Nobody
likes to admit it but if you do not work you eventually
start to get bored.That was definitively my case. As
a young man I experienced numerous love affairs. During
my time off, I strolled along the Espinel and there
was always somebody to be found but after that Bruna
came, and that lasted for four years. Life in Buenos
Aires starts to lose its attractions when you are jobless,
living alone with a cat and not being very fond of
reading or roaming through the city.
--Julio Cortázar, Collected Stories, Meulenhoff:
Amsterdam, (1996).
The above described experience of Tito Balcárel,
a character in one of the marvellous stories of the Argentinian
writer Julio Cortázar,
is not a unique one. Several studies produced by Dutch "leisure
managers" in the Benelux have proven that a large
part of the European population considers "free time" as
a residual product generated by the working week. In a
recent publication, which deals with the historical development
of the concept leisure time, the Dutch journalist Rudie
Kagie comes to the conclusion that in a 24-hour economy
like ours more and more people would no longer know how
to handle their leisure time, if they could not rely on
events and activities which are carefully planned by travel
agencies, tourist offices, and event planners. Free time
is no longer "free." It is structured in a rigid
way and it takes up a large part of the monthly budget
available for living expenses. Kagie claims that we have
evolved from a time when factory employers and chiefs of
big companies minutely organized every spare minute their
laborers had out of fear they might otherwise - if they
only worked six days a week - ruin themselves while drinking
or gambling. Now we have reached a period in which the
employees themselves have developed an almost hysterical
fear of boredom and are desperately looking for organized
entertainment. An obsession with incessant activity, with
bustle and hum, a paranoid fear of inertia and laziness
seem to have become common phenomenon. It makes us nostalgic
of figures such as Oblomov, the anti-hero in Gontcharov's
eponymous novel, who spends endless hours doing absolutely
nothing, daydreaming, musing and enjoying sleep; "the
gentle rocking travel along the river of the dark," as
Anthony Burgess refers to it.
Traditionally artists seem to live in
an autonomous time zone between work and leisure. Their
time does not to fall into any specific and well-defined
category. This partly has to do with the fact that you
can never bring creativity to a halt whether it is Sunday
or Monday, nor can you send imagination on a holiday. But
it equally relates to the fact that the artwork itself
is trapped in a vacuum between past, present and future.
The works in this show directly or indirectly deal with
this indeterminateness. They question the essence and construction
of concepts and principles such as labor and relaxation,
work and leisure, time and moment.
Time remembered and reconstructed is
a central issue in the work of Silke Schatz. She deals
with what the classical philosopher Saint Augustine called, "that
which has not yet vanished into oblivion and that which
has not yet been buried." Personal and collective
memories are reconstructed in monumental semi-architectural
drawings. She draws rooms and houses - related to her own
past - not as they are but as they appear to the inner
eye. Just like the Scottish artist Kenny Macleod she jostles
and juggles with concepts such as reality and fiction,
lived and remembered experience.
In the video by Macleod titled Breaking
Up, we are confronted with the overlapping stories
of two characters reliving their affair. Their personalities
never become clearly defined, the difference between
lie and truth is continuously blurred and the past stubbornly
collides and interferes with the present. This sort of
uncertain relationship between sign, image and meaning
recurs time and again in Macleod's work. Words and images
are played off against one another and the precise relationship
between them escapes our understanding.
The works of Manfred Pernice, Ellen
Brusselmans and Asta Grafting show a preoccupation with
the cracks and crevices of ordinary life. Grafting brings
us pictures and portraits of ventriloquists in the series "Ventastec" (2001).
At first, one is led to believe that the preoccupation
of these "actors" with their dolls is a mere
hobby. The German artist however subtly hints at the fact
that 'speaking through the mouth of an inanimate object'
relates to much more complex issues such as construction
of identity and self-analysis.
Manfred Pernice uses makeshift wooden
constructions, images and real-life elements in order to
create the ambience of a garden party - a free afternoon
in the sun. His installation can be read as both a sculpture
and an arrangement of functional elements for everyday
use. The decor he sets up can however be changed and transformed
at will of the public. What matters is not the objects
in itself but the atmosphere they evoke. A similar concentration
in the everyday atmosphere occurs in the photographs of
Ellen Brusselmans. To create the series Untitled/H20 (2002),
she spent time at a swimming pool in the middle of a small
industrial town - an artificial little Eden where tropical
paradise is meagerly represented by a few stereotypes such
as palm trees and waterfalls. The photographs pinpoint
moments in which this 'pleasure hall' becomes a near abstract
location, where the hard edges of the artificial environment
become vague and smooth, producing a dream-like quality.
Ettore Spalletti shares Brusselman's
interest in the visual poetry of soft shapes and pure curves.
Beauty - as a primary utterance of intelligence, a genetic
reality, a gift and a sacrifice - is the favorite subject
of the Mediterranean artist. He deals with silence and
isolation. His sculptural paintings predate the post-modern
preoccupation with "the aesthetics of ugliness." They
are suspended in time.
Jessica Diamond uses a medium that can
equally be called timeless and rooted in tradition. Her
wall paintings seem to be a tribute to the ephemeral. They
appear and disappear, staying only for a short while. This
aspect seems to be reinforced by the explicit message that
the painting conveys. The phrase "I hate business" seems
to be a powerful statement of an artist who refuses to
get trapped in and by the mechanisms of a capitalist art
world. An artist who refuses to live up to the expectations
of high production and big sales, an artist who chooses
to live in her own time.
The element linking all of these heterogeneous
works into a harmonious whole is "virtually" present.
It is a fin-de-siecle painting of a young aristocratic
girl, dressed in black, hand on the doorknob as if she
were ready to leave with her eyes fixed on an indeterminate
point in front of the canvas. The 19th century painter
Theo Van Rysselberghe did not so much paint the sfumato
portrait of the daughter of one of his acquaintances as
the title leads us to expect. Rather, he depicted an anonymous
girl caught daydreaming. Although her features are fixed
in oil paint, she is hardly present, but rather suspended
in time; caught in a similar crevice between "then" and "now".
Jan Hoet with Ann Demeester
© 2002
Mr. Hoet (Israel Pavilion for the 2003 Venice Bienale,
Sonsbeek Netherlands, 2001 and Documenta IX Germany, 1992)
is currently the Director of the Museum for Contemporary
Art (SMAK) in Ghent, Belgium and the acting Director of
the Museum for Contemporary Art and Design (MARTa) in Herford,
Germany. Ms. Demeester is a Curator at MARTa and the Director
of the kunsthalle W139 in Amsterdam.
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