KIRAC: Brilliant Art Criticism or Empty Shouting?

This week, the artists’ collective KIRAC’s Honey Pot premiered at the debate centre De Balie in Amsterdam. In their latest film, they corner the radical-right philosopher Sid Lukkassen in a game of sex, power and manipulation. One thing is clear: KIRAC will stop at nothing. But where is the boundary?

Mirjam Eeken — 29 October 2021

As Kate Sinha leaves the stage after the introductory discussion with De Balie director Youri Albrecht, she looks into the camera with a sigh, as though she wants to sum up the entire discussion with a raised eyebrow. Behind that camera is Stefan Ruitenbeek, her partner and KIRAC’s co-founder. Although the programme is being streamed online, they meticulously record every minute of the evening—and themselves in particular.

“I would hereby like to withdraw my consent,” Sid Lukkassen stammers halfway through Honey Pot, sitting on a mattress in a dimly lit room. The former VVD municipal councillor and winner of a Forum for Democracy essay competition drove to Zandvoort a few hours earlier with the prospect of some enjoyable sex. Now that reality is unfolding differently and Lukkassen’s manhood has been wounded, he backtracks.

Yet he had volunteered himself. Honey Pot grew out of an appeal on GeenStijl by the 22-year-old “left-wing” philosophy student Jini Jane. She asked right-wing men who wanted to have sex with her on camera to come forward, with the aim of bridging the divide between left and right. Lukkassen submits a video message that leads to a meeting in a house full of KIRAC members and cameras. Once in his company, Jini quickly delivers her verdict: Lukkassen is a “bastard”. After some kissing and tugging, she has had enough. When the jeweller’s also turns out to be closed, so she cannot even get a nice piece of jewellery out of the afternoon, she throws in the towel. Lukkassen feels rejected and wounded to his soul. He no longer wants to be in the film. But with KIRAC, he has come to the wrong place. They decide to use all the footage.

Since their first YouTube video in 2016, the artists’ collective KIRAC has offered art criticism without shying away from confrontation. Resonant voice-overs connect encounters with people from the art world to reflective monologues in which Sinha and Ruitenbeek criticise the present art world, which they describe as stale and ideologically left-wing. Their style is pretentious, intelligent and merciless, yet difficult to pin down.

Former television programme-maker Rob Muntz sees precisely that as KIRAC’s strength. Almost bursting with excitement: “The best thing made in twenty years! I think the way Kate analyses things is brilliant. You cannot fault it. It remains mysterious, and that is exciting. You should not explain it either, just as you should not explain an artwork. The more you know about someone, the less attractive that person becomes.”

Director Martin Koolhoven came into contact with KIRAC two years ago, when they asked him to introduce their film King Philip: “Initially I thought the form was a little too easy, but after watching a few videos I noticed that it intrigued me. I saw progress in form and content. The fact that Honey Pot takes on a right-wing figure might make new viewers think they are a bunch of left-wing artists, whereas that is precisely what they usually kick against. They are not easy to catch out, so it is hard to define exactly what they do and what the dissenting message is, but I like that they are a thorn in the side.”

They have played that role from the beginning. In the very first KIRAC episode, Sinha fearlessly demolishes a work by Saskia Noor van Imhoff. The artist has placed five neat stacks of paper in different colours alongside one another. Sinha: “She actually has no idea what to do with it. They are simply little stacks proving that she knows what modernism is.” And that is only the beginning. In subsequent episodes, Sinha and Ruitenbeek reduce gallery owner Mara McCarthy to tears, and a director is lied to about the fact that a telephone conversation with her is being recorded. Sinha calls artist Zanele Muholi’s work “the lazy fabrications of a spoilt slut”, which visitors are supposed to find interesting only “because she comes from South Africa, is a lesbian and is black”. The Gerrit Rietveld Academie subsequently cancelled KIRAC.

Rob Muntz himself is not averse to a little controversy. During his Waskracht days, he once wandered through Vienna dressed as Hitler, carrying balloons filled with “Zyklon B”, to denounce the election of Jörg Haider. The VPRO responded by firing him. He thinks KIRAC is not all that extreme: “It is so disruptive to the mainstream, yet KIRAC is doing nothing extraordinary. It is so good because no one expects it. I do not think it is so terrible if a gallery owner starts crying. It is about fighting the ideology and the networks and exposing those things. They reveal how people maintain the systems and show how trivial that art world is. Look at the Rietveld; everyone just spouts bullshit.”

Koolhoven: “There is a sort of ‘emperor’s new clothes’ aspect to the way they approach art. They kick against the art world, which, as an outsider, you already suspected consisted of snobs, and in doing so test the limits of what is morally acceptable. That makes it exciting and forces you to think about things, although of course it is an unequal struggle, because they have the power of editing. I do not think it is classy that they sometimes lie about recording a telephone conversation, but I can get past it.”

Playing with the truth is a recurring theme in KIRAC’s work. They like to hold their film subjects to their promises—in Honey Pot, Lukkassen has to go to the jeweller’s for Jini: “Otherwise you lied!”—but scatter untruths themselves whenever it suits them. They also frequently remind their guests and speakers of their moral responsibility to realise that they have taken a wrong turn in their thinking or are subject to networks and systems. When Ruitenbeek thinks they are incapable of this, he does not hesitate—with a generous spoonful of self-importance—to explain it to them.

