VISIONS FUGITIVES 11.02 - 14.04 LE FRESNOY, TOURCOING

http://www.visionsfugitives.net/

UPCOMING: The Hague & Tourcoing

Saturday january 21st from 20.00 hrs until late there'll be an in situ Fluxus event of performances, music, video, paintings, sculptures, text at Quartair in The Hague. I'll probably show a new film, based on the lyrics of the performance/music group F.L.U.T. (Harry Heirmans & Rufus Mich)

Participants from Brussels, Antwerp, The Hague and other places:
Awawa, Marlies Adriaanse, Rachel Bacon, Rob Bothof, Gregory Brems, Hou Chien Cheng, Christine Clinckx,
Alexandra Crouwers, Harold de Bree, Barney De Krijger, Dialogist- Kantor, Lode Geens, Chris Gillis, Kati Heck,
Nick Hullegie, Joseph Jessen, Jelle Kindt, Shanglie Zhou, Djuna Michielsen, Susanna Ouwerkerk, Mischa Poppe,
Cesar Raes, Jessy Rahman, Leo Reijnders, Ronan Riou, Tina Schott, Pierre Sondeijker, Kim Thissen, Maarten Tibos,
Philippe Van Damme, Bart Van Dijck, Peter van Loon, Bram Van Meervelde, Sharon Vanovermeiren,
Pietertje van Splunter, Sofie Vrancken, Hans Wuyts and many others.

VISIONS FUGITIVES
at Le Fresnoy, National Studio for Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing (Fr) the international group exhibition with animation-based art will open the 10th of february.

11th February > 15th April 2012
Opening preview : Friday 10th February

Animation is perfect for showing the phenomena of metamorphosis, but is not simply destined to the mythical or the magical. It is the realm of traces, of the ephemeral and reveals the transformations linked to passing time, lending itself to mental projections, of memory as well as fantasy, dream and nightmare, to individual or collective fleeting visions. From the very first animated cartoons to digital images, the transient and changing nature of the images echoes the instability of the world, with the hopes and anxiety it generates.

Marie-Thérèse Champesme

With, amongst others: Kelly Richardson, Tabaimo, Jan Kopp, Clint Enns, Robert Breer, William Kentridge, Laurent Pernot and myself.

Below: still Untitled video for Instrumentical at Quartair, The Hague. H720p, colour/no sound, 4'02, 2012

'CLOSE ENCOUNTERS' ARTICLE IN hART #90

Click on image to enlarge

TRANSLATION

Jan Dietvorst and Roy Villevoye
in Johan Grimonprez-exhibition S.M.A.K.


CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

Much has been published already, also in hART, regarding Johan Grimonprez’ retrospective ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’, which is currently running at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent. Grimonprez invited a number of other video artists and television makers, amongst whom the Dutch duo JanDietvorst and Roy Villevoye. But what exactly are their works doing in this exhibition?

Alexandra CROUWERS

In the eighties Grimonprez resided as a cultural anthropologist in the inlands of Papua New Guinea. His film ‘Kobarweng’ (1992) consists of historic image and audio fragments concerning the first encounters between European colonists and the local population, which at the time was still firmly set into a stone-age culture. Since 1992 Roy Villevoye is travelling regularly to Asmat villages in the Indonesian province of Papua. In 2001 he starts to cooperate with artist and publicist Jan Dietvorst. Together they work on an ongoing series of films in this region. These seem to be documentary by nature but they dismiss journalistic conventions and lack guiding background information like voiceovers. As a result the viewer is forced to draw his own conclusions from the images he’s presented with: a reference to the experience of explorers first meetings with new and puzzling cultures.

THE VIDEO MESSAGE

Papua people seem to be extremely practical. This is not very strange considering the circumstances they’re in: they live in a barely pervious jungle, food is at times scarce and the laborious political interaction with trans-migrants from other, overpopulated parts of Indonesia compels them to be inventive. Villevoye and Dietvorst attitudes are also pragmatic: how to communicate as a Westerner – and as an artist – with this group of people in order to achieve an artistic result (a film, a photo or a sculpture)? Much criticism on their work is connected to accusations of patronizing neo-colonialism. This has to do with the fact that the duo sometimes gives money or goods to those that play a role in the work process. Critics consider this to be an equivalent of mirrors and beads but it is actually based into an attempt to maintain an equal relationship with their subjects, beyond the evident economical inequality.

