Mirror worlds, doppelgänger and doubles have emerged recently as a framework for thinking about conspiracy, paranoia and social fragmentation in the wake of the pandemic. What about the double (as opposed to the self-portrait) is compelling to you?

Thanks for considering my work in relation to concepts of ‘the double’ rather than self-portraiture. I am very concerned with the present mainstreaming of the other, where ‘normal’ people see themselves as ‘different and unique individuals’. It makes it very difficult for us genuine freaks who seem to suffer more than usual as a consequence. These ideas of the mirror and the double (or multiple) are very complex to explain and understand, but I feel they are connected to what artists work with. Now after sixty-odd years of personally trying to mirror the world around me and become someone, I don’t give a shit.

Many readings of doppelgängers cast them as figures of disavowed traits, projected externally to create a ‘bad other’. Is this how you’d describe the figures in your work? Or should we see them as diminished, abjected shadow selves? 

No, and no. We should embrace them. My personages are just going about their lives, having a go. If you see them as abject or ‘bad’, that is wholly your issue. It may be surprising, but there are many factors at play when making work: art history, personal history, and sometimes it’s about trying to move the work in a certain direction, and always struggling with materials and eradicating meaning. And always trying hard not to illustrate theory.

You often seem to work with the dynamic between the icon and the outsider, and between individualism and conformism. In No One is Watching You, your 2018 survey at Buxton Contemporary, you embodied both ‘Bad Fathers’ and Failed Sons, the masculine archetype and he who is forever doomed to fail to live up to its image. Should we reverse this? Are the icons failing the outsiders? 

To be honest, there is no intention on my part to do any of those things. As I said, I have tried hard to be an artist, and failed more than I have succeeded. And what I mean by being an artist was to mirror what I thought an artist was, and failed because it was an attempt at fitting in, which only resulted in being labelled an outsider, iconoclast.

Not sure I have done any work about Failed Sons, maybe ‘Sick Children’. Bad Fathers was a work that was me revisiting an early show of mine from 1996 called Father, Son, and Holy Ghost which was a rambling installation about the transmission of ideas through the generations, or how ideas are passed on through the power of influence. ‘Father’ is used in a non-gendered way, and for me had little to do with masculinity, and more to do with obsessing over some things from my childhood, like Star Wars and King Lear. The work was intended to be over-saturated with signifiers and to realise materially the idea of history, ideas, and time (future, past and present) surrounding us. It could come down to how you interpret the ‘Bad’ in ‘Bad Fathers’. 

What will you be exhibiting at the Melbourne Art Fair?

I’m making a sculptural version of Fuseli’s The Nightmare painting. After making the chest-crouching figure, I saw a Japanese horror film called Ju-on (The Grudge, 2002), with a ghost that holds the identical pose as the figure I had made, and I also realised I had used the crouching figure image before, so the work now has a Japanese Horror film overlay.

Van Hout’s work can be seen in Darren Knight Gallery’s booth at the Melbourne Art Fair, taking place 22–25 February 2024 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.