2016 0519 20 vandenberg seminar transcript final [m fi 4235] issuu

SEMINAR PHILIPPE VANDENBERG 19-20 Mai, 2016, Atelier Philippe Vandenberg, Molenbeek, Brussels, BE

SEMINAR PHILIPPE VANDENBERG 19-20 Mai, 2016, Atelier Philippe Vandenberg, Molenbeek, Brussels, BE Wouter Davidts: Welcome to the Philippe Vandenberg seminar. We’ve also seen it yesterday in the film.

He’s an artist who worked for a long, considerable time on one motif or subject. Used it up, abolished it as it were, and then moved on to the next. Sometime he return to a certain motif or subject matter. But if you take the oeuvre as a whole there’s a pretty strong method, body of work from one to the other and they’re pretty distinct. The abstract works, the map works and so forth. And now the terms for it, bodies of work, are pretty personal and based on the artists’ account and titles, so the aim is to list these different groups of works. This is not something that we will do today. But it’s a start. So one of the aims is to list these bodies of work. We’re trying to come up with words that are not so bound to the biography but are more general concepts, art historical. Obviously this will never be purely objective. We’ll have to rely on personal narratives. But I want to move up and try to map the oeuvre as a whole in terms of […] And also a second thing, a general desire of the estate, is to have probably around seven key terms that are not literally bound to works, like titles of works, but themes or categories that apply to the oeuvre as a whole that could help them position the oeuvre today as a body. The desire is quite literal. If there is a show about the body or suffering then someone raises a flag, we need to look at the oeuvre of Philippe Vandenberg. And also for galleries. And also for collectors who are specifically invested in language work or abstract work. It’s a hard thing to do, so we need shared intelligence, it wouldn’t make sense for me to do it on my own. That’s the main aim of bringing intelligence around the table, if we add it up we can go much further. So that’s the second thing, and the third thing is the most methodological one, the fact that if you look the biography of Philippe Vandenberg, and early-on success as mentioned, arrived at an international scene but then it sort of abruptly ended and it suddenly ended not really negatively, he was local with international exposure, but limited. And from the present day perspective as art historians, if you want to write about this you face some kind of a problem. If you want to re-inscribe him within larger art historical humanities, it feels artificial to link him with established oeuvres, established readings and established vocabularies, critical languages.

And so the fact is that critical literature that exists currently is pretty local in its perspective and very much bound to and colored by the biography of the artist. And this is why all of you around the table [made] a very conscious choice to have little or no knowledge about his life. And much of the reading, because he was a person larger than life, that obviously colors the historical perception of the work, and you cannot get rid of it because … and the work deserves preserves more distance as it’s much stronger than… it requires a distant reading to really arrive at the strength of the work. So the methodological challenge for us, and there’s no obligation to any of you to write about this work, so we don’t sign contracts throughout the entire seminar. We want to spend the day and pick your brains and try to come up with readings and try to move on and if people want to engage further you’re very welcome to, but there’s no commitment so far. !1

But it’s a very interesting problem for work on revisionist art history that if you have to write about artists who are very well aware of the international trends, but not literally participating in them, like in the same shows as the key figures of the art historical narratives that we know. Participated in a few shows say in the States or Germany while he was obviously very aware of what the German expressionists, conceptual artists [were doing.], You can sense it. But there’s no literal sharing, as being in the same show, being at the same dinner table, spending time in each other’s studio. So the context around it is local and that also colors the critical perception Nevertheless we can agree upon that the oeuvre has a quality that deserves attention and exposure. So how do we go about this? Especially the children and the estate. We want to confirm the value of the oeuvre. So those are the three main aims for today. The principle is pretty simple: we asked you to select three works from the holdings of the estate. So the folder is a selection the children made with me. It’s a fraction of what is available, but it’s a start. So we asked you to pick three works. And what I’d like to ask you is start with one sit in front of it, spend time with the work, and then we’ll move onto the next one.

You don’t need to follow the order as the works stand now. Basically it’s an invitation to engage in an open conversation with the work. Without the obligation to being conclusive. We don’t want to make decisions regarding what the works are about.

Precisely what is lacking is a close encounter with the work that starts from the work itself. Forget about the biography and have it reenter if it’s necessary. Many of the materials is rich enough, there’s enough material to start from that.

[Helene logistical discussion] So Jesse is in charge of the personal archive that was donated last December to the Gent University Library and so they’re currently in the process of processing the whole body of letters, notes, and so on. So Jesse, apart from the children, is probably the most knowledgeable about the history and personal life so he can fill us in.

Jesse van Winden: Boxes full of stuff, but no works. Letters, photographs, administration, wide variety of documents, but we also included the children’s paintings of Philippe’s children in the archives there is an exchange of visual motifs and ideas and we’re digitizing all the photos and correspondence is very interesting because he had a quite intense correspondence with other artists, writers, gallerists and also other people not necessarily involved with the art world. There was an intensity of mind and engagement with critical questions, society. It’s very interesting to read all of the letters.

I’m very glad that his object were donated.

WD: We had to hire someone really fast and we needed someone with archival skills. But then we said we needed an art historian, because they can look at the material, do the archival work and the intellectual work at the same time. So we’re very glad Jesse came on board and was available in one week’s time. So the project is another much larger project that will take a few year’s time is the … so that’s one of the things we’d like to start. In order to do so there’s quite an intellectual work to be done so this just fits within the aim of bringing people together around the work and help us out to contextualize and see what next steps are needed for the catalogue or writing commissions. And obviously !2

exhibitions are key to bring the work into the world. And the desire of the estate for a framework to choose and to filter questions, theoretically refined narrative or framework And that is currently still lacking. So one of the things we aim to do provide for them is a dispositive to choose also are we going to sell. So I am not advising on sales but rather what is preceding it. I am not mingling as it were in the effective daily operations of the estate. So to be clear about it but I think it’s a great opportunity to spend the day within the confines of the studio with the work. So the holding of the estate are the total amount 14000? There’s about 2500 paintings (Guillaume 12400 paintings). So what we’ll do, the schedule for today is from now til one we’ll spend time with the paintings and we’ll have another 3 hour session in the afternoon. We’ll have breaks whenever necessary, and then we can have some time with the drawings. It’s a nice way to conclude the day. We didn’t include any drawings because to make that choice it’s too hard. We tried to limit it to the paintings as a way of framing it. We could do a seminar only about the drawings, which could be a second iteration. But I think it’s key to see them because they open up many perspectives. That should do as an introduction.

22:50 Anna Dezeuze: I just had a question, and maybe you don’t want to go there, but it had to do with reception. Whether there has been any art historical work on certain periods To help us provide a context for the works in which his work features WD: You mean more general work on Belgian…

HV: There are some books on paintings. There are four or five books I think. And they’re upstairs.

AD: Mapping tendencies in painting in Belgium?

Merel van Tilburg: But this in itself should be contextualized because very few of these books exists for the Netherlands and Belgium. So there is a lot in magazines and journals, but mostly literary journals, because again, there are very few art historical journals.

HV: The quality of the texts is very very poor. They strangely all have a very narrow way of looking at the work. No international context. It’s very local. It’s a very romantic writing. Always about his life. Even Belgian curators! They all knew my father very well but they were so mixed [involved?] that they can’t look at the work itself anymore. And he was a character.

WD: But it’s a job that has to be done.

MvT: Not just for this artist! In general, in Belgium, there has not been an international contextualization.

AD: But in terms of critics, they like to package to sell the work WD: But there is Jan Hoet. Hoet did the Documenta in 1992 and that’s when a few Belgian artists started to work on an international platform [?]. De Keyser, Thierry De Cordier, Guillaume Bijl. That type of attitude, like with arte povera [name mentioned unintelligible] has been inexistent. We’re always more interested in international artists than the locals.

John C. Welchman: I think it’s really true. I just did a little book on Guillaume Bijl who is in the Hoet Documenta. And one of the things I had to do was establish the literature. A good case example, someone who is working for your father and still working today. But !3

quite astonishing how little almost no one good essay, one good interview, which was in the SMAK catalogue. It was interesting because it was weird but it it was still interesting.

I got a lot of detail out of it. Almost nothing! And it was quite surprising!

Maarten Liefooghe: Maybe that’s what you found interesting in the article, there’s even the level of fact assembling, basic historiography. There’s been a lot on interpretation, but basic historiography, getting the information and facts there’s so much work to be done on postwar.

JW: I don’t want to talk about it too much but maybe this can be a case example for you, the idea of the monograph is exactly to put an artist who has never been put in an international context, and to see how it can be done. It’s a first step towards doing that because it’s quite hard to do. I had the international knowledge, but not the local knowledge.

WD: It’s a matter of balance. The fact is that now reception is mostly local and to bring in all the international contexts and perspectives, you need to balance it out. At this moment, I’d like to stick to the things themselves and then we can see how we can balance it out with local contexts en personal narratives. And that’s why we didn’t send you any articles – it would color it too much. Then you know what the work is about. So let’s try and see if you can present a different view. As you would encounter a painting in a museum – “This is interesting! I’m intrigued by this work” and then you might move on. That’s basically the aim. To trigger you through the work and hopefully if you want to move on, we can do that.

HV: But the thing with my father is also that he had so much bad luck. He was selected for the Documenta with and he was selected for a big show with Szeman at SMAK. He came to him and then he had [an attack?]. He also had a German gallerist who was interested, and then also something went wrong. So it’s not always about quality sometimes it can just be bad luck.

WD: Shall we proceed to the works? Merel first? To ontextualize it a little. Last November I did a masterclass in [unintelligible]. So to see the work and not necessarily explain it, but rather describe your choice out of the selection. Why you think we should look at this one and then then try to list what we see, or what we think we see.

MvT: First of all I am very pleased with my selection because I knew that you are a bunch of modernists and I would be the only one taking figurative works. And I also think they are visually and intellectually more problematic. And I know you want to talk about materiality but I think the motifs are more important in this work anyway. And I don’t want to say that it’s a key work but it raises a lot of questions for me that I bring along with the next paintings. And I chose it before I looked at the video and before I read one of the texts so I’m going to try to not talk about all of that information. But I chose it, I think it looks different on the image than [in real life], so I am a little bit sad about the quality and about the fading of the actual work. But I chose it more, let’s say, for questions. So it made me think of Jonathan Meese, this is a reason I chose it, because there was a point when Meese had a show about dictators and he said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if history had made a theme park or reserve for all the dictators where they could have played.“ And it feels a little bit like in this painting where Captain Sweetheart, the !4

artist, just sits on a nice teletubby landscape somewhere maybe in Bavaria or maybe France and hangs out with some dogs with lovely colors. And hangs out with Napoleon, and maybe that is supposed to be Bismarck, and a tiny purple Hitler. So one obvious question is about violence, which is going to be a theme in other periods as well. And maybe we can talk about the inner violence but there’s also this question of how politics and inner life are connected. So this painting sort of brings that out because why would you have fun on the grass with a few dictators. And there’s also an important question that I have, that I hope we can discuss and it’s about irony. If you read the texts and look at some of the more intense works that are online, etc. I thought where is the irony, where is the distance like you said yesterday there is no filter. But when I come here, it’s much more joyful, it’s much more light. So maybe there is some form of irony that I hope we can discuss. And how do you define irony. Is it critical distance towards your subjects?

Or is it something that has to do with other words that the artist uses. And now I am going to make a complicated backtracking: I come back to irony in a bit but I want to say something else first. For me, as a woman living today, the first contact with this oeuvre was difficult. I will just say it. It’s painful, it’s masculine, it’s a lot of pathos and I had to withdraw myself and say: don’t use your feelings, be an art historian about it. Don’t make a judgment before you know better. So I’m trying to get into this mind frame that is of this time, and not be judgmental about it but be historical about it. And so I started to think about other masculine writers in the Netherlands and Belgium and their discourse about art production. And I came upon a writer that I love, Gerard Reve, a Dutch Catholic writer, and he says this beautiful thing about irony, that irony is contrary of science, and whenever you cannot reach something factually…so for example if you want to approach God, there is not reason, there is only irony. Because you need to let go of everything. So maybe this form of irony has something to do with Philippe Vandenberg who also claims that his painting in the end is about mystery and he’s always looking for something that you cannot reach. So this is how I’d like to introduce it. Irony through this kind of selfstaging which is so obvious here and becomes diluted later, dilated into other motifs. But here it’s so very clear that he is staging an “I’m having fun with my inner dictators or dictators of the world”. So this is why I chose this painting.

AD: But for me irony is something of the mind. I don’t understand this definition of irony from this catholic writer.

MvT: It’s probably an ironic definition of irony. It’s more a question that I have. Like how can you understand the kind of humor or irony in the painting like this?