In the film ‘The Video Message’, through the camera lens directed to Villevoye, we see a man explain how he had a dream in which the spirit of an ancestor warns him how the use of his person for one of Villevoye’s sculptures might lead to certain death. The man asks Villevoye for an additional amount of money on top of an earlier agreed upon and paid sum in order to pay off his forefather’s displeasure. The stereotypical Western response is something like: “Sure, the man is making up a story for financial benefit.”

The man, however, is indeed very much aware of the fragility of his urgent request. He too is struggling with the ‘economy’ in the relations between him and these Westerners and in his clear formulations he’s searching for solutions to solve a to himself very real problem: he’s forced to ask a friend who lives thousands of kilometres away to make a sacrifice that would save his life. Once this man was invited by the two artists to visit the Netherlands (about this trip the film ‘Owner of the voyage’ from 2007 was made) and he knows Europa is filled with useful materials (cargo) and money. At the same time he values the mutual respectful relations, both with Villevoye as with the spirits of the forest. These ever present ancestors do not perceive cash to be relevant.

This web of social relationships, which are often economical but also charged with cultural history and magic, is representative for the subjects of Villevoye and Dietvorst’s films.

DISRUPTION

All of Grimonprez’ works contain an almost subliminal message that scrapes against the supernatural in general and specifically many science-fiction-like complottheories. As a contrast the works of Villevoye and Dietvorst are particularly ‘earthly’. Within Grimonprez’ universe ‘Kobarweng’ might as well be regarded as a concealed reconstruction of a supposed historical close encounter between aliens from another planet and earthlings. This reduplication of meaning in the images – and in the editing – is almost nonexistent with Villevoye and Dietvorst. They visit the Asmat, but also look for situations in India and the forests of Northern France, in order for them to have the need to redefine everything they know. For them traveling to, staying with and the interaction between themselves and exotic cultures is a way to review all presumptions about what would be ‘normal’. This is what is conveyed to the viewer. Above all the works of Villevoye and Dietvorst are revolving around the relationships between people.

In between the frames of Grimonprez’ films in which connections are being shown through a kind of superior context zapping, shreds of obscure contemporary myths that barely have anything to do anymore with human reality can be found.

It’s as if Grimonprez in ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’ attempts to invalidate his own tangled world view by using several external factors. In the exhibition space of the S.M.A.K. this is done by applying the combination of some sort of amusement park aesthetics – preschool-like stools are randomly placed in information corners, light bulbs are used as lighting – with the excitement of a cinema experience.

The choice for the works of Villevoye and Dietvorst contribute to this disruption by an unusual lack of ‘meaning’: what you see is what you get. This charges the exhibition with a scientific culture relativism and credibility, averse to political agenda’s or conspiracy theories.

By the way, the additional amount of money was paid to the man from ‘The Video Message’. Unfortunately he has died. Whether this might have had something to do with the man’s displeased ancestors I’ll gladly leave up to Grimonprez.

'ABOUT NOTHING AND EVERYTHING SIMULTANEOUSLY' ARTICLE IN hART #89

My article on the works of Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans, published in hART #89. English translation (with some contextual and convenient links) below.

click on image to enlarge

 

About Nothing and Everything simultaneously

The works of artist-duo Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans are fascinating, though not easily situated. Some explanation might be in order, especially considering their current solo exhibition at the Base-Alpha Gallery in Antwerp.

 Alexandra CROUWERS

Somewhere, deep in the Swedish midland the Swedish/Dutch artist couple Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans are working on the construction of a parallel universe which contains its own inhabitants, landscapes and spaces, and above all its own logic. Their studio isn’t confined to the wooden walls of their base – a former small church building – but stretches itself into the surrounding pine tree forests, the bright, clear lakes, the moss overgrown rocks and strange local edifices. Also, they don’t limit themselves to one dominant medium but they use stop-motion animations, sculptures, video, 8mm film, music, sounds, drawings, murals, neon-lights and hand-colored prints of film stills. This arsenal of media is combined in rather alienating installations.

AFFECT

Though the artists largely use recognizable, figurative elements, the works are close to incomprehensible within the laws of ratio. They respond to ‘affect’, a term originated from psychology that can be described as a ‘primary, physical reaction which proceeds consciousness’ and is impossible to be translated into language (*). In each work Jeannin and Schuurmans provide us with a huge amount of information, manifested as images and sound, and trust your subconscious processes to connect all this.

