Under the title Longing Belonging the latest crop of MaHKU students presented the results of their  research at Academiegalerie in Utrecht this week. Being in Utrecht anyway, it was a pleasure to attend.

The show is again curated by Mika Hannula, who’s lanky frame filled the doorway when I came in. I loved working with him when I graduated,  he’s a genious at making art theory complex and inspiring. I would have made his wall charts part  of the exhibition – wish I had documented them better.

The MaHKU students were asked to connect their city of origin and the city of Utrecht through their work “and, not to forget, the cities we pass by and the cities that we dream about”. 

They were meant to use a faculty called  spatial imagination. I checked the ‘net for a definition, here goes: “spatial imagination is the component of spatial ability that involves the ability of imagining the movements of objects and spatial forms. In spatial imagination tasks, a complete representation or parts of it may be mentally moved or altered. This has been conceptualised as the ability to make object-based transformations where only the positions of the objects are moved with respect to the environmental frame of reference, while the observers frame of reference remains constant.  

SI plays a significant role in many aspects of life, especially in science. For example, a routine activity in which children need to apply imaginative ability of space is when they visualise where in the kitchen they can find candy, even before entering it. Scientific ideas and theories, creativity in art and technology, and so on, are products of SI. In fact, to create something new, first an ideal model of it is built on the basis of the images and products of SI. 

Interesting stuff: check the full article here.

Having processed this, it was time to ask  myself the next question:  did the exhibition appeal to my spatial imagination? In retrospect, Joyce Overheul’s video work titled IT stands out:   Do you dare stand somewhere and just stare?

IT  is a re-enactment of  Francis Alys’ work Looking Up, where  Alys walks into view at a suare in Mexico City, looks up, keeps looking up, a group of also-lookers-up assembles, then he walks away.

Joyce did the same experiment in Amsterdam, where she herself was behind the camera and she’d instructed a couple of helpers to go look. In her own words, her work is ‘not as aesthetic’ as Alys’s is, for Alys’ work is very bare and hers is much more real-life-style messy to look at. I like bare, myself, but messy isn’t bad at all where Joyce works the camera.

At first I saw three random street views, then Spatial Imagination kicked in:  I wanted  to find  patterns. Which is what the brain usually does. It took me a few minutes to see  patterns of behaviour – people pointing at something, nudging, staring, bending over backwards sometimes. Then I noticed the cast – and started  separating  cast from passers-by. Ended up wanting badly to know what it was that everybody was looking at. This Joice does not show, which I think is smart:  tension built up but not released.

Academiegalerie
Minrebroederstraat 16
3512 GT Utrech

Participating artists
Jai Young Cho, Efrat Gal, Ceemin Golshan, Ji Hyun Kim, Hyemin Kim, Joyce Overheul, Enrico Piras, Sarah Stein.

Curator
Mika Hannula

Opening: Wednesday 16.5 17:00 h.

Opening days: 18.5 – 27.5 Wednesday – Sunday 13:00 – 18:00 h.

Took  Evi Renieri and her family to the atelier of Jan van der Meer yesterday. Jan is a gifted portrait painter based in Zaltbommel, who had the good luck to be offered a big atelier space that fronts the river Waal. It turned out to be a lovely big space where his paintings were shown to good advantage. We should all be so lucky!

The walk from my house to his atelier was made even prettier than usual by the cow parsley along the roads. I had to look the english name up –  must say that its Dutch name sounds much nicer: “Fluitekruid”. It’s like the roads have gotten lacy edges – lots and lots of the stuff all over the Bommelerwaard, the polder in which I live. Took a few pictures using my phone – have recently figured out how to get them from phone to computer using bluetooth. Another skill mastered!

I was hoping to see the effects of more space on Jan’s work. And there was! He’s using bigger sized canvases, for one thing. For another, he’s gone 3-dimensional, doing wood sculptures outside of his atelier. One was huge, a tree upside down so it became a cathedral-like structure. I lacked the courage to go and wind my way through its branches – very inviting, though.  Am considering to use this shape for a weaving project – nice and organic. How to fasten the yarn to the floor, though?

 I graduated at MaHKU doing games – both indoor and out-of-doors – and wrote an essay that I published as an online game here. When revisiting the game recently I discovered that it was a no-go with Chrome where it works fine under Internet Explorer.

This could not be borne! Having some time to spare today, I delved into the matter. First step was to find a way to debug Javascript when running my game under Chrome. For I wrote the game in Javascript, an add-on to HTML that allows for interactivity.

