May 29- July 11, 2009
Curator: Lilou Vidal
FDC Satellite, Galerie Les filles du calvaire
Brussels, Belgium
Artists
Bas Jan Ader, Jean Baptiste Bernadet, Iñaki Bonillas, Patricia Dauder, Edith Dekyndt, Cyprien Gaillard, Amy Granat & Drew Heitzler, Barnaby Hosking, Marine Hugonnier, Sophie Nys & Philippe Van Snick, Paul Pouvreau, Lisa Tan, Stefan Tcherepnin, Pieter Vermeersch
This project was born from an observation, the doggedness of a certain form of Romanticism (in its melancholic acceptance) in the contemporary and conceptual art of today. But doesn’t this doggedness come from the intrinsic foundation of our being, whose duality between reason and emotion creates melancholy? Have not the negation and denial of this natural inclination towards romanticism revitalised its very sense and existence?
Historically, Romanticism has been asserted as a rhetorical critic of an ideology based on the logic and material constraints of the period of industrialisation and beginning of mass society of the 19th century. It was a question of giving free rein to the spontaneous power of emotion versus the rationalism that dominated the period of Enlightenment to which the German political and literary movement of the second half of the 18th century – “Sturm und Drang”,1 the forerunner of Romanticism – was already opposed.
The definition of Romanticism proposed by Baudelaire in his text The Salon of 1846 covers the main basic principles: emotions, individualism, interiority, infinite, a fusion with nature becoming a reflection of the soul.2
Much later, minimal and conceptual art reacted against the mythical and so-called pretentious speech of the abstract expressionists, extolling a certain lyricism and the emotional strength of the spontaneity of the gesture, to mention but a few aspects.
That is when the ideas was born that art must be totally pure and detached from any affectation.
When Sol LeWitt wrote in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art in 1967:
“It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with Conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the Spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry..() The expectation of an emotional kick, to which one conditioned to Expressionist art is accustomed (...) would deter the viewer from perceiving this art”. But as Jorg Heiser 3 emphasises, why would a spectator not think that a work is mentally interesting and that he can be emotionally affected by it? In fact, it was two years later, in 1969, that LeWitt published a new pamphlet in his Sentence on Conceptual Art in the first issue of Art and Language, when he wrote: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather that rationalists” and “They leap to conclusions than logic cannot reach”.
The idea behind this was developed borrowing from the work of exposition Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975), who today is recognised as the key figure that incarnates these two tendencies that are diametrically opposed: Romantic and Conceptual.
Disappearing in mysterious circumstances in 1975 while crossing the Atlantic in a small motor boat – a voyage that corresponds with the 2nd part of a triptych that he had called “In Search of the Miraculous” – Bas Jan Ader studied in southern California at the end of the 1960s at a time when minimalism and conceptualism tended to eliminate any personality cult in the work in favour of a more objective and scientific approach.
Whereas in his methods Bas Jan Ader adopts the orthodoxy of concepts that feature a systematic approach in the treatment of his work (films, photographs, slide projections and installations that are very pure in form), his subjects include references, sometimes very banal, that engage a romantic sentimentality: flowers, tears, sunsets, etc. Bas Jan Ader was himself both the subject and object of his own productions.
He became a master of confronting art with the physical laws of gravity. Many of his pieces are based on the simple act of falling. In Fall 1 (Los Angeles) 1970, the artist is sitting balanced on a chair placed on the roof of a bungalow and lets himself fall. In Fall II, Amsterdam, 1970, he hurls himself headlong on a bicycle into a canal. Despite the humorous tone to be seen in pieces such as his videos, the act of falling engages a sense that is much more existential and dramatic, even self-destructive. With his final work, In Search of the Miraculous 1975, the notion of falling reached its paroxysm, we are forced to imagine this man, alone in the face of the immense ocean, allowing himself to be driven by the whims of an uncontrollable sea before making this final leap.
The disappearance of Bas Jan Ader is somewhat reminiscent of Donald Crowhurst, a copy of whose book, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst 4, was found in his locker at university a few months after his disappearance. When a person disappears, there is always the hope that he might reappear again. As is the case with Crowhurst, we can imagine that Bas Jan Ader set up his own disappearance and is living another life somewhere else. Whether he disappeared dramatically at sea or merely disappeared from life, there is still this romantic idea of fleeing and escape.
The exhibition will present various aspects of this paradoxical relationship to be found in the work of Bas Jan Ader between Ratio and Pathos, Mental and Emotion, Humour and Drama. With regard to the method used, we can distinguish works produced from processes associated with the past, such as 8 mm or 16 mm films that many contemporary and conceptual artists have used, and the re-appropriation of photographic images or archival documents, texts, works on paper, photographs, fragments of memory, images of the absent, testimonials of a time that is no longer there... Sound works will also be on display for their conceptual and emotional potential.
As for the subject, we can identify various notions that are inherent to romanticism: the missing part, the trace, the affirmation or negation of the artist’s inner “me” or “I”, as well as picture references in their relationship with nature and the sublime. Some works also question the notion of the “romantic cliché”, the popular image made banal, which acquires a new strangeness by moving in a conceptual sphere.
- Lilou Vidal, April 2009
1 Maximilian Klinger is, of course, one of the key authors of the movement with his play Sturm und Drang, although the term existed before the play was produced. In fact, it was Friedrich von Schiller (Brigands) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who were the main representatives of this movement.
2 “Romanticism is neither precisely in the choice of topics nor in exact truth, but in the way we feel them. They are sought from the outside, and yet only inside is it possible to find them..(...) We therefore, before all else, must come to know the aspects of the nature and situations of man that the artists of the past either disdained or did not know. He who says romanticism says modern art, – in other words intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration to the infinite, expressed by every means contained by the arts.” Charles Baudelaire, Le Salon de 1846, Chapitre II. Qu’est ce que le Romantisme ?
3 Jorg Heiser, Romantic Conceptualism, pp 136-137. Jorg Heiser through this exhibition that took place in the Kunsthalle at Nuremberg created a new name: “Romantic Conceptualism” (also known as conceptual romanticism) is a strand of conceptual art which seeks to place emotion and a sense of ‘the hand of the author’ over the cold intellectualism of most conceptual art. The movement has its roots in age old ideals of romanticism. It draws on aspects of magic realism and cynical realism. There was coindidentally an exhibition at the American Federation of the Arts curated by Jorg Heiser of Frieze magazine, which aimed to point towards a group of artists since the sixties who have an evident element of romanticism in a conceptual practice. Early forerunners of romantic conceptualism include Cornelia Parker, Bas Jan Ader, Sophie Calle, and Tacita Dean.
4 Donald Crowhurst (1932–1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Crowhurst had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from the Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Instead, he encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. Evidence found after his disappearance indicates that this attempt ended in insanity and suicide.
5 quote from the text of Les mots dans la peinture de Jean-Baptiste Bernadet by Devrim Bayar
6 The initial idea for the film came from a conversation between Olivier Mosset, Steven Parrino, Drew Heitzler and Amy Granat. Oliver Mosset found the project to put on a theatre play in front of the Centre Pompidou in Paris in a biography of Jean Genet. Genet’s idea consisted of replacing the object of the amorous quest of the young Werther by a motorcycle.
7 Claude Lorrain was the pseudonym of the French painter Claude Gellée (1600-1682). Gellée specialised in landscape drawings and paintings, and spent much of his life in Rome.The Claude Lorrain Mirror is a slightly convex mirror made of black glass that produces a reduced, upright and virtual image of the scene being observed by reflection in it. Much of the colour is washed out, thus allowing the artist to concentrate on the forms and perspective.