Hans Theys

__________

Hans Theys


Shattered and Shining
A few words about Johan De Wilde’s work


Introduction

The garden is home to a blue peacock, which flies off to a nearby park in the evenings where it sleeps high up in a tree. The bird was living in the park when De Wilde (°1964) moved into the house; only later did it decide to take up residence in the garden during the daytime. That says something about the garden. The first attempt in the spring of this year to set the bird up with a female companion failed owing to the mysterious death of the latter, but a second attempt resulted in a nest with four chicks, which I saw today for the first time. The chicks and the mother are currently living in a pen, as they need protection against the rain. Their daily diet includes handfuls of rucola, which grows rampantly in the garden. The previous owners had built a swimming-pool and, with the addition of a protractible cover, the pool was turned into a greenhouse where dozens of different varieties of tomatoes and peppers are grown. Vegetables, fruit trees and ornamental plans live harmoniously side by side. There is now a small pond as well.
On entering the studio, my attention is immediately drawn to several gigantic, pinned lepidopters, including an atlas moth. De Wilde tells me that he and his stepson were given a cigarette box containing chrysalises and each of the chrysalis in turn exploded into a butterfly. With an odd mixture of sobriety and joy, we consider the strange lot of butterflies and May-bugs. They seem to be no more than the winged reproductive organs of caterpillars, which themselves live for years underground or hidden away. It is the same with our drawings and texts, I suspect: they flutter around rather aimlessly, in the hope that their rich colouring or rustling will attract the attention of fellow artists and writers, thereby ensuring the survival of a few of the experiences of their makers who have toiled and fretted in the dark.


Beyond the unambiguous image

We often have to overcome inner obstacles to shake off the impression that a work of art is trying to evade us, that it is reluctant to give itself up. An old way of looking at a work prevents us seeing how it differs from all the others, what is unique about it and therefore gives it its raison d’être. To what does this creation owe its personality and how does it broaden, deepen, reinforce, lighten or intensify our world of experiences?

Perhaps during my last visit to Johan De Wilde’s studio I came to understand something new. By this I mean that an image suddenly appeared, which seemed to crystallize his passion. “Ostracism”, I thought, “it’s like ostracism.”

The artist showed me his new, partially completed work Hands of Time. It consists of twenty-four drawings and seems to contain all the elements of his oeuvre. The drawings were made one after the other and though the draughtsman did not look at the already completed drawings, they form diptyches and triptychs. Not looking at the previous drawings was, I think, a way of sabotaging a tendency to make compositions. Perhaps it was also a way of reinforcing the incongruous, collage-like effect: could it be that because the draughtsman could only rely on his memory, all sorts of little mistakes crept in? It was at any rate a strategy to escape the artist’s meticulousness.

De Wilde had never even seen the Hands of Time drawings together before, never mind shown them to anyone else. He wondered what he would see. So did I. Was I going to see, think or feel anything? And if so, would it have anything to do with what he had tried to make?

Those who have read his collected letters in Tot nu toe was alles in orde (S.M.A.K., 2010) know the importance of that last question, for his work starts from the conviction that it is impossible to make an image that can be read or experienced unambiguously by an observer. That images are not unambiguous is not news. You only have to compare the descriptions of the Nefertiti Bust in three general histories of art. The one historian considers the queen to be proud, the other humble, for the one she is sensual, for the other cold. The same applies to works which are much closer to us, like Manet’s Olympia. Even people who Manet knew personally fail to agree about his intentions, his disappointments and even his intelligence. However, the fundamental openness, indefiniteness, uncertainty or plurality of the image makes De Wilde curious about the images evoked for the viewer. Fantasizing about what the viewer might think or ‘see’ on looking at a work, De Wilde sets to work in reverse, trying to create a texture which fits the image that will be seen or imagined. His drawings become ‘triggers’ which precipitate images De Wilde will never see, but which inspire him.