This ‘affect’ takes effect due to the many references to a universal imagery of myths and legends from eras when people from all over this planet had a necessity to convey their mental worlds into image, sound, ritual and narrative.

Jeannin and Schuurmans explore and exploit the embedded tendency of our mind to give meaning to what we see. In cases when what we see is difficult to be explained with rational logic, we fall back on a more intuitive, symbolic interpretation. This is both the foundation for religion as well as for interpreting art. Traces of illusionism and animism, next to notions of shaman storytellers can be reconstructed from the duo’s works. Yet you don’t need to consider yourself a spiritual shaman to appreciate the work. On the contrary: you can be a nihilistic atheist just like the writer of this piece.

The nucleus of the installations often consists of multiple, inter-related and interactive projections. The convincing amount of details in the often space-filling installations guides the viewer to effortly access their universe. Sometimes the viewer is a physical participant: in ‘Enter theWild’ (2009) the visitor has to walk through a door that is simultaneously part of a projection screen on which a filmed door opens. Their latest installation ‘Hokus Pokus’ at the Base-Alpha Gallery in Antwerp, reveals itself only after the viewer has moved through a lightning-strike-like crack in a wall. The darkened space that follows is lit by black-lights which reflect a forest of birch trees. The animation in the back space connects an animated skeleton walking through blossoming flowers with, amongst other things a hybrid between a tree and a human, a fluorescent three-dimensional pentagram and a cool magician who turns a normal sized wrapped Swedish cheese into the proportions of a huge building. The pentagram – in the animation a scale model – is in this space present as a life-sized sculpture.

At first glance the stop-motion animations - in some respects related to the work of another Swedish artist, Nathalie Djurberg - combined with the nostalgic use of 8mm film makes an almost childlike impression. In ‘Crossing’ (2006) a chain-smoking, drumming spider presents a film to an audience of characters in the setting of a forest. In its turn this 8mm film shows a herd of zombies – played by friends and acquaintances – being tamed by three martial arts specialists. In ‘GGG&G’ (2007), next to some sort of cult of small trolls and a camera-eyed gorilla, children in green bodypaint are presented. Together the children give shape to a cheerful interpretation of the Hindu goddess Shiva. This character wears a necklace of singing skulls.

LIMITLESS

The description of this chain of events seems lighthearted but within the works of the artist duo much larger themes are addressed than the short-term tendencies the contemporary art world often prefers to deal with. Jeannin and Schuurmans wish to cross the boundaries of space and time, of scale and of thought; of imagination itself.

It’s of no use attempting to explain what their self-constructed myths are in fact about. It is sufficient to remark that they’re about Nothing and Everything at the same time. This might sound non-committal but the couple doesn’t have the luxury to work like that when the production of an animation is accompanied with the building of large scale models of landscapes and sets or filming growing flowers frame by frame for three weeks.

In fact their works and methods represent mainly a limitlessness between everything and nothing: their environment is integrated in films, outside becomes inside and vice versa, their friends and family members are actors and heavy, metaphysical narration becomes comical. Every kind of media that is at their disposal is explored – I didn’t even get around to mention their performances with the keyboard playing turtle Vilhelm -, objects reincarnate into characters or the other way around and even between an object and a character the difference is diffuse: a tree becomes an actor, a spider exists simultaneously as a character and as an object on variable scales.

This duplication and re-duplication also recurred in ‘Beyond the Sea’, their retrospective at the Malmö Konstmuseum in autumn 2010. The exhibition assembled a large part of their installations and sculptures. The word ‘sea’ from the title not only referred to large surfaces of water but also to ‘see’ or ‘seen’. This presentation stressed the coherence between all the works and made clear that every work can be considered as a chapter from a non-linear, or rather a Multi-linear, narrative that takes places on several levels.

The relevance of their work derives mainly from the necessity of actually making it. This is transferred to the visitor who, though he might not be able to make any sense of what he’s presented with, for the duration of his stay in an installation irrevocably becomes part of Jeannin and Schuurmans ever expanding universe.

