Hans Theys

 

 

 

___________________________

Hans Theys

 

 

 

An Apocalyptic Triumph Parade 

 

Some words on a case of kinetics

 

 

Introduction

 

It is Saturday 26 October 2024 and Joost Pauwaert is planning to lead a strange procession through Ghent city centre. At eleven o’clock in the morning, I text him, asking if can help. ‘Sure,’ is his first message. And then two more follow: ‘Feel free to come over.’ And: ‘We are between Kwaadham and Sint-Baafs.’ 

     When my ten-year-old daughter Oona and I arrive, he asks if she would like to decorate the mobile sculptures with balloons. He shows her how to operate the gas cylinder, tie a knot in the balloon and attach a piece of string to it. ‘You can hang them wherever you want,’ he says. I am handed a cable reel. Whether I want to take care of the electricity supply? I walk into the cathedral and look for a socket with an earth connection. Then I am invited to decorate a mobile bell tower with ivy, fresh flowers and balloons. The activist and photographer Martijn de Meuleneire joins me. Oona hands us balloons.

     Slowly the procession takes shape. Pauwaert walks around calmly, solving technical problems as they arise, suggesting things to do, showing newly-arrived volunteers how to tie tiny bombs together. A two-legged gallows is erected on a farm cart to support an upright piano, which will hang from it. The men working on it have ladders, but can’t see how they can hold up the crossbeam and attach it at the same time. Pauwaert hops onto the cart, grabs the two triangular armpits that will later support the crossbeam, and swiftly attaches them with screws at hip height so that he can stand on them to attach the crossbeam. I have never seen anyone improvise so quickly, making ad hoc decisions calmly and efficiently and without the slightest hint of ill-temper.

     Three hours later, the procession has unfolded, silently, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. Two drummers lead the way, followed by a long rocket on wheel systems steered by Pauwaert’s father and the artist Willem Boel, dressed in tailcoat and bowler hat. A procession of mini cars is pulled along by Pauwaert’s eldest daughter Rho. Friends carry gold-coloured flags. Impressively persistent artists try and make the rolling bell tower change direction by having it hop over the tram tracks and the cobblestones. Meanwhile, the young photographer Francesco Coniglione and I steer the heavy gallows cart with its dangling piano. The cart is pushed by three powerhouses, including the tireless painter and performance artist Karel Thienpont. It is heartwarming to see so many artists working together on one work of art. There is no friction. Everyone, it seems, just gets on a job of their choosing. Oona carries a golden flag. She has broken away from the other flag bearers, I see. The wind tugs at the long bamboo pole. She holds on for a very long time.

     By the time the procession is about to start, the crowd of spectators around us has thickened. The bravest ask ‘what’s this all about’, ‘what’s the idea behind it’, ‘if they can take pictures’, ‘if this is planned’, ‘if this is part of an official programme’, ‘if they can find information about it somewhere’. They are pleasantly confused. They are attracted by the unusual, but they are also on their guard. What’s the catch? Is this a madman glorifying war or a pacifist formulating a clumsy indictment? Many questions are asked, but no answers are forthcoming. 

When the various contraptions start moving, a dense column of people forms and continues to grow as the procession advances. Everyone leaves off whatever they were doing and draws closer to get a better view. Bystanders with cameras weave their way in and out of the procession taking pictures as they go. The drummers set the pace, black smoke billows from the rocket, the bell clangs, the golden flags make a flapping sound as they flutter in the breeze, the piano dangles causing the farm cart to tilt precariously. Fireworks crackle and an explosion creates a mushroom cloud. Pauwaert walks up and down, lights the gunpowder and the fireworks and points out possible hazards. Mid-way along the route, the procession comes to a halt and the rope holding up the piano is cut. The instrument lands with a bang on the cart and the procession sets off again.

     In May 1989, at the age of twenty-six, I was busy helping Panamarenko set up a solo show at the M HKA when he suggested we visit the Sinksenfoor funfair on a nearby square. The seamless transition from the one venue to the other awakened in me an awareness of the similarity between the sparkling exhibition (with the moths in the reeds that he had vibrate for me) and the many fairground attractions with their moving parts, the mix of greasy and sour smells and cheap perfumes, the noisy banging and roaring of the rides, the shouts, the snatches of music and wind-blown conversations. The whole thing struck me as a living collection of hundreds of contraptions made by Tinguely and Panamarenko, flapping, humming and rattling around me like a Puccini opera or a Fellini film. Walking along in Pauwaert’s apocalyptic, triumphal procession, I am reminded of that old daydream and am pleased to note that it has come true.