I suspect that this is how key works like Hooglied (Song of Songs) and π came about, though I am not sure about this. Hooglied consists of a series of drawings for which the well-known book in the Bible was turned into Braille. Instead of raised dots, the punctuation marks consist of tiny burnt indentations, so that even a blind person cannot read the text. What remains is a mysterious rhythm, an illegible language, a collection of signs which together form an intangible image: a labyrinth, a vanishing point of love and the body, a sort of zero of visual art. Something similar happens in π. It consists of a series of drawings that could be continued indefinitely in which the number π must occur with an endless series of figures after the comma. This means that each new drawing contains a new series of numbers after the comma. Those who have never seen the first drawing will probably never be able to make sense of the series of numbers they find in one of the drawings. The image evoked might be compared to the image of Borges’ perhaps infinite library (which is believed to contain every possible combination of the letters of the alphabet), including the tireless traveller who is looking for one readable book or one readable sentence. The draughtsman becomes a monk, who copies and illuminates unintelligible books out of humility and respect for the creation.

At the same time, this strategy results in drawings that contain well-known or unfamiliar fragments which can consciously or unconsciously conjure up other images for the viewer or remind him of works of art. Sometimes the image is completely unintelligible, for example in a drawing based on an aerial photograph where De Wilde evokes the crowns of a tree around the house where he was born. (The image brings to mind missiles from anti-aircraft guns exploding high in the air.) Sometimes we recognize the shape of a cloud, an object or a limb. Sometimes we recognize a tree, but we don’t know that in 1989 it was the only surviving oak of all the trees growing around the Olympic Stadium in Berlin in 1936: an old, speechless witness.

Some of De Wilde’s drawings affect us outright (like the depictions of clouds, the wonderful silhouettes of trees or visions from a dream); some surprise us (like the distorted Olympic flag or the German grave of the Unknown Soldier) and some force us to surrender helplessly. If you see them all together, however, they seem to be an ode to love, life and art, a new ‘Hooglied’ or Song of Songs, a Stabat Mater, an Ecce Homo, strewn round a bass line of Charles Mingus, a mixture of fact and fiction like the stories of W.G. Sebald, fragmented and invisibly joined together, playful and serious at the same time.

Seeing Hands of Time for the first time made me realize that this series appears not only to be a concentrated version of De Wilde’s complete oeuvre, but also, conversely, that we should consider all his drawings from the viewpoint of their relationship with all the others, as is also the case with the works of Marcel Broodthaers. Every drawing leads an autonomous existence, but all together they form a carefully knotted net for the observer’s stray thoughts and images.

De Wilde’s drawings put us in mind of the paintings of the Flemish Primitives, whose meaning was not unequivocal either and should be seen as necessarily ambiguous aids to a spiritual praxis, based on the conviction that God was an image for all the things we cannot know, manifesting Himself in the Creation by concealing Himself or hiding Himself by appearing.

In so doing God followed a strategy which Freud called “dream work”. According to that inspired charlatan, to enable us to sleep the dream work conceals our fears behind false images, but sometimes the real image is also shown, which will then seem untruthful.

De Wilde went on to mention Luis Buñuel’s film The Milky Way (La voie lactée) in which he says images appear one after the other with no logical connection. Might it be possible to make a three-dimensional work that shows itself to us in that way? In a conversation with Jan Hoet and Bart de Baere, the painter Walter Swennen once expressed the desire to be able to paint “no matter what”, by analogy with Jacques Lacan, who is said to have invited his patients to tell him “no matter what”. How do you escape from yourself, from what you know, from what you are able to do? How do you entice a new work into the world? How do you make something that has never existed?

If the choice of recognizable representations can be so important to painters and sculptors who are essentially looking for texture, for a recognizable approach in terms of form, a specific sort of spatial evocation (rather than conveying an emotion or an experience which is unrelated to making or experiencing a work of art), then this certainly applies to someone like De Wilde, whose work, of course, also conducts a dialogue with other works of art, but hopes to say something about broader issues as well.


Shattered vases

In Athens, when the voting public was convinced that certain persons were too popular or too powerful, they could try to have him ostracized. They would write the name of the person they were challenging on a potsherd and hand it in. When six thousand potsherds had been collected, the names were counted to see whose appeared most often. That person was then exiled.But what happened to the shards? I image that someone kept them and tried to read them, decipher them. What sort of shard does a particular name most often appear on? Does the sort of shard provide any clues about the voter’s class or profession? What sort of pottery is it? Is it glazed? Is it decorated with a red drawing or a black one? What form does the shard take? What figures can you see in the shard in the semi-darkness, when the sun is at its highest point, when you are sad, when you have dipped it in honey, when you look at it from a distance? Are there shards which fit together, like pieces of a puzzle? Are there shards which evoke an image they do not show, but carefully conceal? Are there thoughts and feelings which are not called up, but excluded by one of the shards?