Here is how to debug Javascript/Chrome: go to the little wrench icon on the top right hand corner of the Chrome browser,  click ‘extra’  then click  ’javascript console’. This shows where javascript goes off track. In my case, the following error message ensued: Uncaught TypeError: Property ‘images’ of object #<HTMLDocument> is not a function.

Huh?Greek to me. So I went and checked my code to see where I did what with ‘images’ . This was it: document.images(u).src= ‘image’+map[u]+’.gif’. That, by the way, is how Javascript turns around a card – by changing the source of the img element so instead of the back of the card we see the front of it.

I hit the ‘net to find out what was wrong with document.images(u).src. First off, I learned about DOM – wiki: The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents.^[1] 

Now for the scary bit - wiki again: Web browsers rely on layout engines to parse HTML into a DOM. Some layout engines such as Trident/MSHTML and Presto are associated primarily or exclusively with a particular browser such as Internet Explorer and Opera respectively. Others, such as WebKit and Gecko, are shared by a number of browsers, such as Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari. The different layout engines implement the DOM standards to varying degrees of compliance.

Turns out  I.E. and Firefox have a layout engine that executes the document.images command, Chrome and Safari don’t. So I needed to find a command that exchanges one image for another and is recognized by all four browsers. Turned out that there is such a thing: the  document.getElementById command ( I found it  here , thanks you guys!). Tried it, and was perplexed because the game still did not work. Had a better look at the command, figured that I my images had no id so the software did not know where to go. Easy to remedy:

<IMG src=”card-back.gif” name=”c1″ width=”80″ height=”80″ alt=”kaart” onClick=”z=0; test()”></font></td>

became

<IMG src=”card-back.gif” id=0 name=”c1″ width=”80″ height=”80″ alt=”kaart” onClick=”z=0; test()”></font></td>

Then I got no more error messages, but no cards turned, either. Took a break, this helped, for when I came back to the computer screen I noticed a minor typo: == instead of = . This the computer neither forgives nor forgets. Once I corrected it – bingo! Game running!

Strange thing is, I quite like fooling around with this kind of problem. Takes me back to when I’d just started working software for a living. I remember bug-chasing on a huge computer printout for a week, to finally realise that I’d typed the letter ‘o’ instead of a zero in one little corner.Frustrating – but a great feeling of reward once I’d nailed the problem.

Having  just finished  Collecting Contemporary my antennae must have been tuned to the collector wavelength, for I found another book about a passionate collector: Dutch TV tycoon Jef Rademakers. The book’s title is ‘Een romantische reis door het leven van kunstverzamelaar Jef Rademakers’  i.e. ‘a romantic journey through the life of collector Jef Rademakers’.  Rademakers was the genius behind a lot of popular TV formats,  had enough of TV when he was 40, sold his production company, moved himself, his family and his fortune to Belgium and started collecting art.

Rademakers made the remarkable decision to go for 19th century Dutch and Flemish art – the romantic period that is so under-appreciated by present-time art buffs. This was a decision both practical and poetic:  the paintings he started to collect were within his price range and he got to exercise his love  for ‘looking back – which can give solace when looking forward is no use‘ (page 10, my translation).  “It is a mistake to say that romantic art is saccharine and safe. Look at the threatening clouds in romantic paintings, the ruins and ripped-off branches that symbolise transitoriness and death. There is always a feral element, something threatening, it’s always a double take: not just beautiful, but precariously beautiful” (page 46).

And did so very successfully! For in october 2010 the Rademakers Collection travelled to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg to be shown under the title ”Through the Romanticist’s eyes” – a collectors dream. The book describes the trip Rademakers took to accompany his paintings – a boys-will-be-boys story – which  irks me – not a great read. What I do find interesting is the part where Rademakers talks about his devotion – or addiction, even – to collecting, for ever since reading Contemporary I’ve been trying to understand the wish to own stuff. So I looked for his reasons to want to own a remarkable collection.

The local-boy-makes-good idea is of course a motivator: look what I have! Apart from that, Rademakers lives the romantic for a  reason. The paintings on his walls are his windows to the past, for looking forward holds no appeal for him: “future and death are really synonyms” (page 10).  He also likes to wipe the eye of art pundits that treat Dutch Romanticism with disregard, sometimes coldshouldering it completely:  “According to old-fashioned arthistorians, Romanticism never took hold in the Netherlands. People in our part of the world are deemed too practical and businesslike to have a romantic take on life. The words ‘behaving normally is strange enough’ are deeply rooted in our national character. Apart from this, our geography is deemed too flat for a romantic view of landscape: no white cliffs, no snowwy mountaintops,, no gulfs, abysses or perilous depths. Both our soil and our souls are deemed too flat for the intense emotions of romanticism”  (page 108).

