Ourhouse

Episodes 1, 2, and 4
Directed by Nathaniel Mellors, 2010

Art can be many things - but surely it’s not allowed to be funny…?

The ICA is currently showing the three existent episodes of Nathaniel Mellors’ Ourhouse video project. I saw episode one a while back, and have been wanting to return for the others since then, but only just got round to it. I’m going to avoid the tag of video art altogether though, as I’ve so many shite examples of it; it just brings to mind opaque noodlings thrashed out on home video cameras with little to no practical skill.

Instead, Ourhouse occupies a juncture between ‘video art’ and a narrative form much closer to television – certainly in production values (which are tip-top) – featuring actual actors, and even a plot! Admittedly an uncanny one, but not to the extent of complete impenetrability. That the characters are likeable (if odd) and the visuals often rather lovely, in a low-key way (lots of window light), goes a long way to making you actually bother follow what’s going on.

In a way, the episodic format isn’t done any favours by the ICA’s curation (with each part played in a different room), which makes people inclined to pop in and out as you might justifiably do with a more (traditionally) freeform video installation. It does the work a disservice though, as it would with any narrative form – like a TV series, the story that develops across the episodes demands to be watched in full.

Taking place in a dilapidated country house and following the bizarre and at times almost ritualistic behaviour of the occupying Maddox family, the story concerns the intervention of ‘the Object’ – a fat man in a white tracksuit who the family are incapable of identifying as human. The Object starts to eat the family’s library, page by page, with a resulting effect on the characters’ grasp of language (the ageing and slightly new-age father comes over all cor-blimey and takes to wearing an ‘I Eat Pussy Like A Fat Kid Eats Cake’ T-shirt).

It sounds a slender premise, but as with any art piece – and it is obviously capable of sustaining analysis on that level – it’s as interesting as you choose to make it: a meditation on language, knowledge, and power. What kind of fascinated me about it though was having the choice to simply watch it as a narrative (albeit an absurdist one).

As I say, I found the whole thing extremely funny – there’s a blackly comic streak alongside a deadpan take on the general irrationality – and it is novel experiencing something with moments of a genuinely comic sensibility in an art space. (Especially when you consider that humour is as valid a form of expression as any other, but one not often recognised as such in an art context.) In some ways, for me at least, the art tag though is almost disingenuous, as, outside of that context, I’d still find these pieces very enjoyable (which makes me wish it was online somewhere).

I particularly love one of the Maddox sons, shorts-and-vest-wearing “magic child”/“space monkey”/“cretin” Truson: a sort of slightly fey, slightly posh, slightly simple boy with soot (?) facepaint, who occupies a position somewhere between sensitivity and imbecility. Whether it’s the character as written, or something the actor David Birkin brings to it (nephew of Jane, tenuously-linked-actor fans!), he’s oddly compelling, whether taking photos of stuffed birds in a tree with a massive Polaroid camera, or finding a totemic earth-mother figure in a hedge. (He also provides an unexpectedly resonant moment of emotion at the end of the last episode.) 

Maybe because it has a kind of through-the-looking glass internal logic, it’s hard to know if I’m really explaining this well at all, but probably the most noticeable and, in a way, impressive thing about it is its lack of self-indulgent wankiness. Well, maybe that’s a matter of opinion. But a sense of humour counts for a lot. Also, I think having the patience to actually watch it in its entirety means it does make sense as a whole.

Perhaps the best way I can qualify it – and what distinguishes it from my experience of video art – is that, though initially opaque, it deals with conceptual ideas (corruption of language, etc) through traditional storytelling and televisual language, which makes it far more palatable than it might otherwise have been.