HORRIBLE POSSIBILITIES Drawings by Philippe Vandenberg ‘The nigger paints himself. He also paints the other. But it is no different: the other is always just himself, the other is always me.’1 The drawings of Philippe Vandenberg, which I discuss in this text, were selected by the artist Berlinde De Bruyckere for the joint publication Philippe Vandenberg/Berlinde De Bruyckere. Innocence is precisely: never to avoid the worst.2 They were made in 1996, a year that marked both a personal and artistic turning point for Vandenberg. It was a time of feverish creative impulses, in which his system of symbols became increasingly more autonomous and concrete, and this in a very unique and highly authentic way. The drawings of torture and humiliation, of lust, murder and death are incredibly complex. They can be subdivided into approximately four categories: 1. drawings that are directly inspired by existing religious works; 2. drawings that might be linked entirely, or partially, to NOTES Observations: In the original text and notes, the author translated as many of the quotes in foreign languages as possible into Dutch. This also applied to the letters and texts of Philippe Vandenberg, which were partly written in French. In this version, these have been translated into English from the Dutch, with two exceptions: quotations taken from the artist’s texts collated in Œuvre 2000-2006 have been taken from the English translations provided in the book, and those of Georges Bataille from Les larmes d’Eros, have been taken from the English edition: The Tears of Eros, City Lights Books, 1989. Own testimonies are referred to as ‘conversations with Ph. Vandenberg’. Where the author quoted from Dutch publications in his original text, the translator has provided references to English editions. 1
Philippe Vandenberg, ‘Letter to the Nigger’ in A. Tourneux (ed.), Philippe Vandenberg – Œuvre 2000-2006, On Line & Musée Arthur Rimbaud, Ghent & Charleville-Mézières, 2006. p. 55, English translation on p. 147. Original text, Paris 2003. On the basis of this text, the Zarakoff brothers also realised a short film in 2004, La Lettre au Nègre, directed by Raphael Kolacz and Guillaume Vandenberghe. 2
In the publication Philippe Vandenberg/Berlinde De Bruyckere. Innocence is precisely: never to avoid the worst, Skira Editore, Milan, 2012, Berlinde De Bruyckere combines the drawings of Philippe Vandenberg with her own. The Skira book contains the complete selection, but a number of these drawings are also reproduced here. The book forms the introduction to the exhibition of the same name in the De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art in Tilburg (2012) and La Maison Rouge in Paris (2014). 1