AD: What I mean is the irony I see in this painting I don’t see in all the others. This one for me really stands out as being very different. And that’s why I was thinking about irony being a game of the mind with this kind of distance that I don’t see so much in the other works.

JW: I think this is a good example of how in order to get to these levels of irony, to me, I would want to parse through a little bit more iconography. And I wouldn’t have chosen this work by the way, I thought you’d choose it, so I ducked out! […] told me I couldn’t have it! One of the things that strike me: where does this stylization come from, this figurative style. And to me it comes from several sources. It comes I think filtered !5

through the British variant of superrealism which is sometimes called superhumanism, which was really going strong in 1973 through 1975. It was vigorously kitschy and to me it fits perfectly with that and I don’t remember artists specifically, but these would have been in magazines and a young man could have been looking at the magazines…I don’t know the stories Helene: And the school that my father was at, with Pjeroo Robjee, it was this kind of work in the school academy in Gent. They called it Neo-Gent [art].

JW: Because I think the second thing comes out of album covers. And you can see that directly here, in my opinion. Because of Captain Sweetheart – Captain Beefheart, and Sgt Pepper – this is the militarization of popular culture through this kitsch, slightly post-1960s image-making, which was very innovative during Sgt Pepper and then sort of degenerated. Sgt Pepper is what, 1970s, 1960s.

MvT: There’s also this German-South African artist who does these magic realist album covers who was very popular at this time. On the kitschy side. I will find the name.

JW: But it did seem to me that the album cover was the one sort of intertext that might be interesting here. It’s also square.

HV: He had a lot of albums, so …

WD: Especially with the roses, a kind of circle.

MvT: This was going to be my second question, and also in the other selections, is how much influence comes from the outside, stylistically. Because here you still you see that looking for style. And you can say he has his own way, and he is outside of history, but I don’t think so. So how much is coming from things stylistically happening at this time?

How much is he of his time? This work, and that work!

HV: He is very young there. He would not even show it to anyone. First year of the academy, when he left university the first year.

WD: Also, his portrait of Hitler is very close to that of Chaplin.

MvT: I once attended a three hour long seminar on Marcel Duchamp before Marcel Duchamp. And at the end of the course the teacher said, “so can we now say that everything comes from his childhood? No! Forget everything that I said!” So maybe this is also a work that should not be over-interpreted.

Jo Appelin: Given the erotics and the problematic treatment of sex later in the drawings and the gouaches and so on the female body I like this because it’s deeply a queer erotic.

The lilac, and the arm resting here, and the roses. There’s something playful, symbolic here and it reminds me of the slightly/very kitsch birthday cards that you’d get that your grandmother sends. So this is something that is kitsch and there’s something queer about it.

ML: I wouldn’t say it’s slightly queer. I’d say it’s all over queer!

JA: Why is that telephone in the center?

JW: I have an idea about it. Dalí has a famous work from 1937, there’s an intimation of it hanging in the Tate called “Mountain Lake” where Hitler is put through and the telephone, with the snail going up, it’s very emblematic of this failed conversation between Chamberlain and Hitler. I don’t know, it’s a famous work in the Tate, he may have come over, it’s possible. !6

Raphäel Pirenne: So it’s kind of a failed communication.

JW: Exactly! I mean Dalí was…

MvT: Also, no wire JW: In the Dali, also no wire!

JA: And they’re not looking at each other. I mean the only person who is drawn in is the viewer that there’s no communication between them. I mean I guess the dog is looking up at Napoleon but he’s looking away so. So it’s not a conversation piece in the way that historically you would think of a group portrayed to be operating.

JW: Napoleon is bored.

ML: But then they can’t be the emperor. The title is … They’re all full front. The artist is maybe a little different but they could all be emperor.

MvT: And Hitler is minuscule.

ML: Yes, that is true. I think the suggestion of Bavaria, what resonates, is of course, with Neuschwanstein and to me very much a retrograde telephone and furniture is making this kind of bourgeois or aristocratic interior scene that is outside. This tension is very much there to me.

JA: What does this architecture signify? What kind of landscape are we supposed to be imagining? Is it completely fantastical or…

WD: Yesterday we thought this castle on the left was this German castle. So left is Germany, right is France, in terms of castles and castle architecture.

HV: But he had this duality of being Dutch speaking and French speaking, so maybe it’s the Germanic and Walloon culture. He came from a bourgeois family and was raised in French, but he went to school in Dutch and he always said my emotional language is French but my rational language is Dutch. So he was raised with both languages.

JvW: I’d like to make one addition about the lion. Might it be Koning Leopold, the Belgian king?

ML: To me it could also be Waterloo, the big imperial powers of Germany, France, and Britain.

MvT: But Leopold: He is called Leopold. The lion of Flandres.

JW: But that eagle, I’ve never seen an eagle look more like a pigeon!

JvW: But it’s interesting, that bird, because there are a lot of photographic studies that kind of predate these kinds of compositions, like tea sets outdoors, in the garden [in the archive]. Taken by him or by friends, because sometimes he is in the composition as well.

And very often there’s girls, sitting next to a similar table with a tea set.

HV: That’s my mother. Or his new wife.

JvW: Or in a couple of cases, it’s friends. Men and women alike.

WD: But I’m a bit puzzled by your remark about Duchamps. So your argument is that we need to pay attention to it, but then forget about it as well?

MvT: That’s Christian Bernard who said that. That you cannot relate the entire oeuvre of someone to their childhood.

JW: The entire oeuvre is about the childhood.

WD: With that moment of maturity, it’s what you told us yesterday, when you gave the small lecture about the oeuvre as a whole. There’s a moment when he goes to Paris when !7

he becomes a mature artist and then for the last painting he returns to that similar type of imagery. So would you say then that everything that predates it is “key” or not not key?

It’s an interesting …

HV: He writes about it. He says that for me, it’s just exercises in painting. How can I control the canvas? And then he destroyed almost all of them.

MvT: But he didn’t destroy this one HV: That’s because his most important “collector” from when he was eight years old was the pharmacist of the village. He bought directly everything that he did. [His godfather].

So I am sure he bought it because he brought this back from his house.

ML: I’d say maybe because they’re juxtaposed these two painting. This reminds me of Magritte. So yesterday when Helene gave us the introduction I noticed that this moment was kind of the moment of the big “startling” and actually the loss of some understanding and support. It reminded me of the “période vache” of Magritte, which is also very similar in many ways. If you think of a number of Magritte paintings, I’m thinking of the coffins on the balcony, or these reworkings of classicist paintings of Magritte’s. I’m not sure what it means but I can see these moments…And it’s not completely irony, but it’s not completely in an oeuvre, where Magritte is not Magritte.

JA: And there’s a text where he actually praises Magritte “vache” period very explicitly.

WD: Two people picked this painting: Rafael and Merel.

RP: C’est bon si je parle français? Je l’ai pris pour plusieurs raisons, la toile. La première c’est qu’il y a énormément des choses qui peuvent etre mise en rapport avec Walter Swennen. Pour ce tableau là en particulier, notamment toute la référence et sorte d’imagerie plus comic strip, populaire, etcetera qui est assez présent dans le travail de Swennen du début des années 80. Et quand je vois la représentation que je suppose être Eva, puisque le titre, en bas, c’est “Ma Chère Eva“? “Hello Eva Darling“ et aussi le visage de Hitler / C’est Olive/Eva. For me via the title – it’s obvious.

WD: For me, I never saw that figure as a woman. For me, I was thinking, where is Eva? I don’t see a female.

HV: It’s Olive, because he used it in other drawings as well.

WD: This could be the snake, of…

RP: Pour le style, il y a des choses qui sont vraiment assez proches. J’ai rencontré la peinture de Philippe Vandenberg via les expositions ou Walter exposait également. Et je pense qu’il y a des choses qui peuvent être mis en rapport, notamment toute l’importance de la littérature, aussi la pensée á l‘oeuvre dans le tableau, aussi bien de l’un que de l‘autre. Il y a des points de connexion qui sont là mais c’est très distant et notamment par rapport a cette question d’ironie, je pense que le traitement que fait Walter … parce que Walter il est très clair. Il dit il n’y a pas d’ironie dans le peinture, c’est un fait pictural qui est la, etc. Mais néanmoins il y a un ironie qui est également á l’oeuvre dans tout l’ouevre de Walter. Et ici, cet espèce d’ironie, ou il y aurait une sorte de manque dans la distance critique, comme s’il y avait un tentative vers l’ironie qui serait chaque fois est mise a distance – mais je pense qui est toujours présent - ca permettrait aussi de relier l’un et l’autre. Enfin, uniquement sur ca…après, ca c’est cote Walter, années 80, etcetera. Et la puisse par rapport a ce tableau pas tant pour – même si c’est quelque chose qui pourrait !8

aussi être discuté, tout le rapport par rapport a l’histoire…Une question qui n’a pas été développé mais qui moi je pense est importante et qu’on voit déjà la dans le tableau là [de eerste schilderij], c’est la question d’une forme de pensée Européenne qui serait là, mais en tout cas une volonté de problématiser quelque chose qui est la a partir d’une question de conflit historique etcetera. Enfin, c’est le motif de swastika, qui est présent, et qu’on voit en fait, se relancer a d’autres moments, ici complètement réinjecté dans un cadre ou la question, la discursivité est possible, est présent, il y a la représentation d’Hitler, d’une Eva supposé. Il y a un contexte qui est présente, des choses sont en train de circuler, de communiquer, donc il y a une forme de discursivité qui est aà l ‘oeuvre. Donc la représentation du swastika ici ou il y a une personne qui est en train d’extraire, avec une sorte de foret, une pensée subjective, ou le totalitarisme à l ‘oeuvre et extrait la subjectivité de l’individu, est complètement absente da les tableaux qui sont plus tardis, donc cette discursivité où il y a la possibilité de mettre en place une sorte de… une réflexion pour cette question la, vient de se déplacer du début du […]

MvT: Je pense que c’est parce qu’il y a cette couleur qui sort de la tête.

RP: Pas du tout, non. Je pense que c’est un symbole, une icone.

WD: There’s something about the painting that I saw yesterday. What you pointed out.

That some of the figures are painted within the contours and sometimes it’s only contour on surface. Like the jacket here. The figure is on top of the surface, while the head is painted under it, and it flips all the time.

JA: Which is a very different understanding of overpainting than what we’re used to thinking about as a form of destruction or creation.

WD: It’s double. It seems at some point you have a surface, like this one, pre-existing the image that goes on top, but not completely. Parts of the image are literally painted as figures, and others solely as contours or lines on top of a surface. I only saw yesterday that the lower left part is the most untoward part I think - there’s very little happening there. So your idea of discursivity, you’re onto something – because it does both. The swastika, it’s merely surface, or a pattern. In others, there is pattern, but differently. And the discursivity, in terms of narrative, arrives at some point on top of it, and then merges and then it’s distant again.

ML: To me also, in the ones that I selected, I found interesting this difference between surface pattern and depth that breaks the image open. So the idea that there’s no screen, there’s nothing in-between. Here [in the first painting] it’s kind of a diaphragm and stage is introducing this brokenness and distance, and here it’s through the figures also, that are just very plain and frontal.

WD: Yeah because what pours out of the head is a pure coincidence, but somehow…I’ve never seen it as such because I see the figures on top, which is purely surface.

JA: To me it’s very comic book-like, which does imply, that there’s a mediating thing, which is not a purely expressive outburst, it’s schematic, we recognize Hitler, because it looks like satirical drawings of Hitler, Popeye. These are all schematic cartoons that have already abstracted from “realistic” so in a way there’s much more mediation I would think here than in many of the other works. Because the feature that we’ve come to recognize as comic book appearance. !9

MvT: Maybe what I wanted to say about this painting touches on this. Because in the film, Vandenberg said “painting is not about materiality. In the end you have to forget the materiality.“ And also because all his references are people I have been working on from the nineteenth century, like Van Gogh, and all the writers he mentions. And this moment of art history, when you talk about wanting to reach the idea through painting, which Philippe Vandenberg calls the light. If you want to reach the idea, normally, for example in the paintings of Gaugin, it means the surface of the painting would only look like this [points to canvas lower left], nothing more, so that you get to the carrier immediately.

And there is no materiality. So this painting for me is kind of a struggle, maybe it’s because of all these layers that become flat then, of dealing with materiality, which is also a given of this time also, so much painting on the surface, but then, making the viewer forget it again. Maybe not through the motive but through other ways of doing it. And maybe that again, you could call discursivity, or irony, ironizing the whole painting process in order to forget it. So for me it’s a struggle between idea and materiality. Or maybe I am just using what he says. But if you’re trying to place yourself in the idea of Van Gogh and Gaugin, etcetera…oh yeah! He also says he wants to be a maudit – and maudit is not in the subject matter but in the way you treat materiality. But this is also a search through dirty painting. I am not sure.

