Bad Dads

An Interview with Ronnie Van Hout

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The New Zealand born artist, Ronnie van Hout is a funny guy. Funny-looking, funny-peculiar and funny-ha-ha. In 2018, Buxton Contemporary presented his first Australian survey No One is Watching You. Multiple mannequins and mini-me’s of Ronnie dead-panned the audience with their squinty-little doll-eyes. The exhibition spanned thirty years and featured over seventy artworks including models of sick apes, a sculpture of a man trapped in a banana suit and three unwise owls titled Ersatz.

Van Hout is best known for creating grotesque fibreglass and polystyrene likenesses of himself often arranged in ambiguous tableaux to be interrogated by a live audience. What’s real and unreal? Alive and undead? Van Hout plays our neuroses for laughs; his art is frequently likened to ‘stand-up’ comedy. The gallery is his stage and he’s ‘dying out there’.

The son of Dutch immigrants, van Hout grew up in Christchurch. He first attended the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University, majoring in film (1982). In 1999 he completed his Masters at RMIT, and in 2000 moved to Melbourne where he continues to live and work. Van Hout says, ‘I’ve begun to see my work as failed film: auto didactic and amateur relying less on research and more on Google search’.

Megan Dunn: What did curator Melissa Keys add or subtract from No One is Watching You? Did you have to kill any darlings?

Ronnie van Hout: I once had my fortune told, and I came away with the impression that the theme of my life was ‘You can’t always get what you want, but you just might find you get what you need’ which at the time seemed a bit disappointing, but putting... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Bad Fathers, 2018. Installation view, Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne. Video projection, paint, urethane, polystyrene, wigs, glass eyes, toy guns, toy guitar, painted mdf plinths.
Photograph Christian Capurro. Courtesy the artist.

All Said, All Done, 2012. Installed Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne 2018. Polyurethane, fibreglass, clothing, wig, synthetic polymer paint, shoes, colour HD video, sound.
Collection of the NGV, Melbourne. Photograph Christian Capurro. Courtesy the artist.