Visual Artist
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Constantly occupying a different spot in the same space


A conversation with Frank Van den Broeck

By Jorinde Seijdel

"Things. I say this word, and while I say it (do you hear it?) it becomes silent-the silence that surrounds things. Everything that is still moving lies down, flows to the edges, and from the past and the present that which is lasting gathers together in the centre: space, the peacefulness of things without haste." (Rainer Maria Rilke)

The specific subjects covered in this interview stemmed from a desire to obtain a deeper insight into Frank Van den Broeck’s theoretical and practical position in the current situation. How do the inspirations and fascinations of an artist who has been devoting himself almost exclusively to drawing for more than twenty years relate to a display culture dictated by electronic media and commercial images? Is his medium an anachronism in this environment, or does it potentially have qualities through which it absorbs or even annexes this image and media culture? And are the artist’s artistic motives and interests eroded or in fact upgraded by technological media?
Plain and simple answers are not forthcoming; the talk is a meandering circling of ever escaping questions, from which emerge some singular insights and ideas that subtly undermine the interviewer’s trendy suppositions or divert them into a much more challenging domain…

IMAGE CULTURE

"As our proliferating technologies have created a whole series of new environments, men have become aware of the arts as ‘anti-environments’ or ‘counter-environments’ that provide us with the means of perceiving the environment itself." (Marshall McLuhan)

You are a fine artist in an age when the image appears to be suffering from inflation. The effect of media like the computer and the Internet has been to bring about an explosive growth in visual culture; the dividing lines between ‘high culture’ and popular or commercial culture seem to be blurring. How do you relate to this? And do you think that observation, or the perception of image and reality, is changing?

Some art nowadays looks like advertising; it seems to be as insubstantial or glossy as the media. But I believe that appearances are deceptive: within every work of art, whether it is made with old or new media, the issue remains complexity, meaning and concentration, precisely the things that give art its identity. Obviously, I too see the modern image culture rushing past, but what I am ultimately seeking is something that lasts. We live in a period of overproduction, and this raises the question-what’s left?
I don’t believe for a moment that the new media have put an end to the art of drawing and painting: as long as children still draw, traditional media will continue to exist. A hand can write, can draw… this is elemental. Compared with technological media, painting and drawing are after all infinitely complex in their relation to reality and to the image, to the empty white surface. This means that painting and drawing will not simply end up in a collection of traditional old crafts. The fact is that every so often there is a revival of interest in painting and drawing, after a period of a predominant focus on other media. It’s strange to hear people sighing, ‘Great, one can paint again’. ‘Oh yes,’ I think to myself, ‘says who?’ Artists have never stopped painting and drawing. That was what happened in the early 1980s and it will soon happen again.
I do not refer directly to the popular media in my work, but I do have a large collection of images cut out of newspapers and magazines-pictures of anything and everything, from a fashion model in Vogue to news photos from Afghanistan. These images fascinate me for a variety of reasons: for their exotic or aesthetic qualities-I see a lot of present-day Caravaggios in the papers.
The influence these images have on my work is usually indirect, but on occasion I do actually work with a photo like this, I use it as a motif-the Vogue photo for instance. I rapidly abandon anything literal, however; a transformation process takes place during the making, so that the fashion photo can acquire a Madame Bovary-like quality, and ultimately the work might just as easily have been derived from a photograph by Nadar. ("E.B.")
I am convinced that media images influence perception. I think you learn to look at reality in part through the images you see. Photography and film unquestionably influence your ‘appreciation’ of reality. In the autumn, NRC Handelsblad published photograph after photograph of Afghanistan, in colour and full page: there is this vast, dun-coloured landscape with two figures in the foreground, almost like darks shadows, dressed in archaic, virtually biblical garments. It reminded me forcibly of Casper David Friedrich or Eugene Delacroix-he, of course, went to Tunisia. So there is an ambiguity: images that show you something of the reality, but also images that remind you of other images…

STAGING

When you are putting an exhibition together, do you make a conscious effort to accommodate the changed perception of the present-day exhibition visitor? In other words, how can you still connect with the visitor within a traditional exhibition model and ensure that he or she does not ‘zap’ through and escape you?

A year ago one of my drawings was hanging in the print department at the Stedelijk Museum, and I saw how quickly people walked past it; how short a time, on average, people spent looking at it. If I remember rightly, people look at a work for an average of 15 seconds. Prolonged and concentrated looking seems to be getting harder. Museums are not usually the ideal place for looking anyway, because they are so horribly busy and consequently too noisy; even so, I still regard the exhibition as a very effective form of presentation.
When I am setting up a one-man show, I do take the present looking conditions and the brief attention span into account. For example, I like to use the corners of a space, to create a sort of privacy and intimacy, and to allow something to take place between the works as they relate to one another. You have to stage things, manoeuvre them. Hanging the works in a row, one next to the other, can be very risky, since it encourages people to walk past. It is important to create white spaces, gaps, between the works, to group them. I have become aware that a picture has to come across even on a superficial viewing, and whether you like it or not you have to manipulate things so that it does.
I think that exhibitions should run for more than six weeks, that your work-which may sometimes have been years in the making-should be on view to the public for at least four months. I also prefer my work to find its way into small collections-collections owned by small museums or private individuals, who are happy and proud to have it in their collection and consequently show it a lot, so that it doesn’t end up languishing in a storeroom for years on end. Martijn Sanders, a well-known collector, said recently, ‘the Netherlands doesn’t just have a butter mountain, it has an art mountain too’. Although we can obviously never have too many masterpieces, that makes you think, doesn’t it?

