First:

Plain Style

(Modesty, Restraint and Shame.)

 

 

Before going off to study art I went to hell. I grew up with an extraordinary version of Protestantism, known as the “Congregation of Believers”. One sunday morning, I was seventeen, I announced that I wouldn’t be attending the services anymore. Whereupon my mother came to my bedside and assured me of my hellbound status. Beside that piece of information there were no further inconvenient consequences. I was allowed to go to art school the following year.

 

Within mainstream Protestantism art is of significance, but, before anything, it is a cause of anxiety, about the sin and sense of material things, the shame and shine of symbols. The ideals of modesty and restraint that make up the morals of Protestantism are constantly under pressure. Without proper justification nothing goes. Of course this means that hypocrisy is a daily excercise. It is applied as lubrication in matters great and small.

The “Believers” however, due to their extreme conceptual approach to the faith, have an even more uncomfortable relation with material culture. This is reflected by the plain style in which they like to conduct their sunday services. The place of worship is called a ‘hall’, to set it apart from something presumptious as a church. The hall in my town was a nondescript low building. The interior resembled a white cube, in fact it could well have functioned as an art gallery come to think of it. No decorations, a plain wooden floor and rows of plain wooden chairs, especially no organ and definately no pulpit, therefore no religious authority like a pastor. Women and children sit apart from the men. No preset liturgic plan! Silence, often sustained over a long period of time. But then, any of the men can suddenly stand up and say something, mostly that we should sing a certain psalm. Then somebody else will react to this opening move and give us instructions for another psalm. About halfway through the service a white loaf of bread, crusts removed,  is passed through the rows on a silver plate and everybody (the baptized part of the congregation) plucks a piece of the bread, that is then followed by the wine, in a silver cup. The service ends at an unknown time, it is over when the usher makes some general announcements and the collectionbag is passed around.

 

This heritage was to give me a hard time to find justification for my art. What I learned was that only an awkward kind of purity – a purity for which one has to defy a degree of shame – will do. The hypocrisy that this implies take a more severe toll on the conscience. Or, depending how you look at it, brings about more comical behaviour.

 

Predestined to be unable to engage with the art tradition like you are supposed to, I had a desperate time as an art student.  It was no use trying to disguise as a painter or a sculptor, because it made me feel a fraudster. Adopting some artistical format or even an established technique or material proved to be equally impossible. Therefore my only option was to stay well below the radar of tradition. The search was on for a modus operandi that would be, to a high degree, immune to an artistic approach by me, as well as to the usual artistic expectations that the public has. I guess without knowing it I acted by the words of Robert Morris, who said in an interview in 1969, that art no longer has its values in formal properties. Or as Joseph Kosuth stated around the same time: “Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting one cannot be questioning the nature of art; if an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it.” You can say that I had an intimate understanding of the most radical thinking about art from my religious upbringing, which asks of you to seek God by faith alone. When I found out about the famous Yves Klein exhibition of 1958, when he showed an empty, whitewashed gallery, literally separating the pure notion of art from all known formal properties, this concept was already very familiar to me. Ultimately art is a question of faith. Which leaves us with the paradox that anything can be art while at the same time nothing is art.

 

I began to read Kierkegaard. Perhaps I was instinctively drawn to his writing. What he has to say about religiously induced hypocrisy, the humour and cunning with which he exposes bigotry, makes excellent reading. But it is what he writes about the highest possible intensity of faith that was important to me.

 

I quote from Dr. Anthony Storm’s commentary on Kierkegaard; “Kierkegaard's main concern was with knowledge of God through faith. Faith is the individual's reaction to the inherent paradox of Christianity. Since essential truth is far beyond our comprehension to the extent that we cannot approach it objectively, it appears to us in the form of a paradox.”

On the function of the intellect and faith, Kierkegaard said;

    “That is, when faith requires that he relinquish his understanding, then to have faith becomes just as difficult for the most intelligent person as it is for the person of the most limited intelligence, or it presumably becomes even more difficult for the former” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 377)

 

Kierkegaard writes in this respect about a leap of faith. “This is not a blind leap as is often thought. Kierkegaard's concern was that faith is never easy or probable. Faith in God is an agonistic and often fearful struggle to cast one's entire person into relation to God.” (Dr. Anthony Storm.) Doesn’t this remind us of Yves Klein’s leap into the void?

 

So we deal with faith. And if we want to understand art, we really should be examining the quality of our belief. But how to take measure of such a thing?

 

In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard gives a succinct definition of faith in relation to the absurd;

    “Faith is the objective uncertainty with the repulsion of the absurd, held fast in the passion of inwardness, which is the relation of inwardness intensified to its highest.... Faith must not be satisfied with incomprehensibility, because the very relation to or repulsion from the incomprehensible, the absurd, is the expression for the passion of faith.”

