When Zhang Huan in his early work 12m², 1994, spread fish oil and honey on his naked body to attract flies, then sat for an hour in a filthy public toilet in Beijing, this was a silent form of social protest. For his film Springtime, 2010–11, the Dutch artist Jeroen Eisinga did something similar but with a completely different intention. The artist had his upper body and head totally covered by honeybees after sprinkling a liquid containing a hormone from a queen bee on it. Although this is an established practice, known as bee bearding, with its own competitions and record holders, it remains a perilous exercise, and only after a long search did Eisinga find an Irish beekeeper willing to help. The artist’s aim was simply to create a strong, “sublime” image. His intense, ritualistic, and technically impeccable black-and-white 35-mm film consists of a nearly twenty-minute-long frontal shot of a man, the artist himself, sitting behind a table, during which he and the wall behind him are gradually covered by a swirling mass of bees.

Zhang’s famous performance aside, Eisinga’s work unleashes all kinds of art-historical associations. Most of the artist’s early performances are reminiscent of the work of Bas Jan Ader, Bruce Nauman, or even Joseph Beuys. Eisinga made his name in the 1990s with simple and often deliberately clumsy or absurd film performances, in which he assigned himself and the Dutch landscape prominent roles. His work fits into a tradition of Dutch existentialism, which also includes artists such as Joost Conijn, Jeroen Kooijmans, and Guido van der Werve. Eisinga’s early diptych Night Porter, 1993, for example, which was also selected for this show, is a somewhat obscure film with scenes of a fitfully sleeping man (presumably the artist), and of Eisinga and a dog trying to occupy the same dark room—a possible allusion to Beuys’s iconic action with a coyote, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974. In the past decade, however, Eisinga has not created much new work and has exhibited only rarely; he spent two years studying at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

Springtime may well mark the artist’s spring, his own artistic revival. Especially convincing are the formal choices he made here (35-mm film, black-and-white, natural light, a single action, and a static camera), which contribute to the two-dimensional and serene character of the film. In any case, Eisinga seems to have left behind the absurdism, the lightness, and the improvisation that characterized his earlier work. Admittedly, the first evident sign of this development was the 2003 film Sehnsucht (Desire; also on view in Schiedam), a bombastic piece showing a dead zebra that appears to continue breathing in and out. The film is technically complex but visually excessive, with an overly insistent black/white symbolism, extended to the checkered-tile floor on which the corpse is lying. With Springtime, there is a renewed interest in and resuming of his own presence as a performer, and a reawakening of his former inclination toward simplicity and directness. This certainly seems like the right direction for an artist who appears to be rediscovering himself.

—Saskia van der Kroef