(* cf. Nat Muller, ‘Feeling it in your guts’, Metropolis M, nº6, 2009)

The installation ‘Hokus-Pokus’, t/m 17 december in de Base-Alpha Gallery, Kattenberg 12, 2140 in Borgerhout, open from wednesday through saturday from 14.00h - 18.00h. 

www.lisajeannin.com / lisajeannin.blogspot.com/

UPDATES

December 1st, in art magazine hART #89, my article on the Fantastic works of Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans will be published. This is an introduction to their body of work of which the latest installation can be seen until the 17th of december at the Base-Alpha gallery, Kattenberg 12, Antwerp. Do go there if you're around. After the publication I'll put the English translation on this blog.

On december 22nd, also in hART (#90), my text is published on the highly interesting videoworks of Roy Villevoye and Jan Dietvorst, which are now part of the exhibition 'It's a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards' by equally interesting Johan Grimonprez at S.M.A.K. in Ghent. This text will mainly focus on why Villevoye & Dietvorst's works are actually there and will attempt to explain the controversy that surrounds their projects concerning people from the Papua New Guinee area 'Asmat'. Again I'll put an English translation here after publication.

The idea of both texts originates from the notion 'under the radar'. Though Jeannin and Schuurmans have been living and working in Antwerp before moving to Sweden, and participated in several Belgian art projects, they unjustly didn't seem to get picked up by the local art world. In the case of specifically this exhibition at S.M.A.K. with Villevoye and Dietvorst, whose works are internationally acclaimed, the focus of publications, reviews and texts lies mainly on Johan Grimonprez.

From 11/02/2012 until 15/04/2012 a variation on my installation 'Practicle Applied Hermetics' will be presented during the exhibition 'Visions Fugitives' at Le Fresnoy, centre for the arts in Tourcoing (Doornik), France. This exhibition brings all kinds of animation-related, international works together and seems extremely promising.

I've also, amongst other things, been working on the title & credit sequence of a short film, 'The Golden Springroll'. This can be viewed on this page, which refers to a site that is dedicated to the design branch of my - eh - empire.

Also, I'd like to mention that my gallery LhGWR in The Hague has recently moved to a new location, which can be described as a mini-museum. They're located on a one minute walk from The Hague HS station and constist of a bookshop, a design shop, a large exhibition space and a project space in the cellar. LhGWR has been compared since with the concept of 'Colette' (please ignore the music on the site) in Paris and to an art/design Walhalla. Hip, Hot and Happening but nevertheless LhGWR's admirable integrity is maintained. At the moment the constructed photographs of Marleen Sleeuwits are presented in the main gallery.

OVERVIEW WORK AT BROELTOREN, KORTRIJK

Overview 'DaHiL' [Dig a Hole into Light] at the Paradise Lost Paradise exhibition/Roelant Savery tribute in the Broeltoren in Kortrijk.

5 Drawings, 5 dimmed pale-blue light bulbs, wire, animationloop of lunar eclipse, 2011.

Below a photo of the top floor of this tower, which wasn't accessible for the public:

One of the works of Nadia Naveau that was part of the exhibition:

And in the other Broeltoren part of the work by Barbara Amalie Skovmand Thomsen (DK):
 

Photos by me.

INVITATION PARADISE LOST PARADISE, JULY 2, KORTRIJK

From 02.07.2011 - 28.08.2011 the exhibition 'PARADISE LOST PARADISE' will take place in several public locations throughout the city of Kortrijk. My work can be found in one of the Broeltorens, closeby the Broelmuseum. More information can be found here.

Click on the image to enlarge.

TEXT II

TEXT II

Alexandra Crouwers, 2011

A background chronology

Concerning some important exhibitions and projects in my c.v. in relation to the research subject

I grew up in the countryside of the southern Netherlands, surrounded by fields, sheep and forests. My sister, who’s now a phd fellow at the Nordic Centre for Medieval Studies in Bergen, Norway, and I had a fascination with ghost-stories and tales our mother told us, local tales she heard in her turn from her father and that often contained some supernatural elements. Our little brother started listening to metal music when he was eight years old and later on became a drummer for a Doom metal band named ‘Another Messiah’. A slight preference towards the ‘dark side’ apparently runs in our family and though most of both my father’s and mother’s family geneology has been mapped, we never found a reason why all three of us should have this tendency.