AD: Well you definitely get a sense of him trying things things out. You start looking at this as a swastika, and this, and so you’re like, well okay, so there’s three different ways of doing it. And each case you have something completely different happening in terms of the ways of painting and the ways we interpret it and the ways it relates to the other elements of the painting. So you definitely have this kind of laboratory feel, of trying things out.

JvW: Same thing with crucifixes here. In the righthand corner, with the snake. There’s also something that resembles a building in green in the upper hand corner.

JW: And it’s a good example of him firing off these morphological variables. Look at the snake form, it’s reprised in the mouth form, which almost becomes a snake, and then the corkscrew becomes the snake. And even the swastika, it’s rare that you get both swipes of the swastika, because you get both the left and the right facing swastika. But that also becomes sort of a snake. And of course the cross becomes a snake, the snake becomes a cross. So I don’t know. Geometric and curvilinear being interchanged as well as the sign systems. But this is really good, to do a profile analysis of this painting. Because there’s probably not much, I mean I don’t know the work, but… in the oeuvre that’s more variegated abstraction than that corner at the extreme left bottom. And then you have one of the most expressive uses of comic strip and comic-based imagery. You’ve got motifs that will recur, the city and landscape figures will come out in the later village work as sort of these stick like diagrammatic city spaces so there you’ve got the schematic children’s cars going through, you’ve got the cross motif, the swastika motif, the meat motif at the top. So there’s literally over twenty different horizons of imagery and painting types in this.

MvT: And the grid! !10

ML: And the composition with the circle in a square as you have here [first painting]. A whirl.

JA: It becomes undone, doesn’t it, towards the edges?

MvT: Well that is also something that symbolist painters would do. That you’d let go of the image towards the corner, just to notify that it’s only an image.

JW: Well there’s a whole series of that, right? The oval painting, coming out of cubism for example. Because the periphery of vision, the edges of the composition, are the places you can’t really digest or analyse. Both Braque and Picasso would leave it less resolved.

And then they finally become circular paintings, as in you know, the 1912.

WD: And is that a music note? The pink one next to the chair?

MvT: Oh God! There’s a key! Oh no!

MvT: It’s a wheelchair.

HV: The little shoe. It comes back in 2008.

JA: And he talks about hands in the film. Some of the hands have ended with precision, and some are not. But then we have an arm that’s had a hand cut off.

WD: And the Hitler neck, seems an arm. A puppet!

ML: These figures, the two on the left and the two on the right, they’re not one image.

This is a scene in front of another scene on the right, so there’s a division, and they seem to refer to different comics.

MvT: And there’s a smiling face on the cross. Am I correct? He is smiling, and in real life you’re not smiling. And I am also very much perturbed by the stroller and the hand grenade.

WD: The stroller with the figure pushing it, but right behind it, there’s a bigger one. It’s as if it were doubled.

MvT: The grenade is the stroller!

WD: There’s a mirror image. But I don’t think this [one part] is painted as this [other part] is painted. But this appears to be a chance effect of the surface. It continues to be a double in this painting, that what is completely accident is then turned into… But this is a bowtie and a top hat! There’s no literal face but there’s the oval of the face.

JA: But that’s a very precise passage that you’re pointing at there. Because it’s very precise, it’s a very small passage where the brushstroke meets and stops.

ML: It’s like on the inside, the spatter. It’s like almost cut.

WD: So I’m just trying to understand the layering of the image. So part of it is just pure accident and is recognized and turned into literal image. Because this is painted on top of something that does not correspond. The backdrop doesn’t correspond to the image on top. While here, the bowtie is almost found, recognized. The actual shape is literally put on top. And here the backdrop just continues and the figure doesn’t follow. There’s something odd about it. It’s like two trains passing, that the images do not necessarily correspond to the backdrop. Sometimes they align and then there seems to be something partly happening. Like the crosses, literally painted on top, almost painted within the contours.

JW: And it’s the same as you see up there ML: It reminds me of Guernica. The bull with the long neck, the reaching into the center. !11

HV: He made a lot of reproductions of the Guernica later, a lot of drawings.

MvT: This was made in 1989. So did he actually go to Berlin at this time? Because it also reminds me of the mural paintings, or the graffiti that was on the wall. And the tactile quality, it’s like a palimpsestic wall.

WD: As if a wall had been gradually built up, because someone paints over something, a new graffiti on top of the other one…

MvT: That could totally be reading into it, but the color scheme, and parts are almost like spray paint.

ML: Like graffiti on top. Literal scribbling…

HV: He was very interested in what was happening in Berlin, and he recorded documentaries when the Wall fell.

WD: Is that a pipe underneath the chair? With the white contour?

ML: And then next to the blue one you have one turned upside down. Is it a cross is it a swastika JW: He must have learned from Oldenburg any type of insect shape became a ray gun. I also keep thinking it’s not all a coincidence, because some early images of Dubuffet in paris, 1946-47, which have the same schematic cars and schematic architecture and the hand, woman, pushing the pram. I mean if it was two things I wouldn’t think it was plausible, but three it’s possible.

MvT: Well there would be historically a link between 89 and again, World War Two. And also because of Hitler. He’s there again.

JvW: The figure in the lower corner makes you think of someone?...Ah Olive from Popeye!

WD: She’s more masculine than feminine.

MvT: This looks like a drunk Frenchman from the resistance to me.

WD: Yeah I wondered where Eva was…

JA: Is this part of a series, this painting? Or it stands alone?

WD: There’s the one with the carriage and the dollar bills.

JvW: But there’s many paintings of somebody sitting on a chair, tormented with a corkscrew motif or electric chair.

HV: But it’s an artist who is tortured.

ML: But the head being tortured with the corkscrew. It’s okay, it doesn’t make sense historically but there’s the comic book Maus. Someone gets knowledge in his head by books being “poured into it”.

JW: But it’s possible that Eva refers to Eve, hence the snake, and right at the center of the composition is an androgynous female/male behatted, smiling figure. If I was going to have my title I would put my central figure possibly in the middle and the snake, that’s so dominant in the bottom. That’s one way to look at it. So the snake refers to the temptation…

HV: Always so many layers!

WD: But that’s one of the things I’d like to explore when we look at things is to see to what extent it’s literally visible. So the overpainting here that’s literal [..2 mins of audio missing] The large work on the wall. It’s not fluid but it’s fast, it’s vivid. And it’s absent !12

in the handwriting. So the handwriting has … All of the other things always have a … even the drawings, they’re light, they’re relatively fast. Writing, whenever he writes words, I don’t think it’s as fast as … or there’s this disparity between that line, that just has a speed to it. And if you see Passion up there, just to name one, that didn’t go fast.

JA: In the film we see him approach the canvas and then he looks away. This zooming in - zooming out. So physically tracing the back and forth, to step away. Which is still fascinating to see someone doing it. So although it’s made up of lots of different patches, there’s this constant stepping away and seeing it as a whole. So we kind of breaking it up here, but I think it’s that he clearly understood it as a whole.

WD: The longer we spend time with it: it does fall apart. I’m amazed by the consistency of it. It always returns to an image that has a wholeness, but very fragmented.

JA: Have they been flicked, these white flecks of paint?

MvT: But I also don’t want to forget about your point about the engagement with European history.

RP: I don’t know if it’s a good interpretation, but in his texts he’s often speaking about this question of division. And metaphorically, there’s this disconnecting of history and of his own ways of thinking about the question of identity.

HV: For me, every work is like a portrait.There’s metaphors of these dictators inside them. He writes about it, all portraits of human beings start with him. […]

JvW: It’s also interesting what you said that there’s a version of this work with a man that’s sitting there with art written over him. At the same time the coat or the jacket is like a sculptor’s outfit, like an overall.

HV: For example the lion works. He said that he is like a lion destroying a woman.

WD: It’s a silly thing, but I always thought that the Hitler moustache was missing.

Because it has the haircut, but the moustache is missing.

JvW: I was also under the impression that it was Hitler. But much more cartoon-y than … like the way I saw the painting, it’s a very daring way to paint a portrait. The most cartooney of Hitler I have ever seen.

JA: But he has the stubble…sort of last days… He has the perfect hair but he’s not clean shaven.

WD: Shall we open up a little? I like the idea of seeing two things at the same time. We put the works together without too much narrative. It’s basically chronological. They work quite nicely, but there’s no argument whatsoever. So if someone wants to see two works together just say so and we’ll do it. So maybe we can move on and take a pair.

Maybe the black one and with the mouthpiece?

JA: I have very unformed thoughts about this and the other selection. But let’s focus on this one first. In recent years I’ve been working on a lot of artists who had a lot to say about space and their inner world. And disentangling the artist and the artwork is a and on-going and fascinating conversation to have. And so for an artist to give this profusion of ways into thinking about his work… He’s ready to come at them in another way. So he presents this huge painting in black. So how to think about this without falling into the romantic seduction of a work like this. So one thing I was fascinated by, the terms he used in the film, to describe his practice, and one of them was painting as an alibi. I don’t !13

really have an answer what that might mean, but I thought that was very interesting. The other thing was the idea of what an artist’s career looks like. It seemed to me, looking through the images, that he has these moments of radical shift in tone: abstractionfiguration just being one of them. And these moments of the artist covering the ground zero of painting and return to the monochrome. And so I really just wanted to hear what everyone has to say about this. What is it about this impulse to return to the blank canvas, which is of course not blank, the monochrome obviously isn’t a monochrome. It’s really something that fascinates me that something that can seem somewhat hackneyed or a kitsch motif now seems to matter and it seem to have a certain persistence. And when he talks about the labor of painting. It was not a process he enjoyed, it’s messy, it’s cold, and yet he still has this desire to return to the monochrome. So I suppose it’s just to try and open up a conversation away from other ways we could think about the big black central image as being an expressive, abstract representation of self but what it means to thinking about painting in this way. And I think it’s super interesting to have it next to this amazing painting here because it suddenly unfolds the rather different ways. So that’s was really what I wanted to open this up to think about. Seeing it it appears to me to be as much a relief as a painting, which has its own history.

WD: So your argument is that this is, of all the paintings we’re seeing, are the least on their own, that are the most relational to the others in terms of an artistic process. This is more a moment than a work in and of itself? It marks a moment, or return [or impasse] or kind of a zero degree of painting purely black.

AD: It’s everything but a zero degree!

WD: Yes it’s almost that there’s another painting under it. There’s one that we saw yesterday but we already had this one out and they are ridiculously heavy, so we kept this one. But somehow the sides of it are to me, not the most interesting. This side it shows that the painting underneath is something like that [the previous one].

JA: And he could have completely overpainted. That’s what’s so interesting about it. This isn’t just economy, oh I’ll just recycle the canvas to save money, this isn’t I can’t bare to see this image, I have to eradicate it. Agnes Martin just cut hers up if she didn’t like it.

There’s many ways that you could destroy your early work. So the idea of destruction makes less sense to me. He keeps working away at them.

MvT: Unless it’s the idea of destruction.

HV: Il faut oublie..At the end he wrote these words…

ML: In Il faut oublier it’s an imperative, but it’s not a belief that you can do that. So the complete stop and new beginning through this is an idea. So to me this painting is kind of saying well make it all black, but then there is this palimpsestic history of traces. So to me this is the basic entry for…

JA: Maybe I want to talk about irony. I mean it’s hard not to be. The kind of modernist and cynical critic returning to the monochrome in 1994 seems to have some form of irony potentially. Like he knows what he’s doing, like the history of the monochrome. This is not a discovery upon which he stumbled. It’s a trope.

JW: It’s almost a relief about the impossibility of ever achieving relief.

RP: A negative … system, the way he is processing this idea. !14

MvT: Unless he’s hyper-ironic really, but I don’t think so. It could be like in a Duchampian way of hiding something in a box and not knowing what it is. I am also wondering about the relationship he had to the spectator.

ML: I think that’s really part of it. And what it makes a monochrome, what you know that is there that they’ll see. You’re continually hinting at it.

JA: And of course the monochrome is a ready-made. It’s a found form that’s readily available throughout the history of twentieth century painting. So it’s a kind of readymade form.

JW: Well first monochrome wasn’t ready-made in the sense that it was a piece of blank Bristol paper.

AD: I just can’t see it as a monochrome. I guess the title encourages us to read it that way but it’s monochrome in the way Dubuffet is monochrome, the materiologie.

WD: So monochrome is more a symbol than effective reality.

ML: You could see it as a composition if you don’t see it as a monochrome but something full of tension and there’s this central point where it’s the thickest. And we don’t know how much is the effect of the wear.