The drawings I saw yesterday feature spots which are reminiscent of shards. They are probably reproductions of lacunas in frescos. So, very precise forms, which relate to the way the frescos were made and revealed to us over time, like the painters’ secret messages, for sometimes a lacuna seems to want to tell a story. And sometimes we use a lacuna to tell ourselves a story. We look at a gongshi, a Chinese scholar’s stone, and the changing light, the changing shadow, the rain, the snow and the mist conjure up changing images and stories around this stone, though we never forget we are looking at holes and bumps, at a cloud which seems to have been converted into stone, though the passing of the day tells us it is still liquid.

Thinking of the numerous forms that a single scholar’s stone can evoke, it occurs to me that the way De Wilde treats images is closely related to the way the second Wittgenstein tried to make his students feel or realize that we do not make ourselves understood with words or sentences that refer to objects or facts, but with a whole range of complicated rituals that differ from situation to situation, in the course of which our words act as ‘triggers’ for scores of mental and physical acts which we sum up as ‘understanding’ a ‘meaning’. “What has to be added to the dead signs to make a live proposition,” he said, “is something immaterial with properties different from all mere signs. However, if we have to name something that determines the life of the sign, then we would have to say: its use.” Or: “In fact we have found that the use we actually make of the word ‘comparing’ differs from the use we might have expected had we looked at it from a distance. We find that what connects all the cases of comparing is a vast number of overlapping similarities, and as soon as we see this, we no longer feel compelled to say that there must be some one feature common to them all. What ties the ship to the wharf is a rope, and the rope consists of fibres, but the rope derives its strength not from one fibre running through it from one end to the other, but from the fact that a vast number of fibres overlap(1)."


Not knowing

Johan De Wilde’s work is linked to every possible area of our knowledge and culture. It doesn’t just want to be art, it also wants to be in the world, to take a political and moral stand, to relate to the world of insects and birds, while not forgetting the existence of music and literature. The common ground shared by all these things is not knowing, modesty and curiosity. And solitude. Seemingly standing alone in the presence of things and the images they evoke, roaming through the rooms of our memory and our imagination, constantly bumping into things and constantly longing for new insights or encounters.

The basis of ostracism, too, is not knowing. The basic principle of democracy is that no one can know everything or, to be more precise, that usable knowledge needs numerous approaches which should not be synthesized, but placed next to each other and tolerated. Only once they realize and accept that they know almost nothing, says Popper in a conversation with Giancarlo Bosetti, can politicians think and act responsibly(2). If a political leader believes that the course of history can be fathomed and predicted, that knowledge can serve to legitimize violence. Once we start to believe that knowledge can be absolute or definitive, our actions become ineffective and harmful. The wonderful thing about Popper’s approach is that it is not founded on a truth we have to accept. Just as he does not allow the scientific character of a theory to be founded on a form of verification, but on the extent to which it allows potential refutation, he considers democracy not as the ultimate form of government, but as the form of government best able to avoid dictatorship. Thus ostracism appears as the ultimate barrier against all human behaviour that lays claim to certainty and it appears as a symbol for every modest approach to science, art and spiritual matters.

As a salutation to De Wilde’s work (which seeks diversity in restraint) I suggest we consider it from a crossroads: an encounter with statements and texts by two English artists I recently came across in Chichester Cathedral. The cathedral houses an early-Gothic bas-relief which Henry Moore greatly admired, but also a stone effigy of two medieval lovers lying side by side and, very unconventionally, holding hands. The sculpture was celebrated in a poem by the poet Philip Larkin which ends: “What will survive of us is love”.

