Miguel Abreu

Lacanian Biology
and the Event
of the Body
JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

Gender and Sexuation
RICHARD KLEIN

The Great Divide
THOMAS SVOLOS

The Absence of
the 20th Century
GÉRARD WAJCMAN

Il n'y a pas de
rapport religieux
SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Rosemarie Trockel
JOSEFINA AYERZA

The Ballad of
Ion Lupescu
MIGUEL ABREU

The Ballad of Ion Lupescu recounts the odyssey of a celebrated Romanian athlete sometime after the fall of the Ceausescu regime. In 1993, yielding to a long-awaited opportunity to try his luck in the New World, Ion Lupescu defected from his homeland and settled in an emerging suburb of Los Angeles. There, evidently feeling somewhat isolated at the edge of the Mojave desert, the track star and national hero spends his days training, running across the landscapes and traversing the many construction sites of the new city.

Following various, high-level diplomatic efforts to reestablish contact with the sprinter, a detective, an athlete himself and an ex-member of the Securitate forces has been sent to the region on a mission to find Lupescu and bring him home safely to Bucharest. The detective's only clue is a snapshot taken at the Pasadena Rose Bowl during the 1994 World Cup, in which the hero is seen mingling with a group of fans, standing behind the pierced flag of the Revolution.

Sitting back with his feet up on a desk located in what resembles an outdoor TV game-show studio, the detective wonders how to begin his search. Suddenly the phone rings: "I need you to want me," murmurs a voice with a Romanian accent; "without you I am lost, with nothing to believe in. I love you, find me," the man continues on the other end of the line. The bewildered investigator recognizes Ion Lupescu, but the caller hangs up. With his portable phone still in hand, the detective jots down the message word for word. What to make of this delirious declaration questions the special agent? He glances at the handset in a state of confusion, focuses on the dial plate and becomes intrigued by the ordinary fact that to each number on the dial corresponds a series of three letters in alphabetical order. Scrutinizing further, he notices that no character appears above figure 1 and that on top of 0 the exceptional four-letter abbreviation, OPER, eludes the previous systematic arrangement. He also discovers that the letters Q and Z have been omitted from the alphabet altogether.

The detective reflects upon these findings for a moment and proceeds with the curious task of inscribing under each character of the English language text its corresponding digit on the dial. He adds up the resulting numbers and obtains 440. Could this figure amount to some sort of lead? After checking his watch, which reads 1pm, the detective prepares to leave and stuffs a few chosen items in his briefcase, including the phone, the calculator, and of course, the written message. He stands up, crosses the set and races away, with the firm intention of completing 440 strides directly straight ahead. What will our special agent discover at the end of his run? This entire operation will come to constitute the first leg of an unprecedented effort to track down Lupescu in and out of suburbia.

What do individualism or social conquests imply when it comes to the need for images? What does an individual expect from images that, unlike the images of advertising, would not exist to hide other images, but would open up onto something else?

Glimpsing at the seemingly endless billboards that flank the longest boulevards in the world, walking through the huge shopping malls that make up the heart of Southern Californian cities, the ubiquitous presence in space of the three primary colors soon becomes natural to the eye. Blue, yellow and bright red spring up from almost everywhere, and in an infinite variety of ways these particular hues give shape to the horizon line. Thus, since outdoor documentary photography was to be our basic production mode, this immediate visual fact was to infiltrate our story and sway the images that would tell it.

Blue, yellow and red are also the three colors of the Romanian flag, and it so happened that this nation's soccer team had qualified for the 1994 World Cup held in the United Sates. So in order to encourage our protagonists to feel at ease and move freely in the environment they would inhabit, it seemed appropriate for them to have roots in that far away country.

Ion Lupescu was and perhaps still is a professional sprinter. It will therefore come as no surprise that to run - and to sprint - remain dominant activities for our hero. But he has also become a clever, if not shrewd user of the telephone system. In fact, the narrative as a whole is deeply permeated by telecommunications riddles. Does not the detective's search actually make ground through repeated efforts to decode increasingly mysterious messages? And since remarkably, one of the major American telecommunications operators is called 'Sprint,' and because that company's logo is solidly anchored in our common media space, it simply fitted the present order of things to risk diverting this glaring confluence of meaning into our own integrated plan to generate fiction.

