Artists in Transit
Why travel? Some people do it for business, love, money, pleasure.
Why stay home? Others prefer to dream of distant places which never make it into their reality.
Then there are artists. People who continually explore the horizons of the globe and their own imaginations. The current Den Haag Sculpture exhibition ‘De Overkant/Down Under’ celebrates this impulse and 400 years of connection between Australia and the Netherlands with the theme ‘Curiosity, Discovery and the Desire for the Unknown’.
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| Royalty & Art: Yeah! |
At the opening ceremony the Ambassador of Australia, Stephen Brady, spoke about the intellectual and creative purity that gives art the capacity to “inspire and challenge us, and the power to lift us from the repetition of daily life.” Quoting Dutch intellectual Rob Riemen, he said: “If there is anything – other than love and friendship – that can give meaning to life, it is the beauty of art.”
Ambassador Brady spoke of the role art plays in society, having “a far nobler role than mere imitative or representative function; Art is what underpins the very fabric of civilisation, it alone has the capacity to ennoble us and make a civilisation great.” While this made me giggle a little, reminding me of that Springfield founder in the Simpson’s who said ‘a noble mind enbiggens the soul’, it was a surprisingly heartfelt articulation of sentiment, and continued with a reference to the contemporary political climate with “a society that ignores the ennoblement of the spirit, a society that does not cultivate the great human ideas, will end… in violence and destruction.” Brady also quoted Art and Australia editor Katrina Schwarz, who recently wrote “contemporary art posits a new context – one not located within a particular country, but rather in a state of transit.
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands inspected all the works and opened the exhibition by raising Jon Campbell’s bright pink and green flag reading simply ‘yeah!’, a joyful affirmation of the place of art in society, and of artists seen vibrantly out there on the streets.
Sadly, I managed to completely overlook Fiona Hall’s Force Field (Garden The Hague), which is a shame, as her work is consistently poetic, detailed and beautifully realised. Perhaps it was a very subtle intervention, or else I was too busy wondering at the broken plywood construction of Callum Morton’s Untitled (Billboard). The installation of work by Ricky Swallow and Patricia Piccinini was a little uneven, with his Darth Vader head spilling over the edge of the unpainted plywood stand, awkwardly placed in a greenhouse next to Nest, one of Piccinini’s glossy chrome motorbike creatures. Swallow’s Flying on the ground is wrong, a tiny bronze bird corpse, is lost between the two larger works, and could have made a much stronger impact on its own.
Richard Goodwin’s architectural installation brilliantly mimicked the police hut set up further down the Lange Voorhout to monitor the American Embassy over the road. Goodwin’s surveillance video of the street and subtle name change from Politie (Police) to Parasite is a wry reflection on the contemporary obsession with safety and monitoring, asking of who, and for whom? The sinister tone was complemented by the placement opposite of Harold de Bree’s Entrance B4, an ominous, unmarked grey concrete bunker with a single gated door leading nowhere. The dark side of curiosity and the unknown being eloquently intimated through both these works. Don’t ask, don’t pry.
Mikala Dwyer’s IOU letters in 6-foot high reflective silver metal spoke expressively of the debt owed to the colonised world by the colonising forces. This piece framed the gently civilised tree-lined avenue in the Dutch capital with a sense of implicit exploitation, and a question mark concerning power and the economic imperative of exploration and discovery.
Displaying a very Australian attitude of irreverence, Melbourne art-rock band The Histrionics poked fun at the entire institution of public art, and provided the wordly sophisticates with some light moments during the opening speeches and after-party. The appearance is part of their European Spring Art tour, which included Venice Biennale.
‘We don’t need no public sculpture/ We don’t need no tilted arc/ No dark steel barrier in the plaza/ Serra, leave our space alone!/ Hey! Serra!/ Leave our space alone!/ All in all it’s just/Useless steel in the mall’. Ahh, a pub rock covers band with a predominantly Australian audience – it saves the 30 hour flight back down under.