Romanticism as a life raft – the title of his lecture at Hermitage –  sums it all up: one needs to own one’s dreams in order to keep afloat.

Later:  The Rademakers on the cover looks like this Rembrandt self portrait – cap, hair, moustache, nose, the look in his eyes, even …   Coincidence?

My garden is very beautiful these days – the wisteria drapes its garlands around the balustrade, scenting  the air with nostalgic sweetness. The tulips are blooming and columbines pop up at unexpected places. It is of course impossible to completely functionalise beauty, but the question is pertinent: what  relevance does beauty have?

The Relevance of the Beautiful

“So long as art occupied a legitimate place in the world, it was clearly able to effect an integration between community, society, and the Church on the one hand and the self-understanding of the creative artist on the other. Our problem, however, is precisely the fact that this self-evident integration, and the universally shared understanding of the artist’s role that accompanies it, no longer exists – and indeed no longer existed in the nineteenth century.” (1)

‘A problem that bestirs us to exceed ourselves is beautiful.” (2)

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 – 2002) was a German philosopher, best known for his treatise Truth and Method (1960). His essay The Relevance of the Beautiful is subtitled art as play, symbol and festival. It deals primarily with the place of art in our perception of the world – a phenomenological approach. Gadamer wants aesthetic pleasure to lead us to a greater degree of attentiveness to and involvement with the world around us. “Because of the beautiful we succeed, in the end, to re-connect to the real world.”(3)

Like Huizinga, Gadamer states that play is an elementary function of human life, and that human culture without a play element is unthinkable. He stresses that not only the players, but the spectators too belong to the game. Both can give themselves up to it – which becomes abundantly clear when we watch the way football fans in the stadium immerse themselves in a game.

Important in Gadamers thinking is the concept that modern art must break through the distance that has come into being between the artist, the work of art and the public. Where religion used to be both common ground and common purpose, since the nineteenth century this common denominator has been abandoned. ‘Play’ is proposed as a new model, a new common ground. A work of art is to issue a challenge to actively engage with it, but also to leave room for players to take up this challenge. The work should claim an answer, an answer that can only be given by those who take up the challenge the work poses. And this answer is to be an individual one, brought about by playing the game the work of art proposes. “The player belongs to the game” (4).

Art, played like a game, demands a surrender of consciousness and an immersion that cannot be anticipated beforehand. Play is proposed here as taking the place of religion because of its potential for transcendence. : “they both .. provide experiences of ‘otherness’, ‘alterity’ or ‘altered states of consciousness” (5).

Proposing play as a common ground, Gadamer makes clear that artist, work and public are to be part of a single game, a game that cannot be controlled beforehand and that exceeds the normal boundaries of perception. What really happens when a work of art takes one up? One must play along, give oneself up to it, respond to its proposition. In Gadamers way of thinking, the effect of a work of art is not created by the artist at its conception, nor is it defined by its formal characteristics, but it exists in the moment of and by the intensity of the public’s engagement with it.

In this, he is in complete agreement with Duchamp, who in his famous 1954 Houston lecture on the creative process, stated: ”All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.” (6)

In his book ‘Relational Aesthetics’, Bourriaud carries Duchamp’s reasoning further forward. Under the heading ‘The work of art as a partial object ‘ he states:”This type of [non-discursive] knowledge is only possible provided that we do not see mere delight in the contemplation of the artwork.” He links Guattari and Nietzsche to this train of thought: “Guattari prowls in the vincinity of Nietzsche, transporting the vitalism of the German philosopher. ”

This new take on ‘the beautiful’ suggests that aesthetic appreciation is active, more active than words like ‘surrender’, ‘immersion’ and ‘giving up’ suggest. As dinner guest and speaker at MaHKU symposium ‘Doing Dissimination’, Bourriaud enlarged on his topic and took the game of tennis as a metaphor for the relation between artist, work and public: “The artist serves, the public returns the volley. Different strokes, same game.”

(1) Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, page 7
(2) Nietzsche as quoted by Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, page 99
(3) Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, page 16
(4) Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, page 34
(5) Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, page 66- 67
(6) http://www.wisdomportal.com/Cinema-Machine/Duchamp-CreativeAct.html