In 1959 Erich Neumann published a book about the ‘Jungian’ meaning of Henry Moore’s work. After reading just a few pages, however, the artist decided not to read any more. “I didn’t want to know those things”, he told Peter Webb, “whether they were true or not. I didn’t want those aspects of my work to become conscious. Even today I still believe they should be unconscious and that the work should always be intuitive(3)." Writing poetry is “a skill easily damaged by self-consciousness”, wrote the poet Philip Larkin(4). Both artists are referring to the need to protect themselves against the interpretations of readers and observers, even if they both want to make work that helps people live (Moore) or that moves people (Larkin). These observations are not inconsistent with Larkin’s description of poetry as “an affair of sanity(5)." He was not interested in hypnotic mumbo-jumbo and atonal music. The point was to realize that reason is inadequate, even though it is essential if something of value is to be made.

This realization became the pivot of Proust’s poetics. Just as our unconscious, discursive memory is inadequate when it comes to giving shape to vivid memories, he did not believe an artwork can be created merely through intelligence. An artwork gives shape to what we cannot know, to what evades us, what lies beyond our reach. It gives shape to it, or evokes it.


Literature

Of course it is impossible, or at any rate pointless, to speak of art in general terms. “I cannot speak about art, only about artworks,” I once wrote. And recently I read in Larkin: “I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals(6).” During our last meeting, De Wilde told me that people often used to speak of ‘literary art’ in negative terms, but he still wondered what the description could mean. I suggest we take that professed incomprehension seriously and ask ourselves what the word ‘literary’ actually means. The same applies here: there is no such thing as ‘literature’: there are thousands of different works and approaches. However, in our study the following description is certainly useful: “To be literary”, Larkin wrote, “means to receive one’s strongest impressions – one’s subject matter – secondhand from literature instead of firsthand from experience, and to set it down in terms and styles that have already lost their freshness by being used by someone else, instead of thinking up your own.” Herein lies a recurrent dilemma in De Wilde’s oeuvre: he is convinced there is no point in reporting on one’s own world of experience, because he believes that images or artworks are inadequate, but at the same time he realizes that there is no point in treating things one has no experience of. “I am condemned for taking mere personal emotion as my starting point”, Larkin writes, “but is there such a thing as an impersonal emotion?”

For Larkin a poem was an attempt to capture and share with the reader an unusual moment experienced by the poet. In that sense his poetics remind us of Tarkovsky, who regarded a successful film scene as “sealed time”: an encapsulated moment which can be visited for eternity. The poem Larkin himself liked best, The Whitsun Weddings, tells of a train journey to London and how at every station guests have gathered to wave goodbye to a newly married couple. The poem describes that strange moment, that strange, hopeful train journey, which they will all remember later as the beginning of a future that is still open.

Nothing seems to be further from the practice of contemporary art than reconstructing an extraordinary moment like that and making it accessible. The only moments that still seem to be important are when the artist entices the work into the world and the public sees it for the first time. The artwork seems to have become a vehicle for the moment, something which draws the observer into the present, not something that records an occurrence in the past. Yet that is certainly not always the case. In my opinion Warhol’s series of portraits of women in varying colours evoke the image of the mother who appears behind the face of the beloved, or quite simply the image of the mother, as a young woman, who appears in the face of the older woman sitting in front of you, or the image of the mother, long since dead, which appears and disappears in your memory and dreams. Warhol did not deliberately set himself the task of looking for an image for mothers as they appear to us, but he may have tried to make madonnas, who of course stem from everyone’s desire to reside for eternity in the vicinity of his or her young mother. I also recognize this sort of strength in the work of Luc Tuymans. A sink or a hotel room appears very close to or far away from the unreachable mother.

Are there artists today who make portraits of their mother?


Capturing images

Larkin did not write many poems, perhaps three a year. He waited until they came to him. In his book Catching the Big Fish, David Lynch says that the initial ‘ideas’ for films (he means ‘images’, for example a man who finds a severed ear) come to him while meditating: if you make room inside yourself you become a sort of fyke net, which is sometimes visited by an image. I see this sort of thing happen in De Wilde’s work. He weaves nets with his pencil lines, and images get caught in those nets like flies. At least, that’s how I imagine it: images pass by while he is working, one of them is tenacious and survives. And how does the work begin? For the Hands of Time series each piece of cardboard was provided with a blurred imprint of a hand (reminiscent of the drawing Ecce Homo and De Wilde’s fascination with the Shroud of Turin: that strange forgery of an original which never existed, that strange variant of St Veronica’s Veil) which was anchored with hundreds of horizontal and vertical white pencil lines. Perhaps that repetitive action can be seen as a form of meditation, as a form of waiting, as measuring, cutting up or thickening time, like weaving a web: like creating a new space or a parallel world in which to ensnare images.