For example, when Steven ten Thije, then a curator and now head of collections at the Van Abbemuseum, says they do not understand one another: “I think I understand you very well. I think I know exactly who and what you are.” Or when the intern is confused because his “paradigm has been challenged” since working for KIRAC: “You have to give birth, man. You have to get new things out. Everything you do not understand hurts, because it is chaos. People want patterns, clarity and an overview. That is why you have identity politics.”

Plenty of history for Sid Lukkassen to draw on, then. It does raise the question of whether, as a competent adult man, he should not have known better. And did he not knowingly enter into this arrangement with the collective?

Before the premiere, a public outcry arises over the screening, with opponents speaking of revenge porn and sexual abuse. They also refer to KIRAC’s collaboration with Julian Andeweg, the artist currently under investigation after dozens of people filed reports against him for abuse, including sexual abuse. The activist group Geen Podium starts a petition to cancel the event and stages a protest at De Balie.

The artist Tinkebell herself caused several controversies by making a handbag from her own cat and allowing 95 hamsters to run around in plastic balls for hours. For a film about the looming phosphate shortage, she underwent sterilisation at 33. Nevertheless, she considers KIRAC’s work far beyond the pale: “It is a step too far to treat people with such disrespect. When someone like Lukkassen says that what they are doing is hurting him, they must have an extremely good reason to continue anyway; the world really has to become a better place because of it.”

Koolhoven does believe the film serves a purpose greater than Lukkassen’s personal wishes: “He was not duped; he went into it fully aware. If things then do not go as he wants, I understand that he does not like it, but he should have thought it through more carefully. Moreover, he is a public figure with strong opinions about relationships and women; that certainly relates to what this film is about. I really do not think it glorifies rape culture either, as the activist group Geen Podium says.”

KIRAC avoids nothing and no one in its struggle to rewrite the “left-wing narrative that has taken over the art world” and to bring its enormous aversion to cancel culture to public attention. In early October, during a try-out of Honey Pot, they welcomed artist Julian Andeweg by having him enter on a horse. He disappeared as quickly as he arrived, but their message was clear: the artist was back in the game.

Rob Malasch worked as a gallery owner for twenty years and is now an art adviser. He was there when Andeweg trotted past: “I even shouted, ‘Julian, Julian’, but he was already gone. I do have a soft spot for that Andeweg. The boy has now been sidelined in the art world. I would certainly be willing to work with him, but I will wait for the court’s ruling first.”

“Society’s stowaways end up with us,” Kate Sinha said at De Balie. She means people such as Lukkassen and Andeweg. The question arises whether KIRAC is simply making fun of Andeweg here. Koolhoven thinks so: “The very fact that he is brought in on a horse is already ironic. I therefore see it mainly as a provocative art project. In these times of cancel culture, I understand wanting to make a strong statement.”

KIRAC itself cites “mystery” as the reason for bringing Andeweg onstage, aiming to investigate exactly what people are so afraid of when he is sitting on a horse. After all, he is not going to jump off and rape you, Sinha says. Tinkebell sees it more as a sign of weakness: “Andeweg, who is no longer welcome anywhere, presented himself. As did Jini, the impoverished student who wants to make money from porn, and Lukkassen, who is looking for a woman to have sex with. Apparently these are the only people willing to work with them, and they have no choice.”

“That rapist on the horse is thinking: attention is attention,” Muntz says. “But at the same time he is being placed on that horse as though on a scaffold, and is immediately ridden away again. It is utterly, utterly sad.”

One thing is certain: KIRAC is elusive. Viewers are always left with questions: what do they want from me, what am I looking at? By continually shifting perspective and blurring the boundary between fiction and reality, the work becomes hard to grasp, creating a slippery tension in which things could derail at any moment.

That seems to be exactly how KIRAC likes it: through confusion and disruption, provoking a struggle that overturns established patterns, resulting in grand terms such as “new truths” and “paradigm shifts”.

Tinkebell thinks this criticism of “left-wing ideology” mainly springs from frustration: “Because they are not allowed to belong and are not capable. Stefan himself said: ‘At first no one wanted to show our films, and only now that we have hooked Sid Lukkassen are people writing about us.’ They want to be in the newspapers, they want fame, while railing against that very culture. They are a group of people who pretend to be intellectual but mostly produce hot air. They edit themselves cleverly, because time and again it turns out that KIRAC is unable to respond to any criticism in the moment. There is not much going on upstairs.”

Malasch is convinced that a dissenting voice is very welcome today: “The general tendency is for everyone to trundle along with everyone else. That art world with its little galleries and all that fuss is the most bourgeois and least creative business there is. In the Netherlands, you are also dependent on all sorts of regulations and subsidy policies. That makes everything terribly dull and boring, so you have to oppose it.”

But, he argues, it has to be an alternative with something interesting to offer: “Of course you must have something substantial to say. If you are critical merely for the sake of being critical, the art world gains nothing. With KIRAC, it is all shouting and screaming. I think those people were incredibly bored and decided to start a little club.”