Nickel van Duijvenboden - Texts for Artists

Nickel van Duijvenboden	Texts for Artists	A Form of Caring (Marijn van Kreij, 2011)	Inner Glow (Wouter van Riessen, 2011)	Looking at Thinking (JCJ Vanderheyden, 2009)
Nederlands ← Back Collaborations: Gwenneth Boelens Geert Goiris Hans Gremmen Arnoud Holleman Wytske van Keulen Irene Kopelman Katrin Korfmann Marijn van Kreij Roma Publications Roma Publications Frank van der Stok Helen Verhoeven	A good text can serve as an instinctive editing principle for a book. Every now and then I am involved in the process of making artist books. In addition to rewriting, editing and translating texts, I do interviews with artists. Even though interviews are inevitably of a transient nature, I always aim to elicit broader statements about the artist’s body of work and his or her motivating force, in order to give the text a certain tension and longevity. The fragments on this page are excerpts of longer conversations.	Your drawings of Kurt Cobain’s leap into the drum kit make me feel that the scene is endlessly rewound and replayed. How many versions have you produced up to now? Between 40 and 45. When I started, I didn’t think about that at all. I made one drawing. Only later did it dawn on me that it’s about the act of drawing and repetition for me. I noticed that while it was perfectly normal for me to draw images over and over, it wasn’t for others. I didn’t do it thinking: this is a comment on authenticity. I just did it. I didn’t make any deliberate use of it until later. Could you compare the repetition of a drawing with the way we listen to music? If you like a certain song, you’ll easily play it hundreds of times in your life. But you only see a painting once in a museum. Yes, the experience is always linked to a moment: you listen and then it’s gone. Certainly when I began it felt right to use an image that is chaotic, in flux. You know there’s a lot of sound. It’s a moment when a lot’s going on all at once, that is frozen first by the photographer and then more explicitly by me. Looking back, you can talk about how he’s lying there in the drum kit, that it’s a classic photo many people think they know. I have a book that contains the original, and photos of what happened just before and after. Maybe that’s a bit of a shame.’ Why might it be a shame? The idea that it could just as well have been a different image. I know it the way it is. Finding out that there are others and, for instance, that the version I use is actually a crop – it makes you ask: just how important is it? My versions of this image aren’t identical either. For a while, I played around with several details, like the angle of the drumstick. I altered the legs a little. Minor changes, like a sequence of frames in a film. This one is an exception. I’ve let Kurt’s head fall slightly. I can’t say why, I don’t think about it too much. I just do it and then it’s happened. Do you consider ‘the original’ an overrated concept and are you more concerned with the act of making, the focus on something, the processing? [Deliberately.] When you make a work, you are continually making decisions. And yes, it is very important to me that you feel that it isn’t contrived, that it just came to be, you know? There’s a tendency to constantly confine it, but once you do that, you also lose the tension that something unexpected can happen, something outside yourself, something you’d never have come up with. With consciousness, I would never be able to do what I can do with chance. Marijn van Kreij: How to Look Out De Hallen Haarlem, 2011 ISBN 978-94-90198-00-8 English and Dutch 6.7 x 9.4 inches / 112 p. / paperback €10 Bestel hier	If you only know Wouter van Riessen from his paintings, it is a little unnerving to shake hands with the man of flesh and blood who bears his face. Different guises of this face appear in his work and inevitably define your image of the person. The portrayals, however, are mercurial, unfinished and barely human, leaving a great deal to your own imagination. [...] A large part of your work consists of self portraits. In spite of that, it is difficult to get a clear idea of who you are. There is something I can’t put my finger on. That’s probably because the self portraits are not very realistic. They aren’t about me, at least not in the sense of depicting a personality or identity. Rather, the self portraits are intended to be a way of investigating the ‘self’ as concept, as experience. Which to me is an extremely logical area of exploration; the subject is so close . After all, you experience the world through the self. Without the self, there is no world. Let’s start at the beginning. When did you begin to paint self portraits? As an adolescent at art school. They were always my most interesting paintings. Initially, they had a psychological nuance. I wanted to explore who I was, who I wanted to be and was mainly concerned with expressing atmospheres and states of mind. Later, at the Rijksakademie, there was more emphasis on developing a personal style. From that point on, the self portraits became puppet-like. I remember thinking: ‘Good grief, I’m painting puppets. What am I supposed to do with them?’ It happened inadvertently? Making a painting is difficult. If you are not a natural virtuoso, you have to find a way to do it. [...] One method is to reduce the forms to a basic shape. When painting a face, first paint a cylinder. I followed this approach in my work, but it left traces behind. I painted cylindrical heads. Of course, there’s an entire tradition behind that in modernism, but I wanted to paint self portraits. Then I began thinking: what’s really the difference between a self portrait and a puppet? The viewer has to project life onto the puppet. Think about a puppet theatre – how children let their imaginations run free even though the puppets have a fixed expression and there’s no theatrical scenery. [...] I began approaching it more philosophically and saw that the image of the self is actually far more of a construct than we tend to assume. Using the puppet as self portrait is more accurate than you might at first think. Wouter van Riessen: Inner Glow Roma Publications, 2011 ISBN 978-90-77459-61-4 Dutch OR English 6.7 x 9.3 inches / 32 p. / paperback €10 Order here	Your work gives the impression that I could just walk in here and, without further ado, start asking you profound questions. JCJ Vanderheyden is clearly amused, but immediately tries to lower my expectations. “I wish that were true. I guess we can give it a try.” On the train I was reading your ‘statements’, which are philosophical in character. Does art bear any relation to philosophy? “Art can be a type of philosophizing. Art and philosophy are both ways of knowing. I see them as parallel to one another; neither one is subordinate to the other — at least, as long as we’re not talking about forms of history, or art history. It doesn’t have much to do with those.” When I read philosophy, I often feel an urge to set it aside as soon as it strikes a chord. Not out of impatience, but because I’m already trying to move on to the next step. A good sentence has that effect, makes you want to start working. “That sounds logical to me. It’s because the activity of making art can be another way of philosophizing. Personally, I do things before I think them. That’s a different way of arriving at insights. Written philosophy doesn’t do anything for me. I know a few philosophers, and it’s funny how often I end up saying, “I already knew that.” But really, it’s not so strange. It must happen to lots of artists, or at least to certain kinds of artists. Beyond that, it’s hard to compare philosophy to visual art, because philosophy is a form of writing, a form of words.” I’ve always seen images as vehicles of verbal communication. But you once wrote, “The image is capable of that which words and language cannot name.” “I still think that’s true. It seems to me that language can’t furnish analogies to images. Likewise, my paintings can’t be described in words; there’s absolutely no point in trying. When people write and talk about art, they’re often trying to justify its form, but good art is its own justification.” JCJ Vanderheyden: The Analogy of the Eye Roger Willems (ed.) Roma Publications, 2009 ISBN 978-90-77459-31-7 English, Dutch and Portuguese 8.2 x 10.2 inches / 264 p. / paperback €30 Order here
				Translations by David McKay (Looking at Thinking) and Lisa Holden (Inner Glow, A Form of Caring)