DIALECTICS OF REPETITION AND DIFFERENCE

You often repeat motifs; at a superficial level one might relate that to the media culture, to the infinitely reproducible and serialized image…

The fact that I often repeat themes or motifs in my work, by treating them over and over again, is of course driven by other motives than those which prompt a technical repetition, a reproduction or an edition of an image. It is not simply a question of multiplication, as it is in a graphic or digital reproduction. The intention behind the repetition that concerns me is very different. It is about looking for the greatest possible intensity, about throwing light on a subject from different angles. Again and again, but always with something different as the result.
The repetition is essential. Looking back, revisiting… Evoking an experience, one that is virtually unique, but would not perhaps be possible without the experience that went before. The reason for the repetition is also a sublimation of the medium: can it be even better? It is always about a variant with new implications, for which you do not necessarily have to have seen the previous one. You can see something similar in "Je suis le cahier", one of Picasso’s sketchbooks that has been published. Continually circling around a subject, looking at it from different perspectives. Constantly occupying a different spot in the same space.
It seems paradoxical, seeking the difference through repetition-but that is what it’s about.

Repetition is often suspect in modern art. Repetition is associated with the copy or the forgery, with a lack of originality or innovation, with regression. The classic concept of mimesis, on the other hand, also implies drawing inspiration from a model, entering the lists against it…

Is there an original, is there a reference example? It is not a linear process: the experience of the first example is carried through into the next, and the whole thing is often intertwined.
Where or what is the origin? Authenticity is a precarious point. Each thing possesses something that does not allow itself to be repeated, but there is so much source material. There are differences between every version. In the final analysis, it’s about a fight, a struggle with yourself. And each time this produces an individual entity, which is different in each work. A ‘telos’, a unique entity, which is created anew each time. It is precisely this to which the maker, and also the viewer, can become addicted so that you want to experience it again and again.
You can in theory get a very long way through repetition as an idea or principle, in the sense that some elements can become available on call, but all sorts of things happen during the work process that you cannot entirely contain and control. ‘Forgetfulness’, or the need for it, plays a role in repetition where I’m concerned: the fact that you have made something so individual that you can forget it, continue with the next from a ‘void’. That you can fill the void again with suggestions and meanings.
FAILURE has also something that is factored into the principle of repetition-not in the sense of a flop or loss, but as an essential element in the process of creation, as a breakthrough in it.
This is to do with embracing and combating VIRTUOSITY. Virtuosity is not regarded very highly in the art world at the moment; the term is usually used to refer to technical mastery. My affinity with the nineteenth century is not confined to Baudelaire, Flaubert or Stendhal, Ingres or Millet, but is also reflected in the fact that I attach a great deal of importance to training, in an art historical and technical sense, to rehearsing and mastering my instrument. There were times, while I was at art college, that I actually felt that this was more important than artistic experiment-even though I was also constantly looking for combinations of image and meaning and for means of expressing and styling.

FILM

You have made a number of works ("Fin", "#1") that could be said to have filmic qualities. Were these things you put in deliberately?

I really regret that I never learned to master film as a medium: it has characteristics that I find extremely interesting. A number of works in 2000-2002 were consciously derived from the film format. They are images that have something filmic about them in terms of form, and also in terms of pictorial language. They have the same picture ratio as wide-screen film, and this reinforces their basis in landscape and allows the elements to ‘float’ in them more effectively. There are also numbers and letters in them, which suggest the typography of film titles. FIN. Done, finished.
A nice contradiction is that the letters in the word ‘Fin’, as I have depicted them, look like cells or sperm: in other words they refer to the beginning of everything. To be quite honest, this is something that did not come about entirely consciously, and in that sense it is a good example of how the surreal element plays a part in my work, and how life and death are expressed in it.
These images also create the impression that they are being looked at out of the dark, out of the dark into the light, as they would be in a cinema. My position in making them and the position from which they are viewed is almost a camera position. As if the whole image is created from the inside to the outside. The monumentality of the image, in terms of scale and compactness, and the transparency also have the qualities of a film.
My fascination with film is also a fascination with the moving image, or with vitality, something that is also a constant factor in my drawing. At the same time it is about directing, about manipulating a reality, a different reality. And something that is very important to me: the relentless reality of film seems to me to be a perpetual reference to death, to that most relentless of all realities.
Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of film, I once drew the soles of Cary Grant’s feet, after a scene in a Hitchcock film. Grant lies there drunk, absolutely plastered, but he is still spotless and immaculate from top to toe, shining from the soles of his shoes to his hair. Everything about him shines. Fascinating, so artificial.