THE STRUCTURING ELEMENTS OF TIME AND SACE

If an overt color scheme pervades the production design and sustains the composition of each frame, the time and space articulated in the video, for their part, are the direct outgrowth of Ion Lupescu's incantations. Translated into numbers corresponding to specific distances to be traveled, these same love messages will further impose time constraints the detective will need to comply with in the hope to fulfill his mission.

Thus the uttered word, here, functions as the ultimate principle of organization, the blind law which, after being tamed and interpreted, will inspire the frenzy of a breathtaking manhunt. And as the viewer will soon observe from a higher perspective, the simultaneous outcome of this very physical chase will resemble nothing but a drawing of discrete geometrical shapes upon the wonderland of suburbia. The delineated blue triangle, yellow square and red pentagon, all expanding from a shared center, will fix the contours of closed worlds in which quasi-secret indigenous languages oversee separate states of affairs.

Ion Lupescu himself would probably feel compelled to live out his apparent lunacy, his sense of perdition even more should he not be somehow conscious that a concerted effort to find him is positively underway. And while our two heroes are being drawn into a high stake game that is quickly turning into a matter of life or death, they are also progressively sliding into becoming one and the same. Strictly speaking, however, the stakes for our prey are to maintain a delicate balance between continuing to tease the detective into everlasting action and managing to retain the slight lead he needs on his tireless pursuer. One might even consider that the fragile distance separating the two sides, the two incarnations of our double protagonist, operates as the space of desire itself, the minimum gap necessary for projection to occur, the interval without which things would become dangerously equal to themselves, that is to say non-existent.

Advertising...has made us accustomed to seeing only one character, one body at the time. What they sold, were it deodorant or Marlboros, didn't matter at all. What mattered was to see a single individual in a non-environment: a bit of blue sky, a swimming-pool... The question of rebuilding the environment is crucial, since we don't know the world the modern individual will live in.

It comes down to editing: the world images is often used, but they are no more. The one thing remaining is relations. Americans, who are more pragmatic, make use of that force.

An image is never alone, it always calls for another. But today, what are called images are ensembles of solitude connected by something being said...

...Movies are not one image after another, they are one image plus another, which forms a third image. This third one is formed by the spectator at the moment when he sees. The film is an image that becomes more and more precise, like the work of the musician or the painter.

One of the primary intentions fueling the project was to always remain receptive to the environment underlying the story. We were to linger on the territory's surfaces hoping to grasp the effects of its dreams before imagining the characters' psychological make-up and devising the staging of their relationships. The aim was to also render palpable the rationalization of time and space governing the development of our city refuge, ode to the consumer king, to private property and to the seclusion of life. This safe and rapidly growing suburb, built from scratch by adding one master-planned housing complex to another, attracts new home owners everyday by offering a variety of residential styles, ranging from the luxurious Mediterranean villa for the more prosperous citizens all the way to the pseudo-English cottage on a hill geared to the lower income prospects. Here we stood with our protagonists at the crossroads of the empire of the sign, where straight lines and right angles reign supreme, and where private security cars patrol to enforce the established distances between places and between people. And as we glided along the glorious road network servicing the area, we noticed that the basic act of walking had become limited to the mall, the new replacement town center where, as if by miracle, a semblance of social life still seemed possible.

Against this background, confronting the general feeling of solitude overtaking the city, the telephones ring, ring and ring again, runners and sports practitioners are everywhere, and the TV sets of the region stay on 24 hours a day.

...man has been violently thrown out of himself, on the surface of things he can neither digest nor refuse. Things are there, because of him, but outside of him forever, without reason, in a sudden and inexplicable state of upsurge.

Genuine communication is a projection outside oneself; not an act of pouring out, but a physical - metaphysical - identification which, far from absorbing it, leaves undiminished the other's freedom. Sometimes, when one fixes that point (an object, a person), one actually becomes that point; and it is the movement of that passage to the other that matters.

If at first sight the The Ballad of Ion Lupescu resembles a detective story, the viewer will soon recognize the call of various other genres without being able to decide to which alternative option the narrative best belongs. Apprehended from this particular angle, the film will remain unresolved as it fails to identify convincingly with the rules of any given genre.