And which images are caught? We don’t know. Here we recognize a picture of a leg. It could be the leg Catherine Deneuve lost or the calf of a footballer from the drawing Heldendood (Heroic Death) or an echo of Henk Visch’s or Robert Gober’s solitary leg sculptures, which in their turn may be partial echoes of Rodin’s and Giacometti’s walking men. The colours call to mind frescoes by Fra Angelico or Piero della Francesca (and indeed we recognize somewhere a figure taking off his shirt which derives from The Baptism of Christ, and the work’s fragmentary nature is a reminder that we cannot understand a single artwork in its entirety, not a single one, save in an instinctive, almost purely physical way.

We also see forms that resemble shells, and forms which recall a birth of Venus, and tubular lamps and bars of colour, and a small vase which of course reminds us of Morandi but could equally have originated in many other secret places.

As an eight-year-old boy, Moore had to massage his mother’s monumental back when she had backache. Later on he realized he had given sculptures the shape of her back.

De Wilde told me that once when out walking as a boy, he had an extraordinary experience; it was “a strange, wakeful state, a sort of excitement, a readiness, a susceptibility I still associate with a work coming into being”.

Just as Larkin said he could not think of poetry or the poetry scene, only of separate poems, so too Paul Valéry repeatedly suggested that we should not speak of poetry and of poems, but of making poems. He tries this in his essay Poetry and Abstract Thought (Poésie et pensée abstraite). When I am walking, he writes, and an idea comes to me, I can contain it in a clear sentence from which someone else can distil the idea. Sometimes, however, I am not gripped by an idea but by a poetic mood, which immediately allows me to contain a particular experience in a sort of rhythm, in a series of sounds, which seems to correspond to the experience, but which in reality is different from a clear idea. Larkin put it like this: “What is always true is that the idea for a poem and a bit of it, a snatch or a line (…) come simultaneously. In my experience one never sits down and says I will now write a poem about this or that, in the abstract(7)."

If every artwork is a sort of raster screen, or a rhythm, as Henry Moore also claims(8), what rhythm do we have here? Images come and go. Here we recognize a navel, which certainly refers to a navel drawn by Ingres (we know this from De Wilde’s letters), but perhaps also to another image, which caused Ingres’ navel to loom up out of the mist of habit one day. Why was De Wilde drawn to Ingres’ navel? Why does the image of the navel return here?

On the one hand there is the steady rhythm of the white pencil lines, the meditative repetition, the careful scanning of time. On the other, there are the eruptive apparitions of the lacunas, the spots, the representations, which appear as if in a dream or something out of Luis Buñuel’s The Milky Way, i.e. without a visible or narrative connection. Ecce homo: splintered, a hodgepodge of fragments from the history of art, the necessary product of chance events: appearances and encounters; a fluid in which images, feelings, ideas and stories intersect, conflict, counterbalance or strengthen.
At this point I would like to digress slightly. When we last met, De Wilde talked about the emphasis on the word “us” in the statement “He'd kill us if he got the chance” which in Coppola’s film The Conversation changes the entire meaning of the conversation. De Wilde told me this because he was looking for representations or forms which can do the same with a series of images, I think. (Quite separately he also made a drawing on the basis of this statement, mainly because he was interested in evoking a sense of menace.) De Wilde’s fascination with Coppola’s film is a good illustration of the way a conscious, discursive motivation can go hand in hand with an unconscious, visual one. In fact Coppola once said that the film sprang partly from the desire to make repetitive images so as to find out how you can create diversity. The critical conversation is filmed as it was listened in to by the heroes: by means of subjectively moving cameras which accompany the bugged couple as they make their way across a crowded square. Because this event is shown repeatedly, other shots can always be shown, so that the decision to constantly show the same event produces a whole variety of different images. These images show us an amorous, adulterous couple, who know they are in danger. In reality, however, it is about murderers who allow themselves to be filmed to entice a jealous spouse to a hotel room where he will be murdered. So the images lie.
Just as Coppola creates a rich collection of images using limited material, so too De Wilde seeks freedom by restricting himself to just a few formats, always the same cardboard and the white pencil. The stricter these parameters, the greater the surprise when the image appears.


