C92 Article
Going Dutch
We're on the periphery, but does that mean we're out of the loop? Here Daan Bruijel draws a few consequences from a visit to Amsterdam, in terms of bringing art to Ireland.
Last February I travelled over to the Netherlands to meet up with Marja Molewijk who is the co-ordinator of the All Ireland Festival. This Festival is an initiative of the British Council and will include music, dance, theatre, film and visual arts. It will take place in Utrecht and participants will be from the whole of Ireland.
I was there specifically to talk about the possibilities of producing a Dutch ‘special’ for the winter issue of CIRCA. It will, hopefully, carry articles on Irish artists in the Netherlands, on Dutch artists in Ireland, and on other cultural aspect of the two countries. Over the years many people have moved between the two countries and Ireland is most known to the Dutch public for its music, literature and theatre, and, of late, film. The Low Countries have a very strong visual-arts tradition–Jeroen, Bosch, Vermeer, Mondriaan, de Kooning to name but a few. It will be fascinating to feature some contemporary work from the two countries.
As our meeting was in the late afternoon on the Leidseplein in Amsterdam I took the opportunity to visit the Stedelijk Museum where there were a range of exhibitions–French poster design of the last two centuries; photo works by Beat Streuli, a photographer using a telephoto lens to photograph people in the streets of some the world bigger capitals; another photographer, Gabriele Basilico, who uses a large-format camera to produce black-and-white images of cityscapes which have great sharpness, with endless amounts of uncompromising detail which sucks the viewer into his visual world.
Rudi Fuchs, the director of the Stedelijk, has also curated a very impressive show of Arnulf Rainer’s work of the last four decades. Rainer was born in Austria in 1929. The first room I walked into had about eight pieces in it. The work–photographs of himself and others–is very intense and has enormous energy and it immediately grabs your attention. There is no distance between the artist, the material, the surface and the spectator. Rainer attacks the surface; he works on it with pencil, crayon, ink, his hands, quite often overpainting or overdrawing existing images,. There is great sensitivity in the use of the materials: the work of a person who is constantly observing what is happening to the surface he is working on.
His earlier works (1950/51) are mainly drawings which are very dense and intricate, creating their own world on the surface of the paper. Later on the shapes become simpler, made with crayon, pencil and oil paint. Rainer in the seventies starts a series of overpaintings on photographs, eventually using existing book pages to work on. In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Noch vor der Sprache (‘even before language’) Rainer has written about his own work in 1961, L’Art contre l’Art, under pseudonym Jaroslav Bukow. He writes about Übermalungen, Überschreibungen and Überbauungen, using existing work as the starting point of his own drawing and painting, where the paintings are a continuation of, a reaction to or even an attack on existing images. In a further article, Inner Conversations, Rainer writes how his work is never finished. He regrets having sold off his works as he cannot add to or change them. In future, he says, he will reserve the right to overpaint his works.
All in all an impressive exhibition, one that would be good to see in Ireland–not in the same format but curated especially for Ireland and the space it is to be held in. At present we see too many tired-looking exhibitions brought over from Britain or elsewhere.
I recently was asked to fill in a questionnaire designed to help the Arts Council of Northern Ireland develop new policies for the future. I feel that ACNI and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon should work very closely together to develop strategies to bring to Ireland exciting exhibitions on the basis that Ireland is geographically isolated from the rest of Europe. The people of Ireland should have access to a selection of the exciting work of mainland Europe as well as that in Ireland.
Working closely together both Arts Council would need to develop a funding policy aimed specifically at bringing to Ireland work by significant contemporary artists from abroad. The philosophy would be to bring in work which is difficult to access for a majority of the Irish public. I don’t mean the tired off-the-peg shows but new and fresh work curated specially for the chosen venue. After all it is easier for a school party from Donegal to travel to Belfast or Dublin than to Amsterdam.
Daan Bruijel is an artist and CIRCA’s Administrator; his most recent exhibition was at the Harmony Hill Arts Centre, Lisburn, May/June 2000.