Three pieces in particular stand out for me in relation to the exhibition’s theme. Firstly, Natasha Johns-Messenger, winner of the Hague Sculpture Rabobank Award with Labyrinth, a subterranean hall of mirrors which is fittingly installed in the basement of the Escher Museum. The work offers an immediate and visceral experience of the sense of exploration and curiosity that underpins the show. The mysterious darkened hall beckons you in, and then quickly confronts you with a reflection of yourself, diverting your steps down another path, before throwing you back to the start. The existing mosaic tiles work beautifully against the dark velvet obscurity, and in my wandering at the opening garden party, I had the good luck to be there with Patrick Freddy Puruntaatameri, one of the Australian artists from the Northern Territory, who played games of illusion and discovery with me in the mirrors.
The next work to really capture my imagination and speak of the desire to connect, and find paths to each other is Robyn Backen’s ‘Whispering Trees installation. Along the Lange Voorhout, this is a poetic rendering of a banal telephone conversation taking place all over the world:
Hello, is that you?
Yes, it’s me!
Where are you?
I am here waiting behind the tree. Where are you?
I am running late, I will be there in 15 minutes.
Ok then, I will wait here behind the tallest tree.
See you in 15 minutes then.
Call me when you get here
Bye
See you soon
This everyday text is translated into Morse code lighting up the trees, and spoken by voices in 8 different languages. Robyn chatted with Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands about speaking Morse code during the opening walk-through, and encouraged her to return and visit at night, but we don’t think she did. The passersby who unexpectedly encountered the work showed their curiosity and intrigue by coming up to ask questions. One couple stopped to kiss passionately amidst the crossing of languages, English speaking to Dutch, German to Japanese, Iranian to Greek and Chinese to Urdu. It’s nice to see a work of art encouraging such an ardent emotional display!
There’s something interesting too about the interplay of royalty and public space. The Queen is also a sculptor, inheriting centuries of Dutch colonial history, teased out from traditional to contemporary life by the work in this exhibition. Robyn Backen has carved into her kitchen cupboards the final Morse code message transmitted by the French Navy in 1997: “Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.” This speaks movingly of the disappearing language and opportunities for discovering ‘new worlds’ at the end of a long journey into the 20th Century, and gives a domestic counterpoint to the public display of personal communication through a vanishing medium and technology.
The final project to successfully navigate this journey of curiosity and desire is a series of public interventions, provocations and invitations by a group of young Dutch artists. Curated by Erik Jutten and Ramon Ottenhof, the Bureau voor Hedendaags Avontuur (Office for Contemporary Adventure) is located in a wooden pavilion beneath the whispering trees, and offers visitors a selection of weekend adventures over the three months of the exhibition. Become a tourist in your backyard #2 offers an experience of adventure that as ‘an elusive force that tends to unravel in the realm of the uncontrollable, on a craggy precipice that most people cautiously avoid’; while Anique Veve promises to give you a new family for the day, and Esther Tamboer will take you out camping in the centre of the city. Further enticements include a food rave, jokes from around the world, an angel’s point of view, and an urban revisiting of Gulliver’s Travels. ‘You see when night falls and you close your eyes to sleep and dream, I have seen things that you can only dream about. I have been there. I was lost at sea for a long time. But I have been there. Oh yes, all the way and back.’ (Jonathan Swift)
It’s the coming back that can be problematic for a long-term cultural nomad. Where is Home when you have learned to make a home in any corner of that world that can offer you a space to work, dream and encounter new paths and directions? As Geoff Dyer writes in his travel memoir, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered Doing It, while musing on the idea of ‘home’ as a peripheral and slightly blurred notion, that maybe he was like Steinbeck, who said ‘I have homes everywhere, many of which I have not seen yet. That is perhaps why I am restless. I haven’t seen all my homes.’
We each follow the impulse to find our own home in the world through a series of journeys, short and long, geographical and metaphysical, internal/external, and mythological. It is an art of writing the map as we go along, unfolding the path as we step out onto it, making the most of each meaningful coincidence, random encounter and deeper connection that we find along the way.
Planning a trip? Browse Viator’s tours and things to do in Amsterdam, or check out things to do in Jodi’s Aussie homeland: Melbourne, Sydney and beyond.
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