Page 7 - Enamel & More

LECTURE HAAGS GEMEENTE MUSEUM

My first experience with visual arts as mimetic imitative phenomenon I had at school,
where I had to copy postcards of painted vases with flowers and French harbours.
The copying as act was a very soothing activity, by concentrating on drawing all
worries about school and home paled.

I was good at that, but somewhere deep in me suspicion and doubt must have arisen
about what this had to do with art or with me. Despite the high marks I received for
such work I had the feeling that something was not right with the image we copied.

Only many years later, when I had more insight in art. I realized that I had been right
with my suspicion. I was fooled to the third degree by reality. The postcard showed a
badly painted harbour, this painting, in itself a copy of reality, was then photographed
and this reproduction had to be copied by us.

Although the act of drawing did not seem false, I did not feel happy with the purpose
for which this act was started, a threefold reproduction of a little harbour which was
unknown and alien to me since I had never laid eyes on it. However, my attention
was completely claimed by the act of drawing; the many lines that turned into planes
and forms, colours drawn on top of each other, the pressure exerted on the pencil
which caused light and dark areas, the direction of drawing; as a result, the problem
of the copied reality was addressed much later, despite the madness of copying a
photographed paint touch or -stroke. This is an experience in which an act is made
subordinate to an imitative goal.

Another fundamental experience, but now concerning the deceptive nature of material
and form comes from my infancy. From Santa Claus (whom I immediately recognized
as my grandfather) I got chocolate shoes (that did not fit me) and a walnut made of
soap.
These two objects arose my rage and disappointment, because I expected real shoes
and besides, after a bite from the walnut I found my mouth full of soap. I fell deceived
by the reality of forms and materials. Things you walk on you eat and things that you
eat are for washing.
Visual manipulation, the metamorphosis of form and material, I found later in the
work of Claes Oldenburg. While he reproduces the complexity of changes, layered
meanings, and associations in the relationship between form and material within one
material, I do exactly the opposite; I reduce the image to one meaning.

It turned out that reality did not consists of one truth, but that it contained multiple
truths, differences, similarities and even opposites. A particular material, evidently, can
adopt several forms and therefore functions and meanings; the form represents not
one but many truths.
Chocolate turns into a shoe and besides, the form disappears after holding it a
prolonged time in a warm hand, only the material remains. Apparently, there was
something constant in the material, as in the act. that, behind all these appearances,
reappears every time. Something with an independent value.

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