2012 ENG_Berlinde De Bruyckere [m st 1550]

130

128

129

Berlinde De Bruyckere

Throughout one long year I went to the studio of Philippe Vandenberg at regular intervals.

My task was to make a selection from his drawings and place my own drawings next to them. The result would become a book.

Between the closing of my own door and my arrival at Philippe’s studio lay time and distance I needed to prepare myself for the task.

Slow progress, made on foot, by tram, by train, by taxi and all the waiting in between.

All that time was necessary to empty myself, to open myself to what I was looking for.

I remember every single visit to the studio.

Especially the apprehension at «being allowed to see,» at «having to see» everything in the workshop of another artist. What would I think if, after my death, another artist was allowed to sit around browsing through my books?

Am I really the right person for this?

These questions haunted me as I set to work, viewing all of 30,000 drawings, chronologically, most of them in sketchbooks or large folders.

During the process, as time and again I met a kindred spirit, all my questions and doubts were put to rest.

roof and bars of human legs. I lay the drawing in the middle of the cage. I crawl around it in circles. From now on I will do this my entire life: try to capture the image and its motif or the motif of the image from another angle. …

I push the drawing to the outside through the bars of the cage, where it disappears under father’s sole. I sit in the trap and now I know: the drawing—the image—will be language.

I must never stop drawing. The drawing will carry the inexpressible and will protect me …

L’image a tout pouvoir.»

Next to this I can place a childhood memory of my own. The wet sheets over the edge of my sleeping cubicle. This image is indelible.

Even though I couldn’t see it on the outside, I knew what the image looked like. On display for all the other children to see. And when I hadn’t urinated in bed at night, then I dreamed I had. I too began to draw as a 5 year old, to escape. To escape a cruel reality. In the drawing everything was possible. My imagination was my salvation, in this I was successful, but also very lonely.

I have made an intuitive choice. The sequence of the series works like a «large» narrative, in which it becomes clear that there is little difference in the cruelties people perpetrate.

Our deepest and oldest fears hardly anyone dares to think of, or that we simply reject with a shudder, he entrusts to paper.

As a 5-year-old girl I went to boarding school, born left-handed, which at the time was considered as something that had to be corrected. I began to stutter. According to the nuns a temporary symptom of unlearning my left-hand writing. But next I began wetting my bed. An even greater shame and humiliation.

All this led to great loneliness, irreparable, but probably my drive to create.

I often encounter myself; Philippe Vandenberg is a soul mate. Like Gustave Flaubert, he accepts no distinction between head and heart, between form and content. With people everything is related. In addition there is our shared love for the old masters.

What makes figures from antiquity so beautiful?

Their originality. How much study and effort does it take to get free of them, to create something entirely your own?

I sit, leafing through the sketchbooks. I never looked for what I thought was the best drawing, rather I read them as I would a diary. In every drawing I sense how he is searching only to come to the same conclusion.

«We are unable to change, we are doomed to be prisoners of evil.» 2 Every series is witness to intimate and internal conflicts. Only by drawing does he seem to control them.

Philippe Vandenberg left us an enormous quantity of drawings. They emanate a compelling force; he had no choice but to draw.

La Dame aux lions, 1996

This is tangible in the childhood memory Philippe Vandenberg describes in On the way in a cage is a man, his hands red. 1 Philippe is five years old and sitting under the table, drawing.

Mother is ironing on the table. Father comes and stands by the table. They start arguing.

Pain seeps into the drawing.

Philippe writes: «I understand the Trap for the first time, and the Trap is slammed shut. This table is the cage, I’m sitting in the cage. A cage with a red hot 130

I’m touched by the «painful» honesty with which he gives despair and doubt a face.

Lions attack a woman. They tear her to pieces and take her from all sides. I identify with the woman and the cruelty that befalls her, but I also sympathize with the dual image of the lion.

Symbol of power and yet victim of his desires, his fate. I cannot read this drawing as a form of bestiality, but rather I see the lion as the alpha male. I feel the pain of the body torn to pieces, I read the despair in her face. In every drawing other «wounds» arise. Wounds that transcend the physical pain. Spiritual harm,

which he can only make legible in physical pain.

The lion, king of the animals, bites with teeth like a «golden crown». In one drawing he looks at us helplessly as if begging for forgiveness, slave to himself. In another he is the most powerful, rearing on his hind legs with erect member, devouring the woman.

In another series of La Dame aux lions, 1996, I see the woman pressed against the ground while being raped by a lion with seven tails, like a seven-armed candelabra. Here the lion has another meaning.

The large bodies show swollen bellies, covered with small wounds from which grows a powerful parasite resembling the roots of an ivy plant. Only here the roots are red, like bloodfilled veins, covered with small barbed needles, that seem to want to attach themselves to anything, anywhere. Together the parasites are so strong they drag the entire body down, to anchor themselves in the ground, become one with the earth. They are far stronger than just one body can be. The body as a breeding ground, as food for an unstoppable parasite.

In my subconscious, the child did not grow in me, but from me. Probably in order to be able to control it and prune it where necessary.

Seven means completeness, perfection, the finishing of a cycle. The number 7 in the Bible is a symbol of power. However, seven is also the number of Satan, who uses it in an effort The Wound, 2011 to copy divine perfection.