Almost naturally, a lot of my works in the art academy of Den Bosch were based into a language derrived from rock music: including devil’s horns and sinister and obscure imagery. Unfortunatly during this education I lost the will to draw, though drawing made me want to attend an art school in the first place. I replaced the drawing with video, writing and photography. I even made some sculptures, which due to the fragility of the material I used, don’t exist anymore. I started experimenting with darkened spaces and slide projections in the third year and graduated with an installation-like rather large darkened space that combined large black & white photography (each photo was about 1m20 x 1m80 in size), two slide installations and some short videos.

After my graduation I attended the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, which was, in all fairness, disasterous to my work and therefore also to my confidence. I did however, around 2000, got to own my first computer and soon found out the possibilities of the Photoshop program which I used to produce photographybased images that were intended as representations of supernatural or science-fiction like settings, scenes from parallel universes. I also discovered ways to add and manipulate artificial light effects in these images.

In 2001 I installed my Sandberg Institute graduation exhibition at the Mariakapel in Hoorn, which was in fact a chapel or a small church. Once again I darkened the space and filled it with extremely large slide projections that were digitally composed from images and texts concerning the subject of my thesis: a fictional correspondence from me – in a parallel universe where an ice age had suddenly set into the Northern hemisphere while the continent of Antarctica was defrosting – to art historian and art critic Tineke Reijnders. In this story I’m describing, in letters, my stay at the museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, when most of the other inhabitants of these parts of the world moved to the South.

Not long after my graduation I moved Southwards myself, to Antwerp, where I was mostly concerned with understanding and using computerprograms. In 2003 I did an exhibition, ‘The Overall Urge to Intervene with Everything and Nothing’ together with Robert-Jan Verhagen in a gallery in Eindhoven, where we darkened the gallery and showed photographic images together with slide projections. At that time I made print outs of digitally manipulated photos, which were portraits or landscapes.

The limitations of the possibilities to present these prints started to bother me; I found it to be not enough to just hang these images on walls. I shifted my attention towards relatively new computer software, 3D-animation, of which it took quite some time to understand the basics. In 2004 I slowly started using one of these programs and in 2005 I made my first installation with this medium at the Sugarfree group exhibition in the Netwerk gallery in Aalst (Belgium). I showed five short animationloops of rotating 3D-animated ‘stones’, that were based on meteors and chrystals but looked much otherworldlier. These animations were shown on five small lcd-screens attached to a wall at the back of a large, bunkerlike space that, of course, was dark except for some red tubelights that lit only the part where the screens were to be seen. Each ‘rotating rock’ made its own soft sound, made by a friend.

Also in 2005 I was a resident at Kunsthuis Syb in Beetsterzwaag, where I made three computeranimations – none of which was made in 3D-animation, but they were mainly photographybased. These animations were shown at several international film festivals like Transmediale in Berlin, the Portable Film Festival in Sydney and Melbourne in Australia and the Impakt festival in Utrecht.

In 2006 I got so tired of being stuck at the computer that I finally, after ten years, started drawing again. First hesitant, with markers on A4s, but quickly the drawings became larger. I made my first mural in an independant exhibition space in Antwerp, Factor 44, which was combined with two red tubelights. It was 2m50 x 2m30 in size and still very graphic, almost comicy – which is a style of drawing that seems to come natural to me but with which I have a complicated relationship. The second mural was made a month after the first one and depicted a gorilla. I painted it on a concrete wall of 5 x 5 meters. Since the gorilla was drawn after a photo I took in the zoo of Berlin, where the animal (named Ivo) was just staring down at the floor, I had the painted gorilla look at some physical debris I placed at the bottom of the mural. Since this space too was rather dark, I used some red tubelights to light the mural from below.

In 2007 I started to make large drawings on paper by using Indian ink, combined with acrylic markers. Since in fact I wasn’t quite sure yet what I was doing and what I wanted to convey, a lot of these images consisted of an element that blocked the view on the background in the drawings: billboards. In one of the last and largest drawings (5m50 x 2m40) I made that year most part of the drawing was placed in a (drawn) frame of a billboard on which an apocalyptic landscape was depicted with a couple of people sitting in comfortable chairs and watching this setting. In the background the letters ‘Ragnarok’ – the Skandinavian mythological equivalent of the apocalypse were placed similar to the letters of the Hollywood sign. The classic comfortable chair is an element that has popped up since.