JW: But I think the comparison to Dubuffet is again, very instructive. This seems to be imbued with absolutely everything that Dubuffet’s textuologies are not in that they are almost completely logical, they’ve almost surrendered to the material, almost serene, they’re intense, they’re even. An artist who is enjoying his alchemical interaction with material and form to produce a result that in a way is an affirmation. And pretty much every one of these terms you could turn on its head when you come to this, including the final product, which is lumpy, uneven, and scarred, and difficult. It’s got no contentment in its resting place.

JA: But it’s an invitation to think it not as a monochrome but as about, or of something else that isn’t just materiality. It’s the nice sky, the detailed view of the sea, this other kinds of readings the big black opens up to, other kinds of metaphorical readings.

MvT: What do you see it as if not as a monochrome?

AD: I see matter and motion. The tradition of the rethinking of the painterly surface in the 1950s, you know Tapies, and…

JA: But I see the environment too as a sort of monochrome that’s muddied and messy and absolutely not pure and white, a monochrome that is drained of that kind of idea that there was ever a pure image. So in that sense I was thinking of the flecks of red.

WD: I am inclined to think of this not as a painterly object but an expression of a moment because all of the other works that have been painted over, receive an image afterwards. So it’s more an intermediary stage, so it tempts us into looking at it as a, in the tradition of Tapies, of rethinking painterly surfaces. Somehow listening to you…I am not saying it’s not right, but I am not sure it has to do with this. It has more to do with the moment of transitioning – and that’s what it shows as such, rather than investigating the painterly tradition of monochrome and materiality, the tactile...But it has the looks of it, but the fact that it’s also the same format.

!15

AD: That’s what I was also going to say. That’s the difference with a Tapies, or a Manzoni is that you can see there’s something underneath so it’s about the act of covering.

WD: This is more an uttering than a material…it’s more a statement.

AD: I think it does both at the same time and I think that’s what’s interesting, it’s about the operation of covering something.

WD: To what extent is the covering itself important? Is the mode of burying important rather than the burial itself. I think this is more the burial than the mode of burying images. But it’s there, it’s plain.

JvW: I think there is something to be said for the materiality of the covering because if you look closely there’s both cracks that show hints of a light colored underground but also accents on top so it’s actually very manipulative.

HV: There’s a lot of colors in the black!

MvT: I have some important information here, because this is the thickest surface we have here, so there is something about materiality.

Mo Vandenbergh: Sometimes he would cut out pieces of canvas and write on it, and put it under the existing paint. It was part of the work but it was under it. It was also done horizontally.

WD: We’re probably looking at the decision to overpaint and the result. So the fact of “I will overpaint”, and that’s what we’re looking at, rather than “Look at how I overpainted.” And I think it’s a key difference because it means that we each focus on something else. It’s more conceptual than…you’re not agreeing?

ML: No to me it’s completely. I understand what you’re trying to say, is this this conceptual moment in an artists career like in these cycles and going to zero, starting again. And that’s what, if we’re going to think about what going to zero would mean, that would be that. But then if we see this, there’s so much ambiguity in what we see and the materiality and the making of it that continues to obstruct this interpretation to me. The black, and you see it as a relief, in a sense also as a maquette, especially you say it was lying, an almost topographic relief.

WD: I guess it’s the visible intentionality that I’m questioning. We’ve proceeded from a work that is not intentional as it has a meaning and is put on top to produce meaning, but here [unintelligible - rumble] but I agree and to use a problematic term the mastery that he would probably not make something that would not look good. So he would work towards a satisfactory appearance, but I would like to keep it up in the air, to what extent that is not what we’re supposed to look at.

JA: It’s a kind of process work that happens to be the result of this decision.

WD: And the end result has incredible qualities about it but they’re less intended or purposeful.

ML: But does it make a huge difference then that the white on top, in a sense, that if it’s just about the conceptual gesture of say painting it all over black again, burying it. If you want to just perceive it as this intervention of covering it up again, or would you say that it…

JA: I guess it reminds you that he’s done it. That materiality again. !16

ML: Yeah that tension again.

WD: Maybe he’s been seduced by the fact that he always wants to bring an image.

RP: But even in the title there is something very ambiguous. There’s two adjectives, grande, noir. I don’t know if it’s the correct title but there’s something.

JvW: Isn’t it also weird that it’s a feminine adjective and a masculine adjective.

RP: That could also mean something.

WD: La grande bleu…the sea…

JW: If we’re trying to make this historical intersection, to me what’s clear is that it’s painting producing a new conceptual space between two traditions in “monochrome”: for me the formalist notion of the monochrome that we find defended by the formalist critics of the fifties, and it’s very American based and it’s about smoothness and transparency.

And the second one is the matière, the material orientation. When Greenberg comes to write about Tapies in particular he becomes very explicit about the difference in those traditions. In the end he has described Tapies’ brown textured surfaces as shit. He never writes this word in his criticism but he writes it in a private letter about Tapies. And when I quoted it for a Tapies retrospective I was working on I got into a lot of trouble. But that’s another story. But so you have these two traditions but this really doesn’t seem to be taken with either of them, because it’s a cover up, it’s a work about anxiety I think in the sense of non-relief and finally it’s a work about the re-adjudication of the final level with these tints, these white highlights. I mean again, to take things to a third level. And I don’t think there’s too many moments where we can see that, right? I don’t know what I would compares this to, if you’ve got these two “traditions” of monochrome up to the mid-century, most of the variants I know you could fit with either one or the other of those traditions. Either in dialogue with them or maybe in contestation of them but this isn’t, I think. To me.

MvT: And it’s the 90s. What do you make of the fact that it’s the 90s?

JW: You mean that it’s late within any of those traditions? Forty years late in something?

MvT: Should we even discuss this?

WD: It’s something that came up when you were mentioning the 19th century examples.

Somehow, I wonder how much of it was related to it its own time. I think his references were older than effectively relating to contemporaries. I think it’s a difficult exercise to say this.

MvT: Except, my mother had a gallery in the 90s with really lousy artists, and my entire youth looked like this.

ML: How about Kiefer in a sense. It’s completely faraway but again, it’s this kind of stratigraphy and this kind of stratigraphy, if you just entertained the thought and think of this as something…

JW: But bits of Kiefer would be like that. But this is unrelieved, the whole thing is like that. I don’t think you can find too much of that anywhere else. And certainly in the 90s.

MvT: I didn’t, by the way, mean to say that this is a lousy work of art. I just meant to say that there was a trend. Lesser known artists, also in Amsterdam and in Germany. I don’t know. A lot of black, with a little bit of colour. Not exactly the same but… !17

WD: Just to Rather than working holed up, this almost needs to contextualize some of the others. And that’s why I was pushing the reading, not to confirm them but to try and see how they differ. I think these are the works that if you put them in a museum or gallery on their own, it’s troublesome work. Because those [the previous ones] stand on their own. And these are much more relational. While they’re all relational, but less relational than this one.

JA: And I think that’s why I selected it in thinking about it as a pause or this moment because it doesn’t clearly signal the shift. It’s not a straight form exactly but these kinds of moments of stopping and it’s is obviously very material and I think thinking of it in terms of an idea or a concept with this I was just trying to disentangle the earnestness of the readings that can be sort of …cause he has always painted. He has painted his entire adult and teenage life so for him to suddenly kind of become so over-invested with materiality of painting when he’d already been working with figuration seemed a little… hackneyed maybe? So I was seeing it as an impasse I suppose.

HV: And it’s true because afterwards he would stop completely with this thick painting and he start with [light?]. So it’s really this last…he just wanted to get rid of this very thick…and he writes about it. For me the power of a work is not in its materiality but it’s in the spirit. So it’s like the death of the painting. Not only, but also…

WD: But I think the puzzle of it is to reconcile reading it as a momentary phase, or an expression of a phase, and then that it’s, there’s still a lot of quality to the object itself.

But it’s different than in the other works and that’s why it intrigued me also a lot. Trying to offer a reading of the single work is much easier with the others than with this one. As a singular piece.

JW: This is in a way a reproduction of what he actually did with [final …?] the scratches, bits of crust would come off, and it’s completely red. But then to go up and see it and I think that final gesture, putting the tiniest little dots and touches of white right here and there. It bequeaths the whole immense cosmological upscaling, and he’s suddenly taken this thing out of the little square it’s in and made it seething and vast, impregnated with this scalar projection that could endure the tiniest bit of... It just becomes a huge topography or a huge space-scape or whatever. And it seems to have a primary effect on the smallness of the touches.

AD: Just to go back to the monochromes. There’s actually very very few monochromes in the history of art. I mean actually I think the concept of the monochrome is more powerful than the actual work. I mean there’s always something else happening, most of the time. So in that sense I was objecting to your [Wouter’s ] reading because it seems to me attached to the concept of the monochrome, rather than any “act” of the monochromes.

WD: But this is […] by someone invested in materiality. […] But I think it’s not the point that it’s driving the work I think what drives the work it’s the monochrome. He has to solve it and he has solved it in a very material fashion.

AD: So you would compare it to those who cut up their works and burn them?

Baldassari?

WD: There is a certain formalism, of a very symbolic act, formally solved. !18

JA: But it’s not surprising that it’s formally solved, because painters paint.

WD: Exactly! And so your [Anna’s] sentence there, “very little monochromes”, is somehow what causes this. And that’s I think the beauty of it, that you can have a purely conceptual work, you write “monochrome.” But even if you write it, that is kind of the riddle of conceptual art, even a title on a small card, there is always some materiality to it.

And so I think that same riddle haunts this work.

MvT: I also really like what John said. And especially in relation to one remark in the film, when the artist said “we haven’t reached it.” So this is in a way also a kind of testament to failure, if I may say so.

JW: Or infinite regress.

HV: Yes, and he said “I go from failure to failure.”

JW: And it has come out as a square there right? I mean we can see it’s a slight something.

JW: So I unapologetically chose some works that were tied into work that I am doing right now: I’m writing a book on the face. Just different orders of relationship between the face and representation. It’s a bit of a crazy intellectual history book but it has quite a lot of visual references. But I chose these two together really because they offer a kind of interesting counterpoint in terms of the isolation, physiognomic expression, body part, expressive moments in Philippe’s work. And I guess the small work is for me about the scream and the animistic roar, and it’s also a little bit about counter-articulation in the sense that it’s a form of expression that is used without words as opposed to the worded animations that we’re going to see. Lots of people have chosen word works and I guess we’ll talk about those together. And it seems that it ties in with language almost as a negative anagram, or a re-inscription of what is missing in these opposite forms. To a certain extent the open mouth with the lolling tongue has a long history in Western representation going back to the early formations of the grotesque, which interests me a lot, misericords and Romanesque sculptural caricatures for want of a better word, but there’s actually quite a lot of interesting writing about how the tongue coming out of the mouth signifies excess and actually it’s compared to the snake very interestingly in some of the literature. I also want to just offer some comparisons with the two different aspects with popular culture. The Rolling Stones logo comes to mind. And certain cartoon characters, one cartoon that I got from the Getty image bank is very useful because it’s so similar. But also Francis Bacon’s interest in the open mouth and the sort of dentured mouth and so on. And I just wanted to put it against the Untitled 1996 work because one of the chapters I have in the book is about tracing the history of the smile right from its associations with Greek archaic sculpture with that knowing, mysterious, inward smile, is caught up probably with certain notions of inner wellbeing and dispositions with having a good and healthy relation with the earth, like certain Greek phrases that seem to correlate with that archaic smile. And you can trace it up through the enigmas of the Mona Lisa right the way up to … a Warhol detail, that’s an archaic smile, a Lichtenstein and then the most obvious, the doubled mouth of de Kooning, this is Woman on a Bicycle from I think 1947. And there’s obviously another question around gender. This is one way to have !19

produced gender questions I think, the confection mouth, the Marilyn Monroe lips, the lip buds signifying femininity and various other attributes seems to me very interesting. And to have that posed with a field of blood and smudges and dots I am not quite sure what to make of that, nor how to argue it through, but it seems to be a particularly ironic formation. I just really wanted to pose these and some comparisons and offer to put this into some kind of context historically. But even as we look to this mouth, it’s completely reiterated in those mouths there. We’ve got the open mouths here. There’s lot of lots of places we see this motifs. And it’s one of the most important motifs isolated from the body and it’s a whole sum of texts of things isolated from the body whether it’s arms or mouths or other body parts that add up to an interesting area to think about. So just as a way of beginning.

JvW: there’s also importantly the smile of Arafat. He uses a lot of faces of Arafat with the smile.

HV: And he said he was fascinated with Arafat because you don’t see a lot of smiles in the political world and it was this cynical smile. Everyone hated him and he still arrived everywhere with this big smile. He also compared himself to Arafat. Like everybody is against him and he is the loner. The second thing is also the Joker. So it’s actually a cynical smile in a sea of blood. So it’s a lot of references.