 

The passion of inwardness...to go by these words it is a thoughroughly subjective affair by which one must examine one’s faith. I quote again from Dr. Anthony Storm’s commentary on Kierkegaard; “Kierkegaard emphasized subjective truth over objective truth, or "the truth that is true for me". By this, he did not necessarily deny objective, propositional truth, but rather, he asserted that truth, especially the claims of religion, must be appropriated subjectively to have any effect on, or value for, the thinker. If we choose to relate to God objectively, he can mean nothing to us, because we will not be related to him anymore than if we deny his existence. Subjective truth is inwardness. (...) Kierkegaard further argued that since an object of knowledge is not complete in itself by virtue of not having yet passed through the phase of ceasing-to-be—and thus is still in the process of becoming—and that we who observe the object are also in the process of becoming, we cannot acquire accurate knowledge of the thing. What would be the mediating factors to accomplish this task? Kierkegaard concludes that when we claim to have knowledge of a thing, we do so solely through an act of faith.”

 

Kierkegaard laid the foundation for the ultimate appropriation art, the appropriation of faith.

 

I saw my task cut-out in front of me; produce work that the public can only relate to if they commit to a brave and truly personal act of faith. To prepare the ground for this you have to create a crisis of belief first, wholly at the expense of your work. Then, if somebody overcomes this and still appreciates the work, the chances are good that he or she does so for the right reasons and will take full intellectual responsability for their faith in the work.

This resulted into the ‘green work’. The year was 1983.

 

The green work carefully avoids the usual qualifications; being well made for instance, or having surprisingly many parts, or nice colours, or being exceptionally small or big, or having a unique and irreplacable nature, or having costed a lot of money, or the fact that it took an amazing long time to make it, or that it adresses some interesting content. This formal reduction is aimed at denying the public a meaningless objective reception of the work, in other words, it is intentionally incomprehensible, absurd, slightly repulsive. (Not in a vulgar way.) The work is obviously inadequate by any standards. Therefore it is up for a subjective reception by default so to speak.

 

The formal properties of the green works are, as one can imagine by now, exceedingly plain. They are simple constructions of woodfibre board, painted in a standard green colour and only so large that one person can handle it. There are a small number of basic forms within the green work, resulting from the need to stand, lean, lie or hang. These are revisited time and again, when certain changes may occur. Woodfibre board being cheap and readily available in a standard quality, is a deliberate choice. It has no material history, this has been thouroughly undone by the proces of compressing woodchips. It doesn’t accommodate for much technical refinement when working with it, which is ideal for my purpose. I paint it green just to spoil it as a building material, green being the most neutral colour. Of course I use a household paint.

 

With these works I try to emulate the kind of awkward purity that I know from my sundays with the “Congegration of Believers”. And I look for welcome signs of shame in the reactions of the public, because shame, more than any other emotion, is most likely to take a turn to inwardness. So perhaps the work of an artist is the ability to instigate shame.

To quote Kiergegaard; "It was a necessary deception in order, if possible, to deceive men into the religious...".  He anticipated that this tactics of "teasingly thrusting people away" would result in a small audience indeed. But he maintained that he wanted his work to be read apart from considerations for his own personality. No surprises for me then as to how my career developed, and I was prepared for this too. So I thought.

Harmen Brethouwer

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Second:

On Superfluous Things

(Anything goes, if.)

 

 

One day in 1989 my studio was littered with the sorry remains of the entire body of ‘green work’ that I had produced in the seven years before.

There had been previous bouts of purging the oeuvre from the works that I deemed as non-essential, but that occurred within the normal critical boundaries. This was a different crisis altogether. It was defeat. What had happened was that I couldn’t bear the life of the artist who makes these ‘green works’ anymore. 

 

I quit the studio and spent the next two years sitting at a table to work out the details of a big project that was going to lead me in the opposite direction. But the point of departure was the same  question as before; what can be my position in regard to the formal properties of art? In stead of avoiding the use of these properties, as was my former strategy, I now was going to embrace them. Not a choicy selection but – as a principle – all of them. So I was not going to adopt a tradition, become a painter or a sculptor, and thus forgo the position to question art. That would have ment total defeat. I was going to adopt tradition as a whole, to stay, in effect, neutral.

 

The diversity/neutrality of the project is not an end in itself, but a means by which I want to achieve my goal. Which is to study in great detail the formal properties of art, as they are embedded in the various traditions. These studies must lead to something that is more than research. I am resolved to engage with the subject on an equal level as the authentic thing. I want to appropriate it for real. I want to find out how it can be justified. Anew.

 

While sitting at the drawingtable, feeling enthousiastic now I had regained the initiative, I recoqnized the need for a sort of ‘perfect vehicle’ (to quote Allen McCollum), or maybe better, a ‘blank form’ (Robert Morris) on which I could appropriate any subject at hand. The identity of this concrete and inviting object illuded me for some time, until I devided the brief into one special form for the two-dimensional and one for the three-dimensional. Suddenly I realized that I already had the solution for the wall-based form at hand. It is a square panel with a hole, by which it can be hanged on a nail in the wall. I had invented this work in 1986, so the original was made out of a piece of woodfibre board, painted green. The idea is that this panel is absolutely demonstrative in the way it hangs on the wall, and though this way of hanging on a central pin is not the most practical, it sure is the purest way. It has to feel its own weight, it has to maintain a delicate balance, it achieves this at a considerable cost, by having being pierced through and through. It has by virtue of this special feature transformed from being an anonymous support to a thing of its own. At the same time, as a blank form, it has a far wider reach than a canvas, it can support or invite properties that otherwise would have to be discarded. A simple panel without the hole could do that too, but I want to stress that the crucial thing that the hole provides is independence for the panel from whatever happens on its surface.