In the series of drawings The Wound, 2011, I drew the wound as something formless as For me the lion here has something «Divine.»

I searched to give pain a shape.

The woman should consider herself blessed.

I compare her to the Spanish mystic Theresa of Spiritual pain, which can never exist of itself, Avila (1515–1581), who gives a painfully but always flows outward in a form of bodily pain. The deep dark red for blood, the pencil realistic description of her visionary religious drawing on top, as if redrawing the wound ecstasies. in another place. The black parts of the drawing, «This spear, I thought, he drove into my heart worked and reworked to the point of several times, and he penetrated into my destruction, like black holes into which all entrails. When he pulled the spear out of me, he seemed to pull them out also and I remained knowledge disappears. behind, completely consumed by a burning The exaggerated scale of the wound, covering love for God. The pain was so terrible I had to groan several times. Nevertheless, the the entire sheet, shows the wound in supersweetness caused by this pain was so extreme human proportions, uncontainable within our that it is impossible anyone would wish it bodily limitations. The wound, also as to stop, nor could anyone be satisfied with something positive. The pain after giving birth anything less than God. …» purifies the wound. We allow the wound to be licked shut by those dear to us, thus forming This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, the scar, a visible memory of the wound. although the body to some extent shares in it… even to an important extent. I find it important to cite the words of the mystic because she Romeu, ‹my deer,› 2010–2011 allowed me to view the drawings in a different light. I exchange God for Satan. I compare Reading Ovid’s myth of Diana and Actaeon the penetration of the woman by the mighty inspired these drawings. lion with the arrow of the angel. No spiritual «Diana wished she had arrows at hand. Instead pain without physical pain, visible and tangible she used just what she had: she caught up a in every drawing. handful of water and drenched his face. And as she cast the water of revenge that soaked the young man’s hair, the goddess said in words Parasiet, 1997 that were harbingers of his coming ruin: ‹Now go, feel free to say that you have seen the The small wounds on the female body in the goddess without veils—if you can speak.› series La Dame aux lions, 1996, reminded me of There were no other threats. But then she set a the series I made that same period: Parasiet, mature stag’s horns firm on the head she had 1997. I was pregnant with my first son. I made drenched; she lengthened out his neck; made them then, but never understood them I now his ear-tips sharp at the top, changed his hands realize. The restlessness and doubt I experienced and feet, made his arms into long legs, and while the child was growing inside me must covered his body with a spotted hide. And then have provoked these drawings. The realization she added fear. And the hero of Thebes took something was developing in me that had no flight and he was amazed at how much speed distinct image yet. An irreversible growing that he had. Then, when he saw his head and his horns reflected in a clear stream, he tried to say: left me wondering where it would lead me.

131

‹Wretched me,› but had no voice. He could only groan. And tears ran down a face that had been transformed. Only his mind remained unchanged.»

The myth ends in catastrophy. Actaeon is torn apart by his own hounds. Unable to produce human sound, his dogs no longer recognize their names. Actaeon’s roar is no different from any other hounded deer.

are soaked with the blood of wild beasts. When Aurora on her saffron chariot brings us a new day, we shall continue the hunt. Now the sun stands high, right midway along its path, and cracks the fields with its scorching heat. It is time to stop and carry back the knotted nets.›» The hunter’s ultimate sense of bliss. To have caught all that had to be caught. Victory.

Followed by the need to rest, to cleanse and empty oneself. The yearning for purity stands in total contrast to the earlier urge to destroy, but it is the only answer.

The stag’s metamorphosis is a paradox: his majestic rack of antlers seduces the entire forest but also singles him out for inevitable death. Especially the enormous antlers were my Berlinde De Bruyckere main inspiration: the strength it takes to carry them, to dash with them through the forest, followed by the humiliation of shedding them year after year.

In the Romeu, ‹my deer,› 2010–2011 drawings I explore the many moods of passion.

The antlers, ultimate symbol of seduction, also embody destruction. They are attached to your body, they grow from your body assuming infinite proportions preventing you from standing straight. The antlers turn into branches, roots, straining to return into the soil, holding you down, dominating you, taming you.

I asked my model, the dancer Romeu, to adopt different poses with the antlers I had made out of brittle wax. To express in his movements the fragility of the antlers, his urge to hold on to them while at the same time wanting to tear them out, knowing that this symbol of seduction will cause his ultimate downfall. A passion this grand will consume you.

And yet you have no choice. To exclude passion is to castrate, is to deprive man of one of his deepest needs: the desire to love and the suffering it entails. My drawings express our incapability to control our passions.

Romeu’s struggle with the antlers grew into a spontaneous dance performance. Forgetting how fragile the wax antlers were, the dancer ultimately shattered them, «accidentally,» leaving us all stunned. It was the only possible ending to the performance.

Another extract from Ovid further elucidates the relation between Eros and violence captured in the drawings.

«And now the mountain slopes were stained with blood of many kinds of animals, noon had come and all shadows had grown short, the sun was at the mid-point of its course, when Actaeon spoke calm and quiet words to his band of companions that roamed the hunting grounds: ‹My comrades, we have had good luck today, that’s enough, our nets and spears 132

1 Philippe Vandenberg, On his way in a cage is a man, his hands red, manuscript, reading for the Foundation of Psychoanalysis and Culture, 17 October 1998, Bruges.

2 Ibidem.

133