ML: Also the isolation of the body parts. In a sense to me these are breasts, inside the lips, or at least a continuation of cleavage.

WD: But the upper parts of the lips are disconnected. So there’s…

HV: But it’s a cut-out. It’s a charcoal drawing collaged on.

MV: There is another blood painting with a smile. Where the blood is shaped as a female body.

MvT: But about the mouth and expression: isn’t this a scream?

JW: A language-less articulation of…

WD: And there’s a blood painting underneath.

AD: This mouth is more like a cartoon mouth. I don’t see it as being expressive. Because at some point I was thinking of a connection with Alice.

WD: Normally there should be a division between the upper teeth and the lower teeth and here it’s a continuation.

HV: To me it’s like the Lozano smile. It’s the complete same smile.

JA: Exactly, it’s a motif she used so often.

JA: Sometimes she cut them out in her own works exactly like this. Other times she painted it into her canvases. She painted one on a toilet seat, with a cigar kept between the teeth. It’s very aggressive and funny.

WD: I was thinking of the position of the mouth. It’s a very odd position, so high up. I try to assess something about the surface…if you were to put it more in the middle, or lower.

JA: I’m trying to think about the artist standing in front of the canvas, I mean was he tall? Is that a head height?

WD: So you almost have a mask, an exaggerated face. So that’s at the height where his head would be. And then it’s more like an exaggerated mask, like with carnival, when everything is exaggerated. Nose, mouth, ears. !20

AD: I think it’s because of this position and this caricature that I can’t take it seriously as a mouth. That’s why I was thinking of Ellen Gallagher where she cuts out all these women’s mouths and uses them as decorative motifs. So it feels more like this kind of decorative element just floating there, more than an actual mouth.

WD: It doesn’t imply body you mean?

AD: No it doesn’t.

ML: It’s almost like he put a word on it. It’s a code. It’s a very coded representation. It’s an icon that you add to it. So it evokes the body very differently than splashes of blood.

But again, it’s the lack of representation. Lips. Or mouth.

JA: How is the blood applied? Is it flecked?

MV: He put it down horizontally, otherwise you’d see drips.

WD: He probably walked around it and threw it from various sides.

JA: And has it faded? Are there some patches where it has faded?

MvT: But I agree with Anna, this is a highly decorative work. And therefore I’d see the lip’s edges rather as a decorative motif.

JA: Decorative in a pejorative way?

MvT: No no no! Decorative is good. But whatever you want to call it…call it something else. Composition…or pattern… And then this connects with the color and with the form in a kind of pattern.

ML: But the color, I don’t know how it has evolved over time.

WD: But if we stick to the comparison or the juxtaposition of works. That painting has a similar treatment of the surface or the backdrop as the 1989 painting. Even though that’s very mixed of course, but it’s relatively even in what’s on there. Same goes for here, but here the mouth is on top and that one is on top of…So what I’m trying to get at is if you are talking about pattern you can even read that not as pattern, but an even surface even though it’s very accidental. But it’s painted as one, so there’s nothing important, or there’s no composition in there. It’s equally “pattern.”

AD The mouth emerges though.

WD: It’s only the mouth though. But there’s nothing else.

RP: But there is something like a fake emptiness on the white part.

JW: Well I was wondering about that. From the reproduction it was more puzzling than to see it in the flesh. But from the reproduction you get the sense that there’s a body or some monster…

WD: Do you see something else there now?

JW: I don’t know quite what to see. I mean what do people see there?

JvW: It’s tempting to see two black eyes right above the mouth but it’s probably WD: I just don’t see anything emerge from that surface apart from the lips and a bit of teeth.

AD: I wouldn’t say there’s a figure but it emerges from the material of the painting. In a way that here feels like it’s stuck on. So I see this very much to do with flatness and then flatness that goes towards decorativeness. I’m ready to see a wallpaper here almost, which is absolutely not the case here. !21

MvT: And talking about that: is this really the direction of the painting? The orientation?

It’s also a thing of letting the blood do its own work. There’s no intervention here. Like there he puts the paint on the canvas and makes it into something else. Here it’s just left…

JvW: The blood is applied explicitly from a distance. And the fact that you have a cutout.

I think it’s an accentuation of artificiality that is foregrounded. Something completely different than a painting made as a whole.

WD: We can see that there’s blood splatters behind the mouth. So we can see that the surface was made first.

JA: And not on the paper.

WD: This would have been on the paper before the blood splats. You can see that they continue underneath here.

ML: If you think what was there before the mouth was and what the mouth does to it if you add it. It’s like saying, hey, let’s break this, let’s not make this too decorative.

AD: It remains very flat. It doesn’t create a space either.

WD: And do we read the blood as a reminiscence of body?

JA: I do. I mean it is flat and it is decorative, but it also looks like blood splatter, like something happened off canvas and this is kind of an aftereffect. We’re told it’s blood but it could be paint, we could have not been told it’s blood so it’s very hard to…it’s about an absent body, but it’s about a body that’s been shocking…

ML: To me it’s too decorative, or I can’t see what incidents resulted in this. It’s not a trace.

WD: But maybe the absence of indexes is compensated by the mouth.

JW: One direction is, it’s a gesture of authenticity. Being in selfhood, but rendered paradoxically in pure pattern. And it needs a cipher for expression that’s empty and smiling and either betokens a cartoon character evil like the Joker or a masculine imagination of the confection of woman in the sort of de Kooningian way but it’s still a cipher. It’s still an emoticon. And so he talks to you about the most patently false artificial “expression” with something that is at least by point of origin, most authentic.

JA: Which has this history, the smeared on the floor, the Pollock, the emotional outpouring, the piss painting ML: Also the two effects of Warhol, the iconic, the Marilyn and the lips. And the piss paintings, which are much more intensive.

MvT: But there was water involved as well?

HV: It’s organic materials so it will disappear. In forty years…So it’s also about this transience.

WD: It’s also an unprepared canvas. With a prepared canvas it maybe would be something else.

JW: Do you have documentation of when it was made?

HV: Yes we have pictures.

WD: The color of the unprepared canvas is beige, brown, and it’s a completely different surface than the white would have been. !22

AD: It’s strangely immaterial. I was expecting it to be much more material. There the connection with painting blood doesn’t come through, like with the Viennese Actionists or whatever.

WD: Is it more skin-like because it sucks up the liquid? […] Then it would be a scene of violence. Now it’s not a scene. Or a massacre happening. That’s not what we see here. I really like the fact that that’s not the case. So it’s not an image. It’s more of a trace or a pattern.

AD: yes but you don’t have the porousness that you have with a Frankenthaler and Morris Louis when the canvas becomes like skin. And there it’s a surface. You really feel like you can wipe it off like that.

JW: What you have and what you also have in Morris Louis… Morris Louis has these acrylics, the way they go around the ends [?] You’ve got the same shadows, the same capillary actions here.

ML: So you see the cloth and the idea of transparency. And it’s also on tracing paper.

WD: This is much darker [another one on iPad].

HV: It’s an odalisque.

JvW: What is also interesting in this kind of series is that the mouth is always up there.

We’ve used the word cosmological before. Maybe it’s a bit far fetched but perhaps we could use that as an entry point on how the blood is applied. Because it made me think of a constellation of starry night and since the smile is so grim, cartooney, to me it evokes a cartoon moon that grins from the sky downwards, to maybe humanize this almost spiritual use of bodily matter. As different counterpoint to the spirituality of the blood to the spirituality of cosmology, to the putting everything in perspective through a cartoon moon.

HV: He had a comic at home with a cartoon cat, smiling.

AD: It’s the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.

HV: He is sitting up there, in the tree!

MvT: And then he becomes invisible and you only see the smile! I want to say something that I also don’t want to say but because everyone is so safe here I will say it. It’s about the end of art, which today is an outmoded idea but maybe at this time it was still somehow relevant. If you want to go to the spiritual of the art. Because Morris Louis was evoked…It’s the last…in Greenberg’s idea…well it’s a new interpretation of the last phase of art where art, the paint disappears in the canvas into total flatness. But if you add blood to it, it’s kind of like the final stage of spiritualizing the painting. If you put yourself into the canvas, you disappear into the canvas. And the cat also disappears!

HV: He says art is the ultimate offer that you give, so you cannot be closer than with blood. Blood is the ultimate offer anyway.

AD: You mean as in sacrifice?

WD: But somehow there’s way more sacrificing left than here. So I don’t see this as an image. There’s no image of sacrifice, which I completely miss the blood…Yes this is how we have always studied this guy, but this has little to do with blood. That’s the powerful quality of this painting. That it does not continue in the same avenue of sacrifice or pain or representation of anger or pain or anything. It’s almost festive. !23

RP: You say there’s more sacrifice in that [previous?] painting?

WD: There’s more an image of sacrificing and anger and unresolvedness RP: But I think that’s a connotation that you are projecting, when you know…

ML: It’s unstable.

AD: But I tend to agree with you that for me it’s easier to read outpouring of emotion here [previous] than in this one.

ML: But you are probably reading sacrifice not as an outpouring of emotion but as sacrificing work and going that far.

JA: The reason that I thought of these together is because they are both really really overdetermined, slightly hackneyd tropes: the black painting, the end of painting, the monochrome, and then you’ve got the artist, the expressive Jackson Pollock, the my blood, I pour everything. So I would in a way like to see them as not about that but as somehow about the condition of ways to think of painting in that way. And that’s why the “shame” painted over here, we can’t think of it in very sacrificial or bodily terms, but it also reminds me of Ed Ruscha’s lists where he used blood and ketchup and pickle and other materials, just stuffed other kind of ready-made materials…so just as a way to kind of disentangling the subject. And that this very heavy language of sacrifice and destruction is somehow personal because it just starts to… just as a way of thinking one step away from the biographical to kind of understand what it means for an artist to work with these very overdetermined tropes.

WD: What I try to get is the moment when subject matter doubles up with iconography and that’s not the case here, and that’s what I’m trying to see. And because the symbol of the monochrome comes closer to that, than this, with the blood. So there’s something fascinating about it that the image as such does not immediately double up with the notion of blood. While in that one there [far away wall] you see people killing each other so the red resonates with the image that’s next to it. So sometimes these three cvomes together while in this case it’s not. I like that.

AD: But I think it’s interesting to do the comparison with that one when we were talking about staining in the painting of Morris Louis and […]. This idea of “stain” that’s kind of bordering there and in a sense I was expecting to see stains in this one. But I’m not seeing either. I’m seeing lines and kind of arabesques, whereas in this one [small painting] I see stains actively interfering with the line of the writing.

WD: And you don’t see this in the reproductions, but the fact that you see the frame. It is then much more reflexive about the painting than about the artist. So it’s the painterly object.

JA: Well this reminds me of more of it being burnt. I mean we know it has been stained, but something like handpainters, you know the pyro…Like take a monochrome and use a kind of brown smoke as a material. So again, it really just doesn’t allow itself to being straightforwardly read as stained blood. And I think you’re right that this one [smaller hung on wall] is more about the stain.

ML: To me, again…you speak of the line versus the stain, but to me it’s not a line, and I really like the hesitant positioning. The light touch after touch. It’s kind of an image of writing, but that kind of shows that it’s not writing. !24

WD: You think the fact that it never arrives at a written word…

ML: As if you looked at writing and tried to depict that. You don’t do the gesture of…

HV: He says this also. I am not writing, I am drawing. When he writes. I have started to write as an act of drawing.

MvT: Are these finger marks to the right?

MV: Maybe it’s the white background.

MvT: That frame seems to be darker WD: What date is this one? 96-97 MvT: If you talk about light, it also has a sort of flickering quality. I don’t know if that was there in the beginning. Because it’s not finished, the line. It’s dots. It has a movement. Am I ashamed, am I not?

ML: Yeah, the significance of the shame.

HV: It’s a question of society.

WD: And I think this flickering is emerging and not disolving into a final word.

You look at this as being expressed, like being uttered rather than being affirmed.

MvT: And this is what it has in common with the presence and absence of these stains which become forms and are not. And there’s this 18th century thing of movement of the flickering of the eye and it’s connected to decoration and it’s called papillotage, when something is like a flickering butterfly it’s there and it’s not. And I feel like these two blood works that we’re looking at have this “am I seeing it?” “Am I not seeing it?”

JW: We have heart flutter in English.

JA: I wonder what year it was that Barbara Kruger did her blood series in Der Spiegel and it was hugely controversial? Every single issue was printed with a tiny tiny dilution of her blood. And due to the AIDS crisis there was this fear of blood. It was traces of blood and words such as these written and pricked onto skin, and it had to do in part with refugee women and self-harm. So it was about something else but it was this use of writing in blood and the fear of blood as contamination.