The brief for the three-dimensional form was very demanding. One form suitable for every category of the object, without changing its identity, which means it must be possible to be fabricated from all sorts of different materials and in the variety of techniques that comes with this. I can quote Morris to clearify the difficulty of this demand; “The size range of useless three-dimensional things is a continuum between the monument and the ornament.” We are talking about the jewelled object living in a showcase and about the landmark of monumental scale, and of course all the categories in between. Each category comes with its own range of materials and techniques, its own contextualisation, tradition and place. All very logic. Now which singular form can be introduced to all of these categories as if it looks natural? And still maintain the critical distance that is needed, I might add, as is indeed required from the two-dimensional form. After some trial and error I found a particular coneshaped form that can fit the bill. Its not a strict mathematical form, that would not work, its more like a human body I think; firmly and independently standing upright, its axis agreably placed in accordance with earths gravitation, its height about three times as it is wide, and the whole form being very self-evident and reasonable.

 

It was 1992 when I started to work with the cone and the panel. Immediately it became clear that the project was so immens - why I could loose myself from the word go into the far corners of the universe of ‘useless’ things -  that I realized I had to create some sort of structure.  To make the diversity managable. Without focus the project would loose much of its effectivity anyway.

I came up with a solution in the form of three major sub-series. Titled after well known styles these series are really not to be taken so literal as this would suggest. In stead they are intended to relate to different traditions in art, much in the way of portals. The Chinoiseries for instance home in on historical traditions, where symbolism is the main factor; the Art Deco  series provides a platform for rethinking decoration; finally the Minimal series addresses contemporary concepts and technical possibilities. In reality the division is much less clear, I’m more interested in the interrelations between the series. A few things can be said about the actual periods in art that are known as Chinoiserie, Art Deco and Minimal, its what they have in common and its why I have  good use for these labels; as styles they are remarkably undefined, they all were crucibles for lots of influences, and they still constitute very present forces in our culture.

 

Only as late as 2007 the title for the project itself was decided; On Superfluous Things. Some people seem to think that this adjective is a qualification, but it really just means that its about all things that belong to the domain of art. I borrowed the title from a book by Wen Zhenheng, a Chinese scholar, who lived during the Ming period. His book gives a complete description of the material culture of his time.

Now in its 17th year the project harbours a wide range of things. To achieve in every case an optimal result the works are created with the collaboration of craftsmen, engineers or scientists from all over the world. Mostly my own involvement is of a conceptual nature, although I have executed some pieces myself and I design many of the things. More and more my role resembles that of a producer, for example when I commission other artists to produce work on a brief that leaves them the freedom to express themselves. This approach could seem almost dismissive, were there not the two anchors in the shape of the panel and the cone. Don't forget, the proper use of these vehicles is quite demanding. Yet it gives reason to suspect that I am deliberately trying to disengage my personal viewpoints and taste. Where will this lead? It is a far cry from my hermit times with the 'green work'. By the way, the destruction of this work wasn't the end of the story.

The weak part of the story was me, not being able to cope with a life of abstinance. The work itself proved to be indestructible, first and foremost as an attitude for which I - soon after the event - found new belief, but also because the actual works are simply replacable, as was the intention from the start. Since 1989 I have been working 'green' occasionally, mainly for myself and for some very low-key exhibitions. Wisely I don't bother to keep the things around. But only very recent I did find the courage to publicly declare that the 'green work' is back.

Of course my relation to the work has changed due to the fact that it no longer has an exclusive claim on me. Is has to endure a 'Nebenbuhler', a rival for authority. Rather it was me that had to learn to cope with this situation. No clear 'either, or' anymore, but the dual responsibility for both sides of the medal. Because that's how it is, not a naïve conflict of opposite truths, but the complicated reality.

The resolve of the dilemma that has dominated my artistic life so far has had an immediate comical effect on me. I want to have fun with art. It goes against all my beliefs and instincts.

Harmen Brethouwer

Third:

Attic Productions

(Authorial distance.)

 

 

My greatest fear is fun. Fun is uncontrollable, see. One can't reason with fun. Very suspect where I come from. I have a disadvantage here. Its my conscience that doesn't let me do anything that is not properly justified. If only I could be left out of the equation, that would open things up. The concept of authorial distance has been growing on me for a while. I've practiced it within the framework of "On Superfluous Things". I find that it suits me, it gives me a great deal of pleasure. If this is the closest I can get to having fun with art - by hypocritical acclaim - then yes, I can work with that.

One can think of different roles to play; that of a producer, a financier, a patron, a motivator, a collector, a curator, or indeed a mix of any of these positions. It will depend on the nature of the project.

Kiergegaard is again the man to look to for guidance. To be continued...