Invasion of the video Vikings

By PAUL PANCKHURST

Look inside the temporary studio in Auckland of Olaf Breuning and see: bicycle helmets transformed with leather and horns into Viking helmets; a half-empty box of red flares; a Sony DCR-TRV900 Handycam; a Powerbook on a desk; lighting gear; four wooden Balinese masks he bought on K Rd; a book of his work, entitled Ugly; and, stuck to the walls, maps of Auckland, souvenir Maori postcards and a shot of a jet-ski.

Oh, and the artist is here, too, in jeans.

Breuning, 31, was born in Schaffhausen, near Zurich, lives in New York, and is spending five weeks as artist in residence at Elam art school.

The main thing he's doing while he's here is shooting a short video at Piha that, from his description, involves scenes of: bedraggled, furry Viking characters coming ashore; Vikings around a fire; Vikings putting on new costumes in a camper van; and the group running through a forest lit by red flares.

He's also shot some carefully staged photographs around Elam of masked and decorated people. Read the commentaries on Breuning's work in the just-published Ugly, and it's easy to bounce off a wall of wordiness.

"Breuning is interested in the semantically and semiotically reduced theatrical elements of his works as a way of developing complexity through the use of simple cognitive structures," writes one of the essayists, Dorothea Strauss.

However, his work is more accessible, and more fun, than that makes it sound. Some elements in his photographs, installations and videos look mock anthropological, with depictions of what Breuning describes as "stereotypes", such as Vikings or cave people or knights, characters vivid to us through pop culture and floating around as ready-to-use symbols, untethered by historical fact.

Breuning tried but failed to organise a cameo in the Piha video by the warrior princess Xena (Lucy Lawless), which would have been just perfect. One of the photographs by Breuning in Ugly is called Knights and shows five people who are posing in a line, wearing suits of armour, carrying swords, and looking at the camera with weird, painted eyes.

The look of the shot is not unlike a celebrity line-up for Vanity Fair.

In the book, an essay by Christopher Doswald explains that only someone who knows military history will realise the five are mixing and matching armour and weapons from a hodgepodge of epochs and cultures; baroque armour, a gladiator's helmet, a Samurai sword, an Indian dagger ... The pieces of equipment have one thing in common: Breuning ordered the lot over the internet. The photograph of the knights is one in a series of studio shots showing little tribal groups in their uniforms: hairy-browed cave-women clad in dark furs and holding big rocks; skateboarders with their boards; and "tribesmen", painted brown, covered in dumb dot patterns, holding big sticks and wearing skirts of twigs over their underwear.

In building what he describes as a personal "language" or "universe", Breuning feels an affinity with the American artist Matthew Barney, who Breuning describes as "creating strange worlds, but in a perfect way".

Breuning's world draws on sources including sci-fi and horror films, and he cites directors David Lynch and John Carpenter as influences.

For those of us who didn't grow up on this stuff, Carpenter's films include Village of the Damned, the story of, as one of the film guides puts it, a "strange mist overcoming an idyllic coastal town, causing 10 women to give birth to children who turn out to be mind-controlling demons".

The B-grade sensibility turns up in the wildman violence in Breuning's five-minute video Ugly Yelp, which was originally part of an installation, where it was shown on a display screen on a BMW motor scooter in a room thick with mist, heavy metal blaring.

Getting to know Breuning's language, a range of elements recurs, including face-painting; long-haired characters wielding chainsaws; groups posing in idiosyncratic uniforms (happy-face T-shirts; black clothing and nugget-black faces); direct movie allusions (Independence Day, ET, 2001, Lost Highway, The Shining); and gleaming luxury vehicles such as cars and motorbikes.

During an interview at nyartsmagazine.com, he was asked: "Your work intertwines reality and fiction. Are the origins still clear for you?"

"For me the separation between reality and fiction is blurred," he said.

"Sometimes I do not know if I have really experienced things or if I have seen them in a film and I don't think that I am an exception. Our lifestyle is so privileged that we no longer need primarily be concerned about where to get the next loaf of bread. Rather we ask ourselves which video we would like to watch today. And this probably has certain consequences."

I ask him a simpler question: why all the cars?

They are "an incredible presence in our world", says Breuning. "Cities are built for cars." He also talks of cars in terms of "power codes", a term that earlier cropped up when he was talking about Xena, and simply as fascinating and incredible creations.

Asked if his work offers a social comment or a message, he says - adamantly - that it does not. He's exploring a personal world.

If people look at his art and like it, that's great, but if they don't, so what?

* Olaf Breuning's nine-minute video King (2000) - with the artist on a road trip, wearing dreadlocks and fake tattoos, then donning a suit of armour and running off into the mid-western American desert - runs at the George Fraser Gallery until August 25. Video from the Piha shoot will screen at Artspace in September and October.