In 2008 I was a resident artist at the FLACC centre for the arts in Genk (Belgium), where I used an existing architectural interference - a white cube - in the space as the base for an installation. I used Indian ink on the walls and some colored tubelights in combination with a few small sculptural elements to adjust the scale. This installation was named ‘Pyrocluster I’ and had an apocalyptic feel to it but also referred, in some way, to graffiti street art. It was more abstract and very controlled.

 

In the summer of 2009 I went to Los Angeles for three months, to work as a resident artist in RAID Projects. I first intended to work with the notion of film and fiction, since Hollywood is also known as the Factory of Dreams. By coincidence I ended up on a road trip with two of my new made friends. We drove from L.A. through San Francisco all the way up to Mount St. Helens, the Oregon volcano that exploded in 1980. On our way back to Los Angeles we passed a village, Dunsmuir. The less than five minute passage through this village became the base for a narrative animation and for my solo-exhibition at the Base-Alpha gallery in Antwerp, that winter. I often wondered what exactly happened during my stay in sunny and glittering Los Angeles that made me build a dark temple, embedded into the history of art and imagemaking of ancient Europe. After my return from the residency I started to use the virtual 3D-program in another way that I’ve used it before; I started building shrines with it, that got overlayed with barely recognizable textures of some of my earlier drawings. Simultaniously, I used the shrine-like models as designs for large murals in black. I also found a way to integrate projected images (animations) into the installations.

At first I did this by projecting an animation loop above a drawing, but in 2010 I experimented at an exhibition of only one evening in Antwerp with actually projecting an animationloop onto a mural: I made a mural drawing, roughly lifesize, of a comfortable chair that was placed in front of an open window. The surface of the open window was black and on that surface the projection was placed. The space was very dark, only lit by one dark room development light bulb and the videoprojection. Though the animation was projected on a brick, rough wall, the image succeeded in suggesting a limitless space through the wall. This was also the first time I’d asked a professional musician, Tim Vanhamel, to provide the soundtrack.

Curator Ronald Van De Sompel (now working at Museum M, Leuven) that just started working on the ‘Hareng Saur: Ensor and contemporary art’ exhibtion in both S.M.A.K. and MSK in Ghent, asked me to reproduce this installation on a larger scale for this purpose. I perfected the animation and extended the design for the mural so it would fill a large part of the (darkened) space at the S.M.A.K. museum.

In the designs for the murals, that are built in a virtual 3D environment, I usually use only one virtual light to light the scene or objects. I’m working with a continuously growing database of elements and objects that I can use and re-use to construct designs with. After I’ve rendered a design into a flat image (a jpeg), I print it onto a transparent sheet, which I project with an oldfashioned overhead projector on the wall. Then I start to fill in the shadows and dark parts. I like the fact that I’m taking steps back into time in terms of the techniques I use: first the computer, then the simple overhead projector, then the paint or the ink on the wall or paper. Finally I place a dim lamp in roughly the same position in the physical space as where it was in the virtual space, which gives an unsettling effect of depth in the mural – as if the painted objects/scenes become dimensional.

For a while I thought drawing on paper would be a crippled subsitute for these kind of installations, so I stopped making those until december 2010 when I transfered my way of making murals onto large format paper. These drawings have much more detail than the murals and since I don’t need to consider the placement of light in a physical space, I can do more with that within the (designs for the) drawings. I’ve started on a series of drawings of which one flows into another – this will be a series of at least 30 drawings, ‘stages’ perhaps. The backgrounds are always black, an impervious fog. Next to this I’m working on a new installation for a small solo exhibition at LhGWR in The Hague opening april 16 and a new work for a project in Kortrijk this summer. All of these works are closely related to or in fact already part of my research.

FAIL & TEXT I

Hm. As far as the Phd proposal regarding my work and the archaeological/antropological research that goes with it, my admission to the specific PhDArts programme in The Hague (the only official phd-in-arts trajectory in the Netherlands) has been declined after I got through to the second round. I'll nevertheless keep in touch with some excellent contacts I made during the process, amongst which prof. dr. Raymond Corbey of the faculty of archaeology in Leiden and Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven. Also, it still might be an option to try to get into a Phd-programme in Belgium, though I seem to have another interpretation about the way research and art can be intertwined than people from the art theory do.

