverse locations have played a significant role in the gestation of Just’s films, but he remains adamant about the distinction between what inspires him and what he believes edifies the viewer. “My films are always made in a way that it could be anywhere,” he says. “My method is to use the history of the place to create, but people watching might not necessarily get that history if they don’t read the press release. They might know that this is the desert, but it’s unlikely that they would connect it to the socialist utopia.”
Just is referring to the early 20th-century community of Llano del Rio, in whose ruins outside Los Angeles he shot much of Llano, 2012, his first film without music. Throughout the work, a heavyset woman piles rocks amid the debris of past habitation. Water drips incessantly, percussively from an unexplained apparatus above her, promising to erode whatever she accomplishes. Stretches of repetitive action alternate with shots of the tunnels below downtown L.A., vacant halls that are lined with pipes and hum with the vaguely menacing sound of unseen machinery. Llano (on view through June 15 in Just’s show at Galerie Perrotin, in Paris) conveys solitude, perseverance, futility, apprehension, and a fundamental incompatibility between the individual and institutions, all without recourse to song or a micro-narrative. Just says, “I would like to continue that in Venice, so the film is more of a description of a place—very objective, just observing, not interpreting.”
Llano debuted last fall at James Cohan in Just’s first solo show with the gallery and his first in New York since a 2008 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The three films shown at Cohan were shot in locations that piqued what Just calls his “interest in failure and dystopia.” Closest in structure to the early works is Sirens of Chrome, 2010, which follows four young African-American women in an aged Chrysler through downtown Detroit and up the ramp of a parking garage that occupies the interior of a mid 20th-century movie palace like a hermit crab. The title is from a 2008 book about the use of seductive auto-show models during the industry’s heyday in Detroit. A fifth woman appears and is suddenly atop the car, rolling and falling, helpless as an accident victim, voluptuous as an exotic dancer. Is this a hazing or a command performance? Just keeps us guessing.
If Sirens of Chrome anticipates the theme of racial identity in the Biennale film and Llano embodies the condition of detached observation Just is now aiming for, the third film at Cohan—This Nameless Spectacle, 2011—is a precedent for coordinating projections across real space. In this instance, two mural-scale screens face each other. They show the same Paris setting (real this time), but one screen is reserved for the actions of a feral young man and the other for an alluring middle-aged woman piloting a wheelchair. He pursues her from a park to nearby residential towers, run-down emblems of modernist architecture’s arrogance. Having arrived at her apartment, the woman rises from the wheelchair and walks to the window to open the drapes. In a window of the mirror-image tower across the way stands the youth. Like the angel who pierces St. Theresa with the golden spear of God’s love, he manipulates the window to direct the searing reflection of the sun onto the woman, who drops to the floor and writhes in ecstasy. The light fades. She rises and withdraws into her apartment, terminating the session even as the young man is hungry for more. Whether this was improvised play or a daily ritual between the two, the power is hers.
Just used multiple apartments to film the reflected light, changing position to follow the sun. He found the woman’s apartment by chance (a resident approached him as he scouted the complex and invited him in) and left it essentially unchanged: “Most of the time I take things out, but I never do set design or add things or build sets. It’s always on location.”
A dialectic of research and serendipity characterizes Just’s process. He was alerted to the phenomenon of Chinese replica cities by a passage in a book by the urban theorist Mike Davis. A preliminary trip to China in December led to the preparation of a script of sorts, some 50 pages of detailed notes, from which Just freely departed. He is using video again after shooting with film for several years; the digital medium’s economy allows more experimentation.
We examine some footage of faux Paris. The velvety black-and-white captures what Just calls “a Truffaut-like feeling.” He is after an episodic, postapocalyptic sci-fi quality: Paris with parked cars and hanging laundry but no visible inhabitants aside from the trio of actors. One man wanders the empty streets and fields. Two others ride a scooter down a two-lane blacktop that ends abruptly at a scrubby vegetable patch. In another sequence the pair searchingly run their fingers along the walls of the apartment they share. The principal sound throughout will be made by the wind. “They’ll all connect,” Just says of the men. “You see them isolated, and then the sounds connect them in some kind of solidarity.”
Just plans to mix the sound on-site in the pavilion in early May and will probably complete the edit there too, refining the interlacing of the films. The 11th-hour finish doesn’t rattle him. “I think the longer you keep it open,” Just says, “the more you can succeed. It can be nerve-racking, but being out there, having everything be chaotic—most of the time it comes together in the last minute.” He smiles and adds, “Hopefully.”
This article is published in the May 2013 issue of Art+Auction.