NRC Handelsblad — How a conservative philosopher ended up in a sex film

The art collective KIRAC is known for its provocative films about the established art world. In its new film Honey Pot, it lures conservative philosopher Sid Lukkassen into a trap through a sexual date with a “left-wing girl”.

Tristan Theirlynck · NRC · 20 October 2021

The trailer for Honey Pot, the 23rd film by art collective KIRAC, Keeping It Real Art Critics, is not a deepfake. It contains no body doubles and no lookalikes. What you see is real: Sid Lukkassen, conservative philosopher and former VVD councillor in Duiven, lies naked on a bed, entwined with “left-wing girl” and philosophy student Jini Jane. She is silent; he is caressing her. The trailer ends: “Come and see KIRAC’s greatest clusterfuck.”

It is Friday evening, 8 October. Two hundred guests wait for the premiere of Honey Pot outside a warehouse near the former Bijlmerbajes prison. Inside is an exhibition by artist Tarik Sadouma, “controversial” by his own account. He plays the role of a pimp in the film. Camera and sound operators move through the crowd.

In the darkness, a horse stands outside the warehouse, a wreath of flowers on its head and a rider on its back. Sadouma speaks: “This… is Julian Andeweg.” The rider raises his head. Indeed: it is Andeweg, the artist accused in NRC by twenty women of, among other things, rape, assault and stalking. “We have decided to welcome him, in the name of art,” Sadouma continues. “A lot of things are going on in Julian’s life. But that is a matter for the judiciary.” There is a breathless silence.

Suddenly horse and rider turn around. Andeweg rides away along the petal-strewn street. KIRAC founder Stefan Ruitenbeek, born in 1982, follows him with a camera. It takes a moment; then discussions erupt everywhere. One guest calls the stunt “a massive shitty thing to do”. Another thinks it is “fantastic”. Andeweg does not reappear for the rest of the evening. KIRAC posts a message on Instagram: Andeweg is “uncancelled”.

The fallen artist on horseback, a shocked crowd: this will be the opening shot of a new film. The evening’s main event, the premiere of Honey Pot, has yet to begin. Tonight, KIRAC and Sadouma show what lives on the ragged fringes of the art industry, where sacred cows burn and provocation is art.

Cancelled by the left

Art collective KIRAC is notorious in the art world. In early 2018, de Volkskrant wrote: “Wherever these art critics enter, knees start knocking.” The group is known for merciless criticism and little reverence for artistic dogma. KIRAC films on YouTube, ranging from ten minutes to an hour and a half, have titles such as The Bad Breath of Mondrian Specialist Hans Janssen and The Tears of Mara McCarthy. They are watched tens of thousands of times. KIRAC received a subsidy from the Mondriaan Fund; its other funding comes from donors.

In 2018, KIRAC became embroiled in controversy. Archaeologist Kate Sinha, born in 1988, Ruitenbeek’s partner and, together with him, the driving force behind the collective, described the work of South African photographer Zanele Muholi as “the lazy concoctions of a spoilt slut”, in which visitors were expected to be interested “simply because she comes from South Africa and is lesbian and black”. In KIRAC episode 9, Who’s Afraid of Harvey Weinstein?, Sinha criticises the #MeToo movement. She argues that in “a great many situations […] women enjoy their own desirability by seeking out precisely those boundaries of defilement”. As a result, a screening of KIRAC episode 12 at the Rietveld Academie is “cancelled”. Eventually, they are allowed on stage for a discussion about racism, sexism and wokeism. But their reputation is established. KIRAC is politically incorrect and contrary in a way the contemporary art world does not appreciate. In Ruitenbeek’s words, they are “thrown out of the left-wing art bubble”.

The result: KIRAC moves in the other direction. Increasingly, right-wing conservative blogs and websites such as GeenStijl, The Post Online and Café Weltschmerz become their distribution platforms. Spat out by one bubble, embraced by another. Sinha and Ruitenbeek now go to the same drinks parties as Lukkassen.

Sex and arguments

The lights in the Amsterdam warehouse have been dimmed. This is Tarik Sadouma’s studio and exhibition space. On the walls hang paintings on the hides of tortured Egyptian donkeys; you can still see the scars. Through the cigarette smoke, Honey Pot is projected onto a large screen.

At the beginning of the film, we hear a phone call from Lukkassen, in tears. He feels humiliated by the film; his supporters have reacted badly to the Honey Pot trailer. “I’m completely devastated!”

What prompted him to take part? In the film, Lukkassen says he came to have sex with “left-wing girl” Jini Jane to combat polarisation. But no actual sex takes place. Shortly after making out, Lukkassen and the “left-wing girl” argue about the cheap chocolates he brought. While Lukkassen is in the toilet, Sadouma, Ruitenbeek and Jini discuss how to use the cheap chocolates to send Sid to the jeweller’s for a more expensive present. Ruitenbeek: “We have to see his dick!”

The boundary between fact and fiction is blurred. Sadouma is clearly playing a role, but Lukkassen is mostly himself. Fictional scenes are edited throughout the film, with a left-wing former partner of Lukkassen portrayed by Ruitenbeek in a wig. When Jini goes to pee, the camera follows. She does want to sleep with him, she tells the camera, but “what is in it for her?”

Lukkassen is rejected on camera. He feels humiliated. “I would hereby like to withdraw my consent [to the footage being shown].”

The footage is hallucinatory and uncomfortable, for Jini Jane, for Sid Lukkassen and for the viewer. Just before the credits, there is a shot of Tarik Sadouma, pretending to cry. He raises his hand in a Hitler salute. Then he laughs.