I've decided to put two of the texts that accompanied my dossier on this blog. They're all about the context I'm working in. They might be interesting. In this post Text I, in the next post you'll find Text II.
 

TEXT I

Alexandra Crouwers, 2011

Maps and Composite Actions

On artificial mountains and gates to infinity

In 2006, in MuHKA, the museum for contemporary arts of Antwerp, I saw an installation by the American artist Cameron Jamie. The installation was called ‘Maps and Composite Actions 2001 – 2003’ and constisted of an artificial mountain, that blocked the entrance to the space behind it. To get into that space one had to cross the mountain by walking over a path while holding a lantern. On the other side it was pitch black. The light in the lantern – I suspect it was one of those darkroom photodeveloper lamps, safelights in short, – was very dim. Once my eyes got a little used to the darkness I could make out some easels, randomly put in the space. Rather large drawings were attached to wooden boards, leaning on the easels. These drawings were only well visible when standing close, keeping the light up. The images seemed to be somewhat disturbing; goats heads, blood spatters, ghosts, knives, rocks, skulls. It was horrible and mysterious and fascinating at the same time.

When I returned to the real world the accompanying text explained how the drawings originated through a remarkable process. Apparently Jamie had led a friend into the mountains that divide Los Angeles from the desert, and executed on several occasions and locations performances especially and only for that friend. After which he’d send the friend to (one or more) composition sketch artists, the ones that make drawings for police investigations. These drawings were produced following the friend’s descriptions of the performances and those ‘reconstructions’ were placed into the installation.

To me, this installation approximates a perfection in combining many interesting elements: a story, the background of that story, the briliant idea to close off the space with a mountain, the resulting darkness and accompanying isolation, the choice for the dim lantern the viewer had to carry which immediately emphasized the notion one just entered another reality, the simplicity of the drawings placed on easels and the strange mix between entertainment (the walk across the mountain) and ‘serious business’ (the alarming images). I just can’t seem to recall whether there were sounds or not. There probably weren’t any.

Much later I stumbled, though through a whole other path, upon a similar way of presenting my work, though I only noticed this after I’d actually made the work. For a solo exhibition I wanted to divide the space into three parts, after the archaïc structure of a narrative: start, middle, ending. To obtain this I needed something to lead the viewer from one part into the other so I built a large gate of ‘crappy’ wooden boards which was placed as a divider between the first and the second part of the space, after which it became increasingly darker. The last space – the ‘ending’ – was filled with almost ceiling-high black murals, which were vaguely lit by the orange/brownish glow of a few safelights and an animationprojection of a lunar eclipse. I realized I’d build a temple. 

As from the art-academy on my work has been infused with references to science-fiction, ghosts, devil’s horns and an investigation towards the behaviour of light. Besides that I’d been reading for years many scientific books on evolutionairy biology, the rise and decline of civilizations and the expansion of the universe. For a long time this was only an extended hobby, something I could never really integrate in my work. The moment I, almost by accident, constructed a temple, something clicked. I seemed to have started working in a direction that goes back to the origins of image-making, a cultural-evolutionairy road that began about 35.000 years ago and at the time for a large part seemed to have been taken place in caves.

I needed to know more about this. The modern human has had its brain structure and size for over 100.000 years. Why did it take way over half our presence before we started drawing in caves, or started carving sculptures in ivory, bone or stone? And who exactly where those people?

We’re now in the fortunate circumstance that the last ten, fifteen years there’s been much progress in carbondating and interpreting archeaological data on a multi-disciplinairy level. This means cognitive neuroscientists, biologists, archeaologists, philosophers, antropologists and psychologists are all dealing with the background noise of our contemporary existence. One sometimes refers to the Upper Paleolithic era as an explosion, the big bang of our visual culture.

The reasons I’m especially interested in cave paintings can be found in a number of things. I do not care for interpretations of what the depiction of a bison, a horse or an imprint of a hand on the rock surface might have meant. One can endlessly debate possible meanings in books, but we can never find out exactly what they were. Meaning is not important. The most interesting part is that they’re there and that they were made where they were in fact found. Maybe there were many drawings outside, in the open air, that over time have worn – we’ll never know – but we do see a large part of the cave-paintings were made on locations in caves that are or were not exactly easily accessible. There are, as far as I know now, no examples of drawings or paintings found at the entrance of caves – or even close enough to the entrance to be seen by daylight. That in itself already points us towards an interpretation of the then significance of the drawings – or even more – the importance of the space, the cave itself, of the darkness in it and maybe it also tells us something about the relevance of a cave structure within the culture of our prehistoric selves.