     After eight hundred meters of walking, dragging, wriggling, pushing, listening, fright and enjoyment, the procession arrives at the triple space of the Barbé art gallery, where the sculptures are installed one by one. There are already a few painted photos of self-made mushroom clouds and a black drone with green lights. There is also a long socle on which the string of tin cars is parked. The large rocket fits nicely in the middle space. An exhibition space as a parking lot! The best happening I have ever experienced, the best show I have ever seen. I am in heaven. 

 

 

Conversation

- Today is 25 February 2025, exactly four months after the parade. Time to ask you where the desire for this kinetic total image came from, before you forget it. Put like that, it is a silly question, I admit. Nobody wants to know where our desires come from. What image were you looking for, I mean. What did you want to see, experience?

Joost Pauwaert: As far as I remember, it was inspired by two different images. While reading a book about Napoleon, it occurred to me that a military march-past or convoy must have been a breathtaking sight for people who otherwise witnessed few spectacles, never went to an amusement park or to the opera house or saw a football match in a stadium. When a military parade passed through town, they would hang out of their window or line the street to marvel at the resplendent uniforms and equestrian paraphernalia, the band, the train of wagons with their clanging pots and pans. It must have been impressive. The second image came during the repeated reading of a musical book. My son Francis’ favourite book is Peter and the Wolf. Each page has its own musical excerpt. I noticed that he was always very enthusiastic about the procession at the end. Peter at the head with the bird, followed by the hunters leading the captured wolf and, winding up the procession, the grumbling grandfather. They make a lot of noise. It is a cheerful procession. Each character in the tale is represented by a musical instrument. That’s how I came up with the idea of combining the military convoy with a joyful parade.

- I understand your wanting to set up a kind of itinerant amusement park opera for yourself and for others, but if I want to be critical, as the anthropologists of the future expect me to be, I have to ask you if there is more to this than a kind of boyish spectacle-seeking.

Pauwaert: I recently came to the conclusion that every good work of art is about energy. When 
I came back from London last year and told you about an impressive drawing I had seen, you knew immediately which work I was referring to.

- ‘A Lion Hunt’ in the National Gallery.

Pauwaert: When I saw that unfinished thing, full of wild energy, I must have had the same experience as Rothko, who, upon seeing half-finished paintings by Turner, decided he wanted to do something similar.

- In all life, surplus energy, in the shape of instinctual drives, leads to more viable forms, which result from an encounter between the dormant possibilities of the organism and the changing environment. Von Humboldt called it a ‘longing for form’. Nietzsche reinstated that image, but gave it an awkward name. I apologise for adding this thought to your evocation of art as embodied energy, which I think very sensible and liberating.

Pauwaert: Sometimes the energy is joyful, sometimes aggressive, but without energy there is no work of art.

- Presumably nothing is more backward and contemptible than nationalism, patriotism, war-mongering and the worship of so-called heroes. You are not a macho man. So why the need for weapons in this procession and in your work in general? You just spoke about the ‘wild energy’ you encountered in Rubens. When people are 
first introduced to your work, some only see aggression.

Pauwaert: Because they don’t look carefully.

- But what do they miss?

Pauwaert: Funny details, anomalies, paradoxes, contradictions, ambiguities. While the procession was under way, I heard a woman say that we were glorifying war. But another woman replied that we might be trying to warn people. As you know, I used to be a war photographer. Nothing is more hopeless than organised massacres. But weapons, tanks, planes and rockets are also very beautiful.

- According to Le Corbusier, an aircraft is beautiful because it has to be able to fly. Its beauty springs from the laws of nature. The mechanics of weapons are functional. I think that works of art are also defined by their functionality. Their form is necessary: ​​economic, minimal and legible. Even in a baroque work.

Pauwaert: If you look objectively at the large rocket that opened the procession, you don’t see a rocket, but a sculpture. Because of its dented appearance, the patina, the material used.

- The rocket does look well used. I saw it as a kind of relic, a strange object which, crashed in a jungle, would 
be revered by the local population. Its proportions in relation to the people surrounding it make me think of 
a prize cow parading shoulder to shoulder with the farmer at an agricultural show. 

Pauwaert: Copper is not a suitable material for a rocket. That’s where it starts. Moreover, the rocket was sandblasted to give it a pockmarked skin. This skin made it look as if it had been lying on the bottom of the ocean for a while and exposed to overpressure. The anger had gone. It had become an unfathomable poetic object. Then I gave it a classic bronze patina by baking copper nitrate on it with a pig burner. It was no longer a living, menacing rocket, but a dull relic. It was the first sculpture I made for the parade. I don’t remember why I started it. I think I had a vague image of ​​some kind of Soviet parade. 