A Michelangelesque collage

This summer there was an exhibition of Manet’s work in Paris. The painting that made the greatest impression on De Wilde was the portrait of Zola, in which scores of images converge, are pieced together and placed side by side without detracting from the unity of the painting. What struck me most in this exhibition was the inner inequality of the paintings, parts of which (for example two women’s faces) come across as badly painted and overwrought and others (for example a third face) seem to be very elegantly executed and contained in the most beautiful enamel. We feel respect for a painter who seemed to find certain less successful parts less important than the success of other parts in the same painting. But then something else strikes us: namely that in other paintings he allowed different pictorial levels to exist side by side, for example in Olympia, where the black cat is like a child’s drawing, no attempt having been made to create pictorial depth, or in Le Balcon, in which the skilfully painted pale vase placed in an illusory space in the bottom left-hand corner stands next to the flat painted vertical bars of the balcony, without shadows, like green stripes of paint. Allowing totally different approaches to coexist in this way is consistent with the imbalance between the lady in the background in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and the three figures in the foreground (she is too big), an imbalance which seems to repeat itself in the strange artificial light which turns this outdoor adventure into a ceramic, collage-like vision from a dream. Could it be coincidental that Manet cut paintings up and regarded parts of them as autonomous works? And to what extent does the composite nature of his paintings correspond to the hodgepodge we call our world view, made up of old and new impressions, images, feelings, words, ideas, dreams, anecdotes, jokes, stories and theories, most of which do not derive from us, but have been caught in the sticky web of our mind-set?

Explaining his late admiration for Michelangelo, Moore pointed out that he suspected that Michelangelo deliberately kept the huge arm which seems to mar the Rondanini Piëta, because the imbalance and collage-like effect it creates heightens the work’s emotional and sculptural impact. It is not important here whether that is true or not. The important thing is that it explains why it might make sense for De Wilde to draw panels of diptyches or triptychs without looking at the other panels. Moore believed that monumentality is not a question of a work’s size, but of the relationship between its different elements. Now we see how the long, dismembered arm of the Rondanini Piëta, transfigured in Catherine Deneuve’s missing leg, returns in Johan De Wilde’s dream-like collages and we understand what Moore meant by “the intrinsic meaning of forms, seen separately from their representational value” which, leaving aside “technical tricks and intellectual conceits”, allow us to discover what was most important to Moore and Larkin: the temperament and the vision of someone who testifies to an experience by creating an image that moves us.


Montagne de Miel, September 11th 2011

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(1) Ludwig Wittgenstein, The blue and brown books, Blackwell, Oxford, 1969.

(2) “We should know that we know nothing – or almost nothing (). We should cautiously feel the ground ahead of us, as cockroaches do, and try to reach the truth in all modesty.” Karl Popper, The Lesson of this Century, Routledge, 2003, p 91.

(3) Henry Moore, Writings and Conversations, Lund Humphries, 2002, p 115.

(4) Philip Larkin, Further Requirements, Faber and Faber, 2002, p 78.

(5) Cf: “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.” Philip Larkin, Required Writing, Faber and Faber, 1983, p 197.

(6) Philip Larkin, Further Requirements, Faber and Faber, 2002, p. 38.

(7) Philip Larkin, Further Requirements, Faber and Faber, 2002, p 52.

(8) “I agree that everyone has a sort of individual form vision. In all the greatest artists the seeds of this form vision has been present even in their early work, and to some extent their work has been a gradual unfolding of this rhythm throughout. () It’s something the artist can’t control – it’s his make up. () The less conscious you are of your own individual form rhythm, the more likely it is, I think, to get richer and fuller and develop.” Henry Moore in conversation with Kenneth Clark, in: Henry Moore, Writings and Conversations, Lund Humphries, 2002, p 127