This all lead me to the following: if drawings in a cave and their placement are interacting with eachother, they’re in fact multimedia installations. I assume sounds were made, music even maybe, because a cave is a rather special accoustic environment. If caves were regarded upon as some sort of existing, natural architecture (since man was still a hunter/gatherer ‘we’ didn’t build houses yet), it might explain why a bit further up the timetrack Neolithical man would make such an effort to build monuments in certain places. The hunebeds, for example, of the Northern Netherlands; these tombs, monuments or ritual spaces in places where there were no caves to be found, were build up by enormous rocks and covered with a layer of sand, and thus became artificial caves, representations of caves.

 In this respect Stonehenge could be considered as an over-evolved attempt to create a fake cave, one that became too big to cover with a roof. The builders of Stonehenge or any other ‘henge’ for that matter were probably not concerned with trying to re-create a cave. It was undoubtly a whole different culture from the Upper Paleolithic cave-users. Anyway, the purpose of ‘monuments’ like Stonehenge is still mysterious.

There’s a bit more known about the ‘Iron age man’. Remnants of ideas about life and death are found in Germanic and Skandinavian sagas and legends. Stones and rocks were still important; in Skandinavia drawings were scraped onto the rock surface and everywhere in Europe are monoliths found, or groups of rocks with evidence of usage.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, architecture evolved into something different – actual buildings. The one temple after the other monument was erected. A pyramid can be viewed upon as an artificial mountain with a cave saved on the inside. Temples were extremely controlled environments, with an emphasis on verticality and often a lack of direct sunlight, which effects the visitor, even up to the present day. Though often empty now, it’s safe to assume these spaces were filled with paintings, flowers, food and sculptures, all referring to myths and stories that everyone knew in those times. ‘Filled’ might be a bit too strong of a statement because emptyness too is an element of a temple, found in its volume.

Temples were built higher so they became small mountains themselves, put on pedestals that rested on a natural elevation. Some time later the temples in Europa got renamed to churches, construced based on symmetrical plans and accomodated with recesses and alcoves which are cave-like trades.

The rich sculptural decoration of Gothic cathedrals unintentionally recalls stalagtites and stalagmites, both from the inside and outside. The height and volume is phenomenal. By using colored glass windows more light could get into the space, but only as part of the controlled environment; light comes from above, diffuse and sheering high above the heads of the mortal.

Every element in those spaces is working together to emphasize other laws are valid in there, that you’re in a space that gets you closer to god, so to speak. A gateway to divinity.

I’ve barely touched upon the subject of sound but echoes, for instance, operate as a natural amplification for the priest at the altar when normal mortals can only whisper in humility. Maybe the artificiality of those spaces, including the caves of 30.000 years ago, is what impresses us so much. They don’t look like any natural or normal, functional space – they’re totally ‘out there’. The wider the gap between the prozaic world outside and the portal into time, space and stories on the inside of these buildings (or installations), the more the viewer becomes isolated from reality while being in that space.

Contemporary art museums, sometimes rightfully referred to as ‘art temples’, are just as much controlled environments as the ritual spaces I briefly described. There’s barely a window to the outside world to be found and the volume of the spaces, combined with architectural interventions that direct the viewer through the building, deciding what is noticed first and what is not. Except, contemporary museums, influenced by modernistic conventions, are usually flooded with lights, the walls are bright and white and there’s rarely a priest or a choir that obscures our whispers or thoughts so the viewer is often very much aware of himself. This disconnects the viewer only partly from the ‘normal’ world and, worse, at the same time partly from the works he’s looking at. Disattached from the work, not stepping in to it and rationally judging what he sees, the viewer fails to communicate with art on the level the artist set out to do. Even I, an experienced art viewer, rarely feel that I’ve seen something that actually is a gateway to the artist’s mind. Since that’s where the work originates from, that’s what I want to experience.

There are only a few occassions when the viewer steps into a world made of art, a world that’s made of the compressed story within the artist’s own mind. This is what happened in Cameron Jamies installation. This is what I hope to achieve with my own work.