WD: 95-96 is the moment when the denial of the AIDS epidemic turns into policy.

MvT: But the body is so absent here!

WD: Early nineties, it was still denial about the epidemic. And then it turns in the mid-90s.

JA: Blood is a very…that was the point of the Kruger project that it preyed on these fears.

WD: I don’t necessary need to address the one next to it, but what does it mean to overpaint a work with blood, with white, and then put a drawing on top. That’s a very tough decision. It’s much tougher than to somehow cover up the sacrifice, if you call it sacrifice, if we call it sacrifice, but the fact that you draw your blood, put it on, and then paint it over.

HV: Maybe it’s not painted over. Maybe it’s part of. You know the women who are crying and taking the body [?] of Christ. And the blood thing is part of the work.

ML: It’s also the white that becomes yellow-ish pink because of what is underneath. It’s not gone.

WD: The shroud of Torino. The image surfaces. !25

ML: It’s like this is not a monochrome, you cannot make it black as if the matter was gone and what is underneath. Toning of that is part of the effect here.

MvT: This is a way where the blood is connected with an iconography of suffering.

WD: But not literally. He painted it over.

ML: That gesture, the painting over, has been done, but not to complete the act. And the residue…

MvT: Yeah and he also didn’t paint a car on it! Or something absolutely not related to blood.

JW: And this is a thorny thread, right? And the mouth is dripping with blood. So it’s almost quite literal that there would be blood underneath. He’s drawn blood, you could say. In English that means to create blood as well as to draw it JA: This is bloodless though. There is no blood dripping.

WD: He’s crying. It’s tears!

MvT: But the upper figure has teeth [fangs?] and has it come from the corners of the mouth.

JW: These are tears for sure.

MvT: No no, this! Ooooh it’s the neck.

JW: But that is even more interesting. It means it’s blood by implication, not literally. It has thorns going through lips. And it’s painful. They’re crying, they’re bleeding. But you don’t see the blood. The blood is inside.

AD: It’s interesting to compare them in terms of the mouth, because here, obviously, the mouth has a different function. Here it symbolizes the face, and there you really see the relation to speech.

JW: And the fact that there is the tongue. There is teeth in two layers and something in between and it’s the rolling of the tongue. And this is a single layer, that people have commented on, and that’s very interesting.

MvT: Also the title, it’s Daily Misery and that there’s four people, not one. And they’re connected in a circle. Something I find problematic is that it’s all young girls.

HV: It’s his girlfriend from that time. He always worked from a personal story.

MvT: So it’s four times the same figure.

JW: The one on the top looks different to me. The hair?

JvW: The upper one looks more masculine.

JA: It’s also got that Picasso eyeline which is one line that goes from the brow to the nose, so it’s much more schematic JW: I read that as masculine, somehow.

WD: It could be Guillaume with long hair.

WD: How did you phrase it? “Blood by implication.” So there’s something much more problematic about this work, than that one. If you look at them as consecutive stages: painting with blood, painting it over white, and then the thing that arrives on top, as the mouth arrives on top. Then that drawing is much more problematically related to the backdrop than the mouth seems to be. Or “blood by implication” implies that he thought well there is the blood so I don’t need to draw it. To put it very simply. I am just trying to get at the construction. The literal phases you can see. Somehow it’s different. !26

AD: But there’s a narrative that is very clearly affirmed that you don’t see in either one.

WD: It’s almost a narrative and it’s almost a structure of being built up. At the final image that arrives he’s inscribed in a narrative that starts with the first and is overpainted…While this is more juxtaposing. You see the colliding…

JW: But these are very good works to put together actually on the blood thing, because they each do something spectacularly different. And even the honte, it’s a broken rhyme that’s always connected. And that’s what’s going through their mouths, a broken line with the thorns constituting the intermittency. And that’s what cursive writing is. It’s a continuous line. So many forms of connection, plus the grid underwriting both his… interminated in the circular repetition.

MvT: I am very happy you are saying all of this because in a closed, old fashioned iconographic reading you would say that the title, Daily Misery, is that she has to suffer for the crown of throwns, which is the artist who gives his blood, and she is implicated in it, because she is crying and she has his crown of thorns in her mouth like women who cried over Jesus. Because the crown of thorns is the last moment before he dies.

AD: But they don’t hold it in their mouth!

ML: I first read it as different people and the gender to me was not as important but it was humanity.

WD: Connected through misery.

MvT: I was the one who chose the other work that this one stands in for. I chose five people who are in a row, naked, who have thorns in their mouths. And this is why the reading of connected misery of nakedness and Biblical state of shame presents itself much more. And I chose it because this is the level that I can bear where there is violence in Philippe’s work where there is the question of thorns because in the drawings other things are happening with these thorns and those I cannot bear, but I did want to address the question of violence. This now became anecdotal to me.

WD: Because of the availability of the face. It doesn’t necessarily address that as…

AD: But there’s an allegorical dimension to this one I think. It reminds me of Francis Alys paintings which doesn’t seem to me so obvious in this [the reproduction]. It’s almost grotesque isn’t it? . It’s a different kind of violence, isn’t it?

WD: I think it is grotesque.

MvT: Oh yes there is much more violence in the way this image is treated. This is very pure I think.

HV: It’s funny this is Berlinde’s favourite work and she chose it as well. And she saw it as fire.

JV: He painted rings of fire slightly before that.

ML: I think it’s also the Christian image of the crown part. The heart/Christ thorned. It’s not a circle.

JvW: One thing about the violence that may be relevant. He expressed on different occasions his motivation for dealing so much with violence in his work is that he felt the need to express the violence that we are knowledgeable of and conscious of in ourselves and in our society. What he meant is a kind of exorcism of things that he couldn’t bear holding inside. !27

WD: The large painting on the wall combines several of the elements that we saw.

There’s violence, there’s the blood, the hand grenate, from the Eva painting from 89.

What’s so interesting about this one is that it fragments the elements that are probably superimposed here. Something I saw yesterday is that the panels without image are vertical ones, but there’s …

HV: Art historical links too. The torture of Erasmus…[…]

ML: You have underpainting and you have the materiality of actually the cut, that is very brittle and deteriorating and then you have the circles, which you don’t know. In the reproductions I was intrigued by it. I am glad that I see it. It’s much more even than what I suspected. It’s a multitude of things that make sense … it being fragmented in pieces and at the same time a kind of layering of codes and things and never an image.

WD: You mean the thing as a whole? It always breaks up?

JW: I think also, the title and the image don’t fit, because the title is La Nuit, desire la reine and Le roi a perdu son sang so it’s actually son sang and not le, so there’s a couple of..

WD: It’s also la neige. Are the circles being made by putting a really hot plate on there?

MV: In the studio in Gent he had two other heating systems and he put it on there and also the mazout. It looks burnt.

GV: It was burnt at the time and the things fall off.

MvT: Do you think that will happen also with the circle? It’s cracking there.

HV: We should fix it and frame it but there’s always a…

JA: What’s the material the words are written in? Charcoal?

ML: That’s again really interesting that it’s not really written, it goes in other directions.

WD: What do we make of the middle image?

MvT: Le roi - la heine.

WD: Or is it the trapeze that breaks?

GV: He also made at this time drawings with a train.

WD: It’s a train track. It looks like a swinging ladder.

JA: Or it’s back to the theme of miscommunication that we started earlier. Missed connection.

JvW: And the not being able to reach what you’re striving for.

ML: One thing that I didn’t say but I find intriguing, and that goes for many works with words is I think the hybridization of French into something phonetic that is not grammatically correct. Désir is no longer…it’s desire, but it becomes something else. So there’s this fracture even in the text.

JW: But it is in the title.

ML: it’s a kind of play with words. If you look at the text. Memlink, Rubens. So that’s one thing and then of course Broothaers has this play on these things.

HV: A French tradition.

ML: It adds a layer…

AD: You said you worked on a Broothaers connection RP: Yes, Walter Swinnen and Broothaers. !28

AD: And do you see a connection?

RP: Yes there is even with shame… I had to get the alphabet and the language and so on and so on. And when I saw the Shame painting I saw the link with Walter Swennen that’s the legacy of Broothaerian ritual of language.

WD: So you see each panel as the panel of Broothaers. This grid of panels that Broothaers made.

RP: But even with that painting evoking Popeye, there is that kind of play of words.

Because Popeye also you can find it in Swennen to evoke “pop“ and “eye.“ I don’t know, in Swennen’s work it’s sure.

JW: We can’t forget greed either. Cursive writing - in some awkward variance of that, but still within that same kind of French…it’s not like what we would see in England, for example the “r” it’s a very continental looking, European “r”.

ML: But it is not the schoolteacher’s perfect blank writing of Magritte, which is more generic.

MvT: But this is how you first learn the letters in school. This is the “r” you learn when you learn how to write.

ML: Yes but it is not the perfect ideal you strive to. It’s not “schoonschrift” WD: Is it intentionally bad writing?

MV: Charcoal was different than when he was writing.

MvT: Did he use this “r” and this “s” when writing normally? Cause these are the ones I learned.

HV: Even if you wrote like this. [He held the pen away from the paper], and if you write like this you are much more free.

JA: It’s awkward, like struggling to express. He could’ve done it as a clear cursive but it’s not.

JvW: But paradoxically you can see that he wrote this very carefully.

ML: It’s not accidental. It’s very composed.

WD: It’s a line going down – la nuit desire la reine…It’s like a slope. And le roi … goes up.

RP: And you can read it horizontally, but also vertically.

MvT: Everything on the right is down in the frame.

JW: Queens blood and mud sink to the bottom.

GV: The middle work he made a year earlier.

WD: So it was not thought of as a whole initially.

ML: It’s like with the mouth and what it does to the picture. Here’s something similar happening. Rather coded and…

WD: So the black painting is to the mouth what…

ML: I am saying the text is the mouth.

GV: This is finished in 1996 and this [mouth piece?] in 1998 and you have some methods that connect.

JA: These two are very little canvases to make up the grid but they do operate differently than…

WD: That’s not a grid… !29

JA: What is the difference in date?

MvT: I just want to remark that either way you read it the end is la boue and over there the end is total red.

WD: The other one, there’s no sentence.

JA: And he arranged these?

GV: Everything is numbered in the back. ABC, 123. And we had pictures of his studio.

AD: This is quite playful. I was seeing it as ladders, like at the end of the game let’s make some ladders. But this idea that you can read them in different ways, and you can shuffle them in different ways. And of course the king and queen makes you think of card games.

There’s an element in this piece that I don’t see in the others.

ML: It has the grid as if it were a system but there is not.

WD: I get your point about playfulness but I don’t see it. I find it pretty sad and dark.

AD: I see it as one of the least dark ones because of the handwriting, it’s childlike, and erasing and making mistakes. Tentative.

WD: These tiny dots, it’s like in comics when someone is having thoughts. It’s as if he insinuated movement, it’s painted on top.

JA: Is the ladder painted on top?

AD: Do you see the connection to childhood? Cards, if it’s a train, a toy train or do you think I’m projecting.

WD: It’s a matter of projection.

JvW: For me the seriousness of words overshadows the playfulness.

MvT: But how serious is it? I am with Anna here.

JvW: To put desir with perdre, and the broken skin at the bottom…

AD: I don’t want to downgrade the darkness but that’s why it’s interesting to think about childlikeness in the work of Magritte and Broothaers. If there is a mobilization of the realm of childhood how does it operate here.

WD: I can see the connection with a whiteboard where you try out words, and as a child you’re very hesitant, but it’s probably the violence of the middle low section and also if you think that they’ve been burnt.

JW: But if you think about Magritte’s work, it’s about mislabelling misrecognition. It’s about words not adding up to their picture, and it’s mis-associated that’s what Foucault teases out in his famous essay. Broothaers is about the institutional mobilization of language and this seems to be about neither. The discrepancy between the words and the title suggests that he is giving us the weight of a vocabulary, each word being leadened down, burdened by its own signification. Heaviness of each word, king, queen, dark, knight, blood. Words with great moment and pitch. And what he does is offer us meaning outside the syntax. And what he does in the title is add back an offering of one syntactical possibility and it becomes a poem. It becomes a way of giving it conceptualization, but it’s just one of many possible meanings. Plus almost a little awkwardly to be honest, he’s telling us that the words don’t connect in this way. Syntax is about bringing words together and I think he’s just underlining, not in a misrecognition sense, that these words, they have a heaviness. That’s very typical of Philippe as I now start to understand him.

Things are very overburdened by their own weight and that’s the weight that pressed !30

down and burnt the hole in this thing. Or ripped something apart. Almost literally: to lose, to rip. That’s sort of how I get at it. It’s what we came to with the sort of monochrome.