- What’s a pig burner?

Pauwaert: A gas torch used to melt roofing. You can also use it to burn the hair off a pig.

- Have you ever done that?

Pauwaert: Yes. I lived completely self-sufficiently for a few years. I had two small children, like today, and lived on a farm, also like today. I had my own vegetable garden, grew potatoes and bought two piglets every year to fatten up. That’s how I discovered that it’s possible to be self-sufficient, but that it leaves no time to do anything else.

- You don’t slaughter animals anymore. You’re a vegetarian.

Pauwaert: When I read your big book about Panamarenko, I found a passage in which you write that some artists clearly grew up in an overgrown orchard or in a large park like the Rivierenhof in Deurne. You went on to say that that’s where their need to create a kind of living space comes from. I could recognize myself in that. As a small, self-sustaining farmer, but also as an artist.

- Two drummers headed up the parade. Professional musicians, I think.

Pauwaert: Yes. One is a drummer, the other is a tenor and cellist. They set the tempo.

- Behind them came the rocket, which was steered by two men, your father and the artist Willem Boel, who was wearing a bowler hat and a tailcoat. I thought that was a lovely touch – it added to the mystery of it all. Why was he dressed like that?

Pauwaert: I had asked all the participants to dress for a funeral. ‘Not the funeral of a family member,’ I had written, ‘but of a prominent person’. It was their idea to don old-fashioned suits.

- At the front, the rocket was supported by a magnificent wheel, which seemed much too big and therefore radiated solidity, as if it had been taken from a real airplane.

Pauwaert: We used the front wheel of Toeterkar, a temporary work of art based on a nineteenth-century manure cart with three wheels. The two rear wheels we took from an old trailer. The colour green suggests it may have come from the army.

- A black plume of smoke came billowing out of the rocket.

Pauwaert: I had linked black smoke bombs together in the back.

- The rocket was followed by hanging dolls representing marching soldiers.

Pauwaert: I wanted to have live marching Napoleonic soldiers. I discovered that lots of people like to take part in re-enactments of battles, but it is difficult to get them to sign up for a separate event. They like to prepare for a specific battle. That’s why I made straw dolls hanging from a kind of tackle so they dangled in front of a farm cart. They were Napoleonic grenadiers wearing bearskin caps. On the cart itself was a large wedding cake made of white-painted plywood and crowned with a soldier’s head. The head was stuffed with a kilo of gunpowder, which I detonated. The cart also produced white smoke reminiscent of fog. I have seen film footage in which it looks as if the soldiers are marching through the fog. If there was one image I had thought of in advance, it was that one.

- How did the image of the string of tin cars come about?

Pauwaert: During violent demonstrations and street riots, cars are sometimes set alight. The cars were supposed to burn, but I forgot to fill them with flammable material: wood and fireworks. Oliver quickly stuffed them with newspapers, but of course that was not sufficient.

- How did you make the cars?

Pauwaert: They are made partly of sheet steel and partly of aluminium, cut with tin snips, attached with rivets and sprayed with alkyd lacquer. The plywood wheels were made using a clock drill; the others are flea market finds. The Range Rover had to have heavy, clumsy wheels; the Peugeot 205 small, funny wheels. There was also a Renault Espace. And a Rolls Royce limousine.

- Then came a sculpture consisting of a kind of bomb attached to the carrier of a kiddie ride. It reminded me of Baron von Münchhausen flying along on a cannonball. And of Stanley Kubrick.

Pauwaert: The bomb is made of folded and riveted aluminium on a wooden base. The whole thing was mounted on a cart. Another sculpture, reminiscent of a WWII bomb, was placed on the chassis of a 1960s pram. It is made of brazed copper and bits of boilers, sandblasted and patinated.

- Then there was a sculpture with a horse’s head and a flashing light.

Pauwaert: The horse sculpture Friedland  (named after one of Napoleon’s horses) consists of a compressor vessel resting on the chassis of a pram. I attached a bronze horse’s head to it, which I had found at the junk yard. I sandblasted it and gave it a dark patina. I blued the compressor vessel in the same way as they blue weapons: you heat the metal and grease it with linseed oil. I painted the light bulb red myself.

- For another sculpture, you combined a compressor with wind instruments.

Pauwaert: Hunting horns and trumpets. The intention was to fill the vessel with air and have it blow the trumpet, but the pressure was much too high and I hadn’t had the time to invent a system to reduce the pressure. The instruments come from Peter and the Wolf.