"For the time being, of course, I am a draughtsman who took up painting…"
In an interview in "Het Parool" in 1989 you said, "For the time being, of course, I am a draughtsman who took up painting". You are a draughtsman who painted too, but you have also been taking photographs for years and recently you made a group of small ceramic figures: when and why does a specific medium present itself as something you have to do?

Nevertheless, I am essentially a draughtsman: making things on paper suits me; that’s something I’ve discovered after all these years. It has to do with time: I can deal with time better on paper, get to things more directly and sharply. Drawing is seemingly quick-compared with painting in oils, for instance. I was inhibited by a material like oil paint, I started to build with it.
Through the oil paint I came to tempera and through tempera to watercolour. The transparency, the rapidity, the short time span of watercolour, to let it set, to do something with it-in the end that suits me better than oil paint. Drawing goes faster because of the material, it behaves in a different way in time from paint. When you paint you can cover up, pile correction on correction, the image is created in a very different way.
One of the reasons I took up ceramics was to get more bulk in my hands, as a counterweight to the volatile materials I use in drawing-although my drawings are actually never flat, they suggest the illusion of a form, volume or object in space. Those figures came about after I had decided to start making line drawings in pen and ink. I found myself asking: is this space or is this volume? And so a new material presented itself, but I left it untouched for a year.
The photography is a very different story. I have always taken photographs, for the last thirty years. I took photographs without asking many questions while I was doing it, without much in the way of posing and with minimal direction. Photography is a sideline that lets me create beautiful images without having to be accountable for them. Although it’s not true to say that I just take photographs for the album; I do actually select and look for images that can stand alone. The photographs grew out of a personal preoccupation, although they are not purely private images; they are also a portrait of the scene, while the ‘model’ in them is often only half present, is absorbed into the scene, partly obscured, looking away…

LOVE

"When I say: I see that there, then the I and the object do not yet belong to the same order […]. In the dream, on the other hand, that is the case. The things that I see, see me as well as I see them."
(Paul Valéry)

What, to you, is the essence of photography?

The essence of photography lies in wanting to hold on to your great love-that’s how it started with me, literally and figuratively, with photographing my great love. The desire to record something that might soon be gone. It’s about a feeling of being in love, in both a specific and a general sense. This certainly does not mean to say that you only photograph beautiful things, or that the feeling-the experience-is unambiguous. The fact that you want to record something that is over-isn’t that a great unending goodbye, a continual death? Take war photos, it may be that they can only show those horrors from a feeling of love-a love of life.
There isn’t a direct thematic or substantive link between the photographs and the drawings-in a sense a different medium also evokes a different subject. Although, having said that, there is a lot of ‘slumbering’ in the photographs, and slumber, as a sort of intermediate state, is something that interests me in general: am I dreaming or am I awake? Is it there or is it not? Appearance or reality?

SHOW

"Alles, was tief ist, liebt die Maske." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Plato said that art is illusion twice over, a copy of a copy. Nietzsche, however, said that the appearance is greater and more metaphysical than the truth; he regarded the creation of appearance as the archetypal artistic process…

In the figure groups I am specifically concerned with ‘lightness’: are they there or are they not? What is it that I see? Is it appearance, reality, or a mask? And what is concealed behind it? Maybe nothing at all. One of my favourite writers said, ‘There is nothing harder to take than a naked person in the street’. Masquerades are important.
I am interested in appearance and reality. The figures are like apparitions. Among them I place more realistic examples, fairly straightforward heads, on the one hand contemporary, with a goatee, piercing and an earring, and on the other perhaps something that looks at first sight like a nineteenth-century death mask-an impression reinforced by the open mouth. The effect of this confrontation might be that the viewer starts to wonder whether it is there or not. Did the one imagine the other? Writers like Witold Gombrowitch and Willem Frederik Hermans constantly stress that we are not who we are, but that we are what the world knows of us, and that we lead our lives accordingly.
One image that imagines the other… Without being truly philosophical, I find that infinitely intriguing. But it is a very rarefied area-perhaps this is why I need to make these images in real material, more substantial than drawing.
It also has to do with the surrealistic or the surreal: on the one hand the fantastic, on the other a sort of realism. My work has surreal aspects, but I definitely do not introduce them deliberately, as a sort of ideology into which surrealism did sometimes degenerate. I don’t go looking for it.
The question of appearance and reality is one you never really resolve, but that’s precisely why it appeals to me. Perhaps art also has to do with something like ‘honest lies’, or sincere illusion… In the end, it’s about the power of persuasion.

BOOK

Why this book?

The book, this book, is obviously the longest-running exhibition. The book as a medium can start living a life of its own. You don’t know where it will fetch up, who will pick it up. And you can look back in it whenever you want: look back at different moments and in different circumstances and keep seeing new things.
A quick manner of looking is not necessarily bad in this context. I do it myself. Again it’s about repetition, about going back, about looking afresh. I always factor that in in my role as viewer or reader. To me, experiencing an exhibition or a book is not a linear process. I want to be able to browse, leaf through, from back to front if necessary. It all comes back to constantly occupying a different spot in the same space…