We’ve got two strands of tradition there, and an answer that he’s definitely not in either camp, but there’s an interesting negotiation of the possibilities of both and I think we’re seeing a similar thing here.

WD: And so your argument about the middle one…your argument is that it’s necessary to point at the objecthood of the words?

JW: I read it as the literal emblem of dislocation, and incommensurability, things literally not fitting together, so there’s a gap between them. Ladders, you can go up one and can’t come down the other, there’s a gap in the middle. And in a sense it’s almost like two works/words that you can put together that may not fit together. You can put any combination of words and so on. And I just think that’s why it’s a little literal – I suppose we could go back to those cosmological dimensions in the background. What the words sit on. An infinity of points of possibility.

WD: It’s strange it doesn’t look so programmatic. The way you describe it now it becomes something programmatic as a whole, while the thing doesn’t seem that. For example Broothaers loved to have word on the panels be problematic [?]. It’s the part he liked the least because it doesn’t have the playfulness that his more present sculptures have. And what I really like about this is that the materiality of it doesn’t speak such a linguistic program. And that’s why the position of the image and because it’s a painting, an expressive painting, allows to produce that disconnect.

ML: The full sentence is also kind of a unity, and it all makes sense, in the title, but then if you look at this it’s fractured and all starts to act autonomously, one thing next to the other, not just the image centrally but the scorch and the surface, what you saw, is also something that is incommensurable with meaning. So the title kind of evokes the universe, kind of, and this can maybe all be things that are much more associative than that there’s a deconstruction of a formula or that they’re deontologically deconstructed.

WD: The naming of facts is same but it’s not so purposefully… I was just thinking of the definitions of Kosuth, also painted on canvas. It’s a pretty far fetched comparison…

AD: They were never painted on canvas. They’re photosets.

JW: It’s funny, it’s a common mistake.

JA: But just from a formal level, words don’t really fit as they might.

WD: Uneasily bumped against the margins.

JW: That fitting and fitfulness of language might be.

JvW: I just realized there is another work present here that connects these themes of solemnity and heaviness to the childhood thing because there’s this panel, that’s very early, with a musician that says “Merci“ in children’s handwriting. It’s from 1964, made when he was 11-12 years old. It also brings back this handwriting of the child but at the same time in this almost solemn, sad context.

JW: It’s his blue period.

MvT: I would like to continue John’s thought, which I thought was beautiful that the materiality of painting somehow logs on to the heaviness of the words in some way, and also the literalness of the installation, which I have questions about. The first function of !31

language, and the first thing God did when he spoke is naming things. It’s a very authoritative use of language. And here you have la nuit as a given, and two people, la reine, le roi, and blood and mud as materiality, but it’s not le desir, because that almost becomes an action because of that, and it’s also connected to perdre immediately. But where the literalness comes in is that perdre is burnt and quite literally, almost unfortunately, I would say, is that night is coming into the black, I don’t know if we should go that far, probably not, and la rage … it’s the one emotion he cannot handle so there’s rage on the word already. I just wanted to say I sort of agree with John that you could go very far with the reading of literalness. But I also want to know why there’s no noun in desir.

ML: I think it’s this purposeful mistake I think [AUDIO MISSING 03:42:28 – 03:43:40] MvT: But also the “d” in desir, it’s the most unstable spelling there is.

JvW: But his handwriting is also the same. It’s also a circle next to a stick.

JA: I know it’s historically a bit off but the only other thing I can think of is the hot plates is the hot plates in Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia from 1971 that’s all about the mismatch of image and memory. When he burns photographs while describing the next one so there’s always a kind of delay, which reminds you that things never are as they appear to be. This burn that slowly works through historic memory, that you’re trying to remember.

JW: And then you’ve got literally a repertoire of provisionalities for each word. So you’ve got stuff underneath words crossed out, stuff blurred, you’ve got one moment when something’s added above rouge, you’ve got the texture, the split up there, you’ve got the indentations, you’ve got five-six different modes of supplementing that verbal capacity with something physical.

AD: But just to got back to the idea of play. I don’t read it as a struggle, in the same case as in other works where you feel a struggle and an effort and this idea of failure. And there the provisionality can be a good word telling a story, but you can tell a story in another way, you can change it. So that’s where I see a kind of relative…relative to the other words…a kind of space in which there’s a possibility to tell the story another way, change the arrangement.

JW: And yet it’s the story of the universe. We start with night, which literally is emblematized in the middle and then there’s primal desire, and maternality, and production, and blood, and redness, and the king and the patriarchal assertion and loss and mud. I mean that’s it, it’s the hisstory of the universe.

MvT: Does the word love ever come up?

[Passion, love, desir.]

JW: There’s not much to add. Again, for very selfish reasons I’ve been thinking about marine space. Because it’s called Marine, and I suppose this very nice falling off of the letters, like the actual single words fall down so you’re almost tempted to divide it into cour- and –age. With the –age literally aging, sinking down into the red abyss, which is given to us by the marine.

AD: It’s his failing courage. !32

JA: [very still] It reminds me of Goya’s drowning dog [Half Drowned Dog?] with tiny ships. And it’s almost like this, with one small dog.

MvT: This one is very emblematic. Almost like a sign.

WD: I think this is a work that almost, even if you compare it to the work on the wall, by some moments it has something cheerful about it, which I realized while looking at it from afar. It’s a cheerful image while courage, you say mostly when people are in trouble.

JvW: And it indicates a moment of an action. Here, the boats are still sailing but there’s many works that are similar, where there’s only one ship and it’s sinking.

WD: L’orage.

MvT: Well this one, the left part is kind of…

JA: It’s listing, isn’t it?

RP: There is another boat there, no?

MvT: But the lettering does seem stronger here. Here it almost reminds me of Ben Gauthier.

JW: That’s because it’s doubly articulated. It’s written in white then red.

MvT: But there’s also less hesitation in the writing.

WD: Maybe it has to do with the fact that if you hold charcoal like a pencil it will break, so you cannot push on it. So you have to work with it very carefully, while with a pencil you can push JW: He got some very good black out of the charcoal, didn’t he? Especially in désir and mud also.

WD: Which makes the work a bit more creative than just black.

AD: Could you talk a bit more about the marine project?

JW: Because I was working on a couple of artists using deep marine metaphors, and that was Paul Mccarthy, who did a big project on Caribbean Pirates, and by chance I was working with […] and she has a very strong subset of imagery that’s nautical and very complicated. Then I started to think about where it came from in early modernism, Picasso and the sailor, Malevich and the sailor, and so on.

MvT: That’s a good question in relation to this. Why the marine? Is it a metaphor or is it an accident. How many works are there with boats?

JW: But isn’t it Philippe’s ceaseless engagement with historical genres and historical art.

It’s a marine painting.

GV: He did a lot of drawings and a book called Lamentations of the Ship. It’s a kind of collage.

WD: You also have Job and the Whale, from the same era.

MvT: There’s also this romanticism, of the courage of those who sailed the sea.

And there’s a Belgian sea. Do you have any sailor ancestors?

JA: And yet where two ships are meeting, there will be three, so it’s different to one single ship.

JW: But they’re headed to different directions. So it’s going to be ships pass in the night.

That’s typical though. Whatever the subject he will grab it by the throat for its metaphysical or existential implications. So boat, ship, sea, courage, fortitude, distance, !33

loss, danger, blood red sea, he intensifies it as a concept before physicalizing it as a metaphor.

WD: Is it ok to move to the next painting?

ML: Now Google has this whole database. If you have Chrome Cast, without you asking, Google sends pictures to your television. What is very irritating is that it’s a mixture of visual arts, so all kinds of digitized museum collections, and aerial views that are cut down. The views are always cut in a way that you get a dramatic composition, but defamiliarized, but this very irritating thing with painting is that they’re also cut, to fit the frame of your television. That’s problematic, but what happens here is this is this not a cut in this way, it is something that stretches beyond. I found it very intriguing. Why is it like this? What first seems to be a pattern beyond. So on the left side it seems to extend more, here the pattern seems distorted or it’s the necessity of the frame that acts differently.

JvW: And the top is accentuated by this one line.

ML: You have this horizontal, kind of a geometric pattern that is also very atmospheric in terms of light effect. So it seems very flat, a kind of frontal feel, but it has a kind of atmospheric depth.

WD: It’s a stupid thing to say but it’s very contemporary. It’s like painters you see on fairs for example, who did recent work.

RP: The title is the Exile of the Painters / Painters Exile.

AD: What is he exiled from?

WD: Is this a way to achieve exile or is this the exile?

JW: He is exiled into a superconducting network from the specificity and burden and weight of objects that we’ve seen elsewhere. It feeds into what I wanted to say about the other one.

MvT: But is he not outside of the painting because of this faded pink layer that’s like a veil over it, you can’t go in. Because that’s the top layer.

JW: Its emblematic range of colors we saw earlier except the pastel here. That’s symptomatic, the things rushing in between these lines is his palate, among other things.

WD: Once again you have these starry skies, especially up here [walks to painting]. It’s almost the same as the blood. It’s not splashes it’s really spats. So he must have laid it horizontally.

GV: This one is also overpainted. Before, this was a Potrait of Van Griet [?], one of his muses.

MvT: To refer back to what he says in the video about the end. These kinds of line patterns are like a portrait becomes this, a landscape. In the video, he says, now I have these patterns, but if you take away all these elements that are still in there, this is what you get. The pure essence of…

WD: So what you’re saying is that underneath that there is this pattern [currently discussed painting].

HV: A skeleton, or map.

WD: I am just thinking about what we were saying this morning about the blood paintings and the notion of pattern. Somehow whenever I saw those, I thought these were !34

the ones that required the least reading. Even the mathematic core I find hard. Because if you look at the drawings there is almost an expression of manual labor of painting and you connect lines and dots. So it’s not intrinsic signification, or trying to produce meaning but just the making of an image by connecting lines and dots.

JA: I can see it more as a structure, or more spatial.

JvW: There are a couple of works that are similar but with less lines, also with a white background and coloured lines sometimes, which much more than this one recall architectural space, but a lot more distorted. This is a hyperactive kind of architecture.

WD: Then I wonder…because you can see some of the images working towards an image. In this case, it’s more an effect than an image that is strived towards. We might see things in it, but I don’t think it was produced to be seen as such.

JW: But it’s also a fall landscape, in that it’s got a sky zone, a russet leave zone and a green zone, from top to bottom. Of course that’s ridiculous but it could be.

HV: The next step is that at the cross points he makes swastikas. This means that the cross points mean something, there it is decided if it’s a swastika, if it goes left or right.

And he writes about these cross points, in Exile de peintre. All the work, it’s never only a formal thing. I don’t he ever makes work that is only a formal exercise.

WD: But for him most would be a formal exercise even though it’s imbued with meaning and signification. In terms of the constructedness of the thing, I like these because it’s less determined in advance. That’s what I am seeing when I look at it first. It’s less problematic as the one we just came from. I find this quite freeing, a liberation, there’s something very liberating about not being driven from early on by some kind of imagery.

I think the imagery if an effect rather than predisposed, like “I’m going to paint…”

JW: I thought it was one of the most compositionally articulate of the series and it’s why I picked it for very simple reasons, but it’s also very moving in a way. It’s a seething compound between unimaginable evil, conception of motherhood or maternality again, and village life, I can’t help reading village life as shtetl-like or Eastern European-like, or Mitteleuropa. It’s the first thing I wanted to say about it. And then it makes it clear as any image, it amplifies on what I think is one of his signature tropes, which I called the linkage system in one sense but which I want to call gross connectivity. Heavy, burdened, underlined, triply, quadruply articulated in this case, and the case there. But anyway you see it. Here, it’s the roundel of thorny arms that goes between the mouth, - this gross connectivity, the thing that absolutely binds us, inalienably to each other, and the fact that that is then compounded with a historical layer and Nazism and fascism and these two other concepts: the bind of motherhood and the idea of village life. Perhaps with the intimation of Jewish identity, I don’t know, one doesn’t have to go in that direction. And the third thing is, for me, because of the blackboard chalk appearance of it, it also, with the two moments, again this is not very explicit, but to me, reading it it is explicit, a couple of moments in art history where it’s very common. Obviously Beuys’s didactic use of the boards for diagramming and mapping out of big cultural patterns predicated of course on his would-be shamanism. And on the other hand maybe Twombly’s blackboard/chalkboard kind of crypto linguistic marks which for me are hymns of Nietschean affirmation. Not directly related, but, yet again, the one two three, I want to !35

go here, but there are traditions you could set up. I want to go there, I want to go there, the language of saying this is chalk, this is a board, and so this inherited third space where he goes somewhat significantly more difficult. And I was also thinking of finding an intertext that wasn’t an obvious one, and I actually chose Susan Hiller’s J Street Project. There’s a project that also goes to the villages of Germany, and the Jewish community and just reproduces the street signs. And this is in a way a pact – and she does it in a literal, documentary, but very moving way across grids and photographs. But it takes a cross-over and begins to inhabit the same space I think.