A porn channel

The audience — KIRAC fans, artists and filmmakers — applauds loudly. But the film also provokes heated discussion. Everyone asks one question: how on earth did this film come about?

In 2018, philosophy student, self-described “left-wing girl” and KIRAC fan Jini Jane, a pseudonym of Jini van Rooijen, contacted KIRAC founder Stefan Ruitenbeek. She had been accused of raping someone in her student association. “Wrongly,” she says. KIRAC and Jini decided to make a film about it, to “invest in Jini”, as Ruitenbeek puts it. Asked to look back on it, Jini giggles: “When I told friends I was working with KIRAC, they said: but aren’t they alt-right?!”

Three years later, after discussing it extensively with Ruitenbeek, Jini starts her own porn channel on OnlyFans. But she struggles to find male performers for her sex films. KIRAC decides to use its connections with the right-wing blogosphere. They shoot a video: right-wing men wanted to share a bed with a left-wing girl. GeenStijl posts it with adolescent enthusiasm: “UvA girl, 22, really wants sex with commenters.”

Sid Lukkassen is one of the few who responds. He knows KIRAC and has previously approached Sinha for an interview at Café Weltschmerz. The philosopher sends a video message explaining that he once had a relationship with a left-wing woman. Being accepted by someone with a different philosophical foundation gave him “creative powers”. He hopes to experience it again.

There is another element too: Lukkassen wants to test his theory that, because of the dating world’s “free-market forces”, only alpha males still have access to sex. His solutions to that “inequality”: more arranged marriages and a greater role for traditional family structures in bringing up children.

The West is in decline

The trailer for Honey Pot appears on 16 September. The title refers to a Cold War term for usually female secret agents who use sex and love as a trap to obtain intelligence.

Earlier KIRAC films were about artists and art criticism. Honey Pot departs from that. “At first, we portrayed artists by criticising their art,” says Sinha. “But gradually a need arose for films about life. But what does that mean? Our intuition was that love and sex are essential. If you aren’t talking about art, you talk about love and sex.”

The result is provocative; that much is clear. Honey Pot mocks Lukkassen, winner of an FvD essay prize, but also the world he represents.

The film’s intention goes beyond mockery, says Ruitenbeek. “A great deal is changing very quickly in the Western world at the moment. Honey Pot comes from the idea that our institutions are in decline as a result of neoliberalism. We’re on the Magic Mountain, waiting for the First World War — something like that.”

Jini Jane and Sid Lukkassen represent that feeling. As a philosophy student, Jane feels she is being trained to be an activist and expected to do nothing but woke things. According to Ruitenbeek, that leads to escapism, expressed in setting up a porn channel. “And Sid saw Forum for Democracy crumble and is looking to connect with another bubble: ours.” Sinha: “That makes him take the shortest route to pleasure, to Jini.” Ruitenbeek: “He is trying to reconcile that nightmare of ‘the end of the West’ with the conservative ideal of love and sex. That is part of fascism.”

It is postmodernism par excellence. The deeper you dig, the more complicated it becomes, and the clearer it is that this film is intended not to answer questions but to raise them.

After the premiere in the Amsterdam warehouse, opinion-making begins on Twitter. Opponents consider the “Sid Lukkassen porn” far beyond the pale, art or no art. There is talk of “sexual abuse” of someone with “severe autism”. Lukkassen does not want to speak to NRC about the film because of his mental health. He says “constant exposure to stress” has left him with serious neck problems.

Pity

Lukkassen’s supporters react indignantly to Honey Pot: Lukkassen has been taken in. GeenStijl will not post the film, KIRAC learns. Conservative ideologue Paul Cliteur comes to Lukkassen’s defence. “You’ll stop at nothing,” he tells KIRAC on the phone. Later, in a WhatsApp exchange: “I feel sorry for Sid, and I can see that this project has […] caused him psychological problems. […] And I am not going to weigh [his health] against an art project. None of that alters the fact that I otherwise think your projects are fine and wish you all the best, but under these circumstances releasing that film is irresponsible.”

Sinha replies: “Only banal, unimaginative individuals mistake it for porn. […] You read Michel Houellebecq, don’t you? Or the Satyricon? Are you or aren’t you interested in practising high culture, including the inclination towards perversity? It is ridiculous that you convince yourself you discern a threat to freedom of expression and Western values in Islam when you yourself have the sensibility of a clod-hopping farmer: what high culture do you think you are protecting if all you recognise in a bare chest is the danger of losing face?”

Cliteur does not reply again. He tells NRC: “Lukkassen did not give permission for this footage to be shown and has even developed psychological problems as a result. That should be sufficient for the filmmakers to stop this project.”

As the footage shows, Lukkassen also calls KIRAC himself. He cries, feeling he has ruined a great deal. Editing of the film continues.

KIRAC and Jini Jane wave away the question of whether Sid Lukkassen has been exploited. Jane: “The man has studied, has a PhD, worked at the European Parliament. And now we’re supposed to treat him as an autistic person who cannot be held responsible for himself?”

“I find that whole question decadent,” says Ruitenbeek. “I do believe you may sacrifice things for the artwork, including Sid Lukkassen.”

Sinha did struggle with that consideration, but: “If I considered Sid’s feelings more important than the film, there would be no film, no KIRAC, nothing. What would I actually be living for?”

Stefan laughs: “You put it better, Kate. I tend to start talking about Napoleon. He can send 500,000 men to their deaths for France, and I’m not allowed to make one Sid Lukkassen cry? What the fuck, man, can I be a little bit Napoleon too?”

Honey Pot will be available online from 27 October at keepingitrealartcritics.com. On the same day there will be a sold-out discussion and screening at De Balie, Amsterdam. Information: debalie.nl.