Are we watching the unfolding of a kind of burlesque thriller, or is what we are witnessing closer to a commercial prolonging itself to the point of turning into a modern-day tragedy? And as to the central set, is it acceptable as a detective's office, or does it function more like a TV game-show studio a la "Wheel of Fortune"? For the increasingly discerning spectator, however, apart from the 'no comment' documentary depiction of the region, several more cryptic associations might offer clues to a more fundamental reading : Is Ion Lupescu, standing on top of a podium with his arms raised to the sky, reminiscent of Moses on the sacred mountain receiving the Ten Commandments? Or in the end, does not the very design of the enacted chase bring to mind the structure of a mandala? And is not this latter correlation facilitated by the recurring view of the circular set seen from above, as well as by the less obvious fact that mandalas, following Dr. Jung's psychological description, "appear spontaneously in dreams, in certain states of conflict, and in cases of schizophrenia"? Are not the hero's actions and reactions the consequence of these precise states of mind? By contrast, for a dedicated psychoanalyst of the Lacanian school of thought, the project would probably be more fruitfully examined from the perspective of a case study on perverse behavior. Indeed, as Slavoj Zizek has noted recently, pertaining to the pervert - and perhaps also to Lupescu - "since for him the Law is not fully established (the Law is his lost object of desire), he supplements this lack with an intricate set of regulations (the masochistic ritual). The crucial point is, therefore, to bear in mind the opposition between Law and regulations (or 'rules'): the latter bear witness to the absence or suspension of Law."

Be that as it may, let us not forget that from the onset our foremost concern has always been to stay in touch with the growing number of extreme sports aficionados and to reach out to the worldwide audience of MTV. And if by chance and in the same breath the video proves of interest to the student of Egyptology and the mere lover of drawing, we will consider it to have achieved its range of potential meaning.

SPEEDVISION VS. THE STATIC IMAGES OF THE CEAUSESCU REGIME

One of the significant techno-cultural developments of the last decade has been the dramatic emergence of data processing. We as human beings - our tastes, habits, physical attributes, level of income and opinions of all sorts - are increasingly being considered as statistical evidence to be processed to make allegedly more and more efficient decisions about almost everything. This in part is a direct result of the so-called digital revolution which has been transforming our living environment into a grand theater of numbers and signs, all the way to the internal structure of images themselves.

The effect of this far reaching evolution is the ultimate subject of The Ballad of Ion Lupescu. We set out to make the first film about 'data-processing,' literally with and through data-processing. The basic bent of the story is that, as opposed to allowing external entities such as large corporations and government institutions to transpose our protagonist's features and dispositions into various kinds of data, Lupescu assertively invents his own private numbers and secret codes and makes resolutely independent calculations that will create the very time and space of the video.

The other crucial theme fueling the work, of course, is the invading effect of advertising. We captured on camera the unavoidable presence in space of signs and billboards and attempted to create a cinematic mode that would absorb some of the immense powers of commercials by re-channeling them into our singular, tragi-comic purposes. The strategy, if you will, was one of reverse product placement, in which a selected big name brand and its accompanying message would be neutralized by connecting it to a recurring theme or action in the story, the most prominent and literal example of this device being Lupescu's sprints surging out of the 'Sprint' telecommunications starting-blocks. And as the world of TV ads and dancing signs begins to contaminate the essentially documentary image of the film, an opposition emerges between what might be called the rapid and hollow 'informational image' of Speedvision on the one hand and the 'memory image' of the static Ceausescu regime on the other.

What Lupescu is feeling, in a sense, is the pressure of these two kinds, these two dominant modes of the image. What he is doing, in the end, is organizing his struggle to escape by inventing a secret order of the image, an order of resistance in the name of the documentary image.

* a cut and paste essay about the video by Pieter Schoolwerth and Miguel Abreu back up

I consider the sculpture to be the fortress in which the film rests, peacefully awaiting the moment someone removes the lid off the box and takes out the DVD to watch it. There are other things inside the sculpture as well, such as the rolled up diagram in the tube - the complete screen play - and a yellow plastic sheet upon which appears a sentence written in one of the secret alphabets regulating the film. These and other clues can help the viewer apprehend the precise construction of the narrative. Every design element of the sculpture, further, is also used in the shaping of the video itself.

Art: Miguel Abreu

THE BALLAD OF ION LUPESCU: OR 222 MINUTES TO LIVE, Plexiglas, DVD, and mixed media, 2000