- Then there was the rolling bell tower, which also contained a siren and the smouldering wooden mould 
of a cannon barrel.

Pauwaert: The Cart of the Mobile State of Emergency. The idea came to me from the way people used to sound the alarm and also celebrate solemn or joyful events by ringing bells and firing cannon shots. I wanted to combine these practices in a mobile contraption. I was originally planning to hang several bronze bells in it, but they turned out to be very expensive. So I bought one bell, made in 1948 and weighing 120 kilos. It produced a beautiful sound. It didn’t have a clapper so I made one myself with a 7-kilo, cast-iron cannonball attached to a 20-mm screw thread. But because there was no lock nut at the bottom, the ball came loose. I spotted it just in time, otherwise it would have fallen. After that, we had to keep climbing up to the bell to tighten the nut. I recently saw Werner Herzog’s movie Fitzcarraldo. There’s a scene in which the main character climbs the bell tower and rings the bell like a madman to demand that his opera be performed. That’s what I want to do. As a war photographer, you have a great excuse to be in places where you don’t belong. In fact, I constantly create situations in which I am allowed to do things that are normally not possible or allowed.

- Then came the farm cart with the swinging, hanging piano. You were afraid the cart might tip over on a bend. The work reminded me of gallows or a guillotine.

Pauwaert: It was not my intention to make it look like gallows, but if you think purely functionally, you automatically end up with that shape. The structure of gallows is minimal. Rifle butts, cannon barrels and cooking pot handles used to be decorated, but gallows weren’t, as far as I know. The falling piano was inspired by cartoons, just like the anvils.

- You said you were pleasantly surprised by the sound of the gold-coloured flags.

Pauwaert: Fluttering Mylar thermal blankets as a poetic intervention! I stole that idea from Cosco, who once used one of those blankets as a flag.

- After the walk, the works were parked in the gallery. Fantastic! It made the whole enterprise functional: the works had to be taken to the gallery, so why not on foot? The week before, you had tried out every possible spatial solution, so that the works could be manoeuvred into position easily. Magic! The rocket fitted exactly in the central space, accessible through a wide door. Hanging at the back was ‘Paraluminor’: a black drone with green lights at the bottom. A magnificent work.

Pauwaert: The plan had actually been for Paraluminor to be part of the procession, held up with very long poles. But the work proved too heavy and also too fragile to be held up by people as they walked.

- There were also a few overpainted photos of a mushroom cloud. Perhaps you can tell us something about those experiments?

Pauwaert: During the procession, I also made a mushroom cloud when the cake soldier’s head exploded. While making A New Study for the End of the World, I accidently created a mushroom cloud with a bomb of half a kilo of gunpowder. I saw it in the photos, some of which I painted over. Making another mushroom cloud at a later date turned out not to be so easy. For a real mushroom cloud, you need several tons of TNT. The warm gases suck up dust and other loose material as they rise and then when they reach the same temperature as the surroundings, they cool down and start to descend. If you want to achieve that sort of effect with a kilo of gunpowder, you will have problems with the wind, among other things. The explosion must not be too powerful either, because then you get a star-shaped explosion. I have succeeded a number of times.  

- At the back of the gallery was a small sculpture consisting of a stack of small anvils. On top is a rabbit. 
A sculpture made by your daughter Alice.

Pauwaert: Our garden is full of anvils, cannonballs and hammers welded together. The children imitate me, of course. It was Alice who placed the anvils one on top of the other and made a kind of Brancusi tower. I added the rabbit.

- Finally, would you like to tell us something about the fountain you made last week.

Pauwaert: Last summer I visited the place in Germany where I grew up. Lying by the pool, inhaling the smell of the nearby chip shop, I had a Proustian flashback. The smells of hot fat and chlorine are so disgusting that they should never be combined, but together they evoked wonderful memories. That’s how I came up with the idea of ​​two fountains, each producing its own smell, or one fountain that would produce both smells at the same time. That’s not possible, of course. Water that comes into contact with boiling fat immediately turns to steam that takes fat particles with it as it rises so that it can easily turn into a jet fire. The fire brigade made me put the fryers far away from the water fountain. Because I wanted a large fountain, I bought a stack of I-beams, which I welded together without a preparatory sketch and with the help of a telehandler. People like to build towers. The need to store water at height led me to oil barrels. I shot holes in them. There was also a waterfall running down a steel beam. The children who came to watch chucked rubbish into it – twigs, earth, leaves – so it soon clogged up, causing the water to overflow and choke a pump that was running dry. It was beautiful.

 

 

Montagne de Miel, 25 February 2025