AD: Let me go back to what you were saying about this in relation to the map. If I’m trying to think about these two, and maybe the third one - they appear as diagrams but unlike a diagram, they are not revealing an underlying order. They’re not giving us a structure that will help us understand anything. It’s almost a diagram for the pleasure of making a diagram. […NOISE] as a child, a way of reassuring and ordering something but without actually revealing anything. And that’s why here in particular you feel like with the swastika there’s the promise of an explanation of something but you don’t reveal anything, like Susan Hiller does.

WD: It’s just village in its very emblematic form, it’s a stacking of domestic volumes with a tower, there’s always a church tower, and smaller and larger things, it’s a typical way of evoking something like “village”.

JW: And it has a very good allegoric power too because the actual node of points of evil connect outside of the villages but surround them and occupy them.

MvT: It’s not the evil swastika. Only the one in the right and the corner.

RP: I don’t see how there’s no structure, because there are the villages and then these kinds of lines. There’s an iconic structure inside. It’s not a diagram, not a map, but in a way it’s like an icon of a structure. The villages are all inside.

WD: But the way we describe it now it’s a cube system that doesn’t inhabit the same plane or space as the villages. It’s more like the Atomium. It’s much more spatial than the villages. You can think of them initially as roads leading. But they occupy two totally different universes and spatial corners. It’s like an atom structure and that doesn’t collide with the villages and they don’t connect with the villages because they always end.

RP: […]

ML: It’s interesting that visually or graphically they’re two. It’s like with medieval maps, where you don’t have the correct perspectival view and the scale is not correct, the way houses are shown. They indicate that this is this house or that kind of building. So the tubular system, has no depth, it’s not codes WD: The incommensurable.

RP: The villages in a way are organized with the swastikas.

MvT: What is the swastika a symbol of again?

JW: It’s a Vedic affirmation of life. It’s called Mama Swastika, and I think that’s the wife-affirmation here. And I think the question is out. What does it mean to have that one on one hand, and it dominates, but then one that is Nazi, and thus the opposite of lifeaffirmation. The interchangeably of them – there’s no reason why that one over there should be different from all the other ones. I know it’s almost terrifying, because you can !36

turn life inside out and you get death. There’s an interchangeability between swastikas. If he has a politics it is that realization at the base level. Life can go to mud, mud can go to life: that’s his evolution allegory here. And this is his moral allegory, where good can go to evil and evil can go to good.

HV: Mama-swastika, because he used that term a lot, and I never knew what it meant.

MvT: But if you look over there, it’s non-connection and I just see the point of your term gross connectivity. And then here there are points of connection, it seems to be happening in a point, but for me, visually, the swastika is almost like a wheel that goes into motion.

If you think of what a line is it can be a vector or intentionality or direction and if you connect it, he says you’ll never arrive where you want to be. So how do you see then this connection? The swastika makes it an always dynamic, changing thing. This is why I like your idea that swastika turns both ways, that the connection is not a point that you reach but motion.

JW: I mean these are more like like transmission cables. Because the things that we know that are linear and couples of three or four, are wires, or transmission cables and power lines. He doesn’t have four of them. He’s done that very deliberately. This is a network. And these [other painting] are dotted lines, some of which fade out halfway towards something. So this is not gross connectivity in that sense of being strong. It’s weak and off.

HV: And there it’s also a swastika, based on a whole study of swastikas.

MvT: So this gross because it is unstable.

JW: Gross I mean heavy and burdensome and also fatal, not in the sense that it brings death bit that it’s set by fate. In a way you can feel this woman is beset by fate, that the naked people are connected. Is it a genealogical line, a sexual line? Whatever line it is it’s got them roped together, muzzled like dogs together. It’s very powerful. And I think it is an emblem of fate, at least in one of its dimensions.

WD: You never stand alone in your fate.

JW: It would be collective fate, family fate, sexual fate, relationship fate, national fate.

MvT: We’re talking about fate as in fatality.

WD: If you read [that] image through [that] one, it’s very hard to sustain the reading that it is initially a formal exercise, even though I somehow am convinced that that is the stage when the understanding achieved by making the image is brought to a different stage. That happens a lot in his work, where one image is produced. And there’s a gradual understanding of what the image might produce. If this is effectively an early examples of that type of work, you can see the incremental arriving at something else. What you said about the lines no longer connecting is a beautiful extension of what has attracted me to that image over there. It seems like the base image for the matrix upon which more complex configurations are being built. There’s near connectivity, and then there’s the human connection, and the community.

ML: It works in both ways I think. You suggested that you can […] it to the formal exercise because you already know […] You already see the swastika and it weighs upon you. But at the same time the fact that this took place and at the same time these experiments on the canvas, the pattern, if you put the lines on like that also makes it !37

lighter. The ways the sawistika and the pattern of networks and connectivity is also the result of an exercise that stays in your mind.

HV: He also writes that drawings are a way to an image. The second is if you look at the skin, it’s very tough. What is there [points to network painting] very explicit is maybe more in the skin then?

JA: I think keeping the drawings in mind is important. He talks about that as control. The progression makes perfect sense. […] It’s interesting to what extent we extrapolate content from the abstract ML: Reading this as part of the oeuvre now. So if we see this just in isolation, it could be very different.

JW: You could produce an animation, it seems to me, a fancy animation. You could start with this, use the nodal points in this, and those would become the points of interception in the ladder, create the ladder to disconnect, and then you could move those down and create a wide ladder. It’s not ridiculous, that you could do an animation and these things would twist into each other, in a certain sense. They do inhabit the same formal space.

WD: So a gradual morphing of one figure into the other?

JvW: In one of the films, he points out that he has an interest he had in not necessarily crucifixes but cross motifs that he started to develop. And from one motif came another one, and another one. He discovered new movable [image forms] with a lot of gradual steps in between that he wouldn’t use but that we’re discovering new ways that we could actually connect with.

MvT: Also in relation to your remark what Helene said of course we’re reading it together now, and we’ve had our own sequences through the works, but also in relation the skin, this painting is very much about painting and about light.

HV: What he writes about Rembrandt: forget that it’s painting, it’s just light. That was his big example MvT: That’s an anti-modernist remark because what Fuchs says is when you look at Rembrandt all you see is paint. I disagree with Fuchs by the way.

JA: A question about the canvases. Did he use standard sizes?

HV: Sometimes he made them himself. It changed a lot, how he stretched them.

AD: So you’re saying there were different techniques used?

HV: It’s also paint and it’s charcoal. He painted it in 1997 and overpainted six years ago.

WD: If we throw this one in the mix, where do we get with this one?

RP: Je pense que quand on vois cette toile il y a la question du kamikaze. Et qu’il faudrait pour comprendre, le voir avec les autres tableaux ou la question du kamikaze est présente. Et il y a une en particulier qui était dans le portfolio ou on retrouve ces motives de code. […] On retrouve dans ces toiles la réduction du langage picturale a des éléments abstraites et très élémentaires et qui produisent et rejoignent comme John disait juste avant ces…si on pense a la peinture comme une sort processus et un ensemble dynamique qui s’en planche et à la fois un réseau qui n’est pas déterminé comme ici. Là, le réseau est fermé, la il continue. Les motifs des cônes sont également recoupés en bas à a gauche donc ça – il recoupe un recadrage sur un système, et puis on peut également se !38

demander si la multiplicité des relations qui sont induit entre ces signes élémentaires, c’est à dire, les cônes et également les motifs des swastika caillés comme des roues qui remplacent un processus dynamique pour produire quelque chose d’autre qui n’est pas donné à voir ici, peut être présent par les ligne [ ?]. Ca ne correspond pas dansd certaines endroits. Le jaune, le bleu, la ligne le vert etcetera. Le système il n’est pas fini. Il est arrêté et il y a une superposition de deux niveau de nouveaux et certains sont complètement obliteré éffacé, soit il y a un phénomène de décalage, soit un élément effacé pourrait produit quelque chose, […] ca crée quelque chose qui complexifie et qui rend la structure de la toile.

MvT: [To summarize in English for John] There’s a relational dynamics going on, which is not a system that is complete, it’s constantly being undermined by elements that are either appearing or disappearing. That don’t fit into the grid so it’s a potential.

WD: I really like the fact that it’s a cutout. Because the cones, for example the brown one, I cannot help to think of these as dwarves.

HV: Yes, I know this. It’s anecdotal.

WD: It could also be tiny flags on a line that can be reversed.

ML: So it’s these things that topple all the time. Because in the drawings there’s also one where there are Ku Klux Klan type persons. So depending on what you see or reference there’s this toppling. So for example I suggested this one [from the catalogue] and it doesn’t seem to have the swastikas. So they’re all variants and just one type of change that is systematic or not that stresses the balance towards certain expectations and what it means. But they’re always there.

JvW: They’re extremely codified, also if you think of them as dwarves, the swastikas start looking like walking legs. So there’s the image of the wheel that suggests mobility but there’s the walking figure is there as well. And you can see this quite explicitly from sketchbooks.

JA: It’s also like a net. When you make a cube, you do the dotted line and cut it to fold, to make it into a three-dimensional object. So this is not going make them an object in reality but this potential.

WD: So then you’re saying that the mama-swastika-villages has two regimes of spatiality in it. That there is a scheme for a three dimensional form if you try to cut it out.

JA: It’s not suggested but this idea that it could be a spatial structure in some way. Just to make it be not about dwarves, but a series of primary coloured geometric forms.

WD: And then the Buckminster Fuller or [?] is once again, it works together.

MvT: I have a question about something Rafael said. Qui donne à voir quelque chose qu’on ne voit pas. You were speaking about the space hors-off canvas. Can you elaborate on that?

RP: Le fait qu’il y a une recadrage qui s’entrepose […]. C’est comme si il y a un système qui était mise en place mais qui n’est pas jugé uniquement a base de la production de qui est la mais qui est également déterminé par quelque chose qui est au-delà de ca. Je voudrais aller un peu plus loin avec ça. Il y a aussi quelque chose qui est de l’ordre d’un système de penser d’une manière de penser qui est […] ça c’est une sorte de !39

matérialisation qu’on trouve là et là et la. C’est pour ca que ca m’intéressait de le mettre en rapport avec ce tableau qui est la ou la motive du swastika intervient véritablement dans un ancrage qui est historique, qui ordonne régime totalitaire […] par contre ici il y a un sorte tentative d’aversion et diversion constant d’un système de penser de codes qui en même temps […] recodification de […] Quand on voit ce tableau […] une question discursive où la question de historicité il est la, on peut pas le échapper. Et progressivement ce motif commence a diviser son historique et cote technique et on va arriver a un système de pensé […] C’est la totalité et subjective […].

WD: So the moral vacuum [?] is gradually evolved, and you’re principally saying the basic scheme came up already.

ML: There [behind them] it’s about almost the liberation of historic weight and historicism. Coming back to that the swastika is very determined to me. We cannot misunderstand what the swastika is there. And it gradually throughout his work opens up as something that becomes a lot more ambiguous, and sometimes becomes just pattern, or we don’t know.

JW: So the swastika there is an armband, and because it’s an armband it produces this circularity. Why would the swastika be in a circle? It makes it an insignia. It puts it onto the body as an accessory. To me this work… He’s so interested in – you’ve got a swastika and you’ve got a circle – now that’s an insignia, the national socialism that goes over there. But here, it’s a formal problem. It’s this line at the top, which inscribes across the circle, it’s this line that goes outside, and here the line doesn’t go to the end. Everywhere you look, here it goes outside, here it’s hardly articulated, each single example is a little different. So when he comes over here, he starts to…this one goes across, this one misses, that one down there misses entirely [gestures at swastika dwarves]. That suggests the rotation, the formal elements. It’s a good example of the taking off from the motif in a really intense way. And then it seems natural that maybe the vectored direction – and then it’s an arrow, and it points! And then little by little it becomes a hat for a gnome or something and then it becomes coloured. And then yet another pathway that intervenes, not at the top, as it were, but now from the side, it becomes dotted and it becomes a different vector system. It’s an amazing sequence of associations. And there’s one that’s empty!

ML: The elements inside the swastika are no longer perpendicular. It has become mobile.

The elements of the construction are moving.

HV: Becoming more a sort of mobility, and symbol of movement.

MvT: Do we really need to hold onto the gnomes. It’s so anthropomorphic!

ML: But in some paintings yes, and others not!

JW: But it’s very consistent that a swastika would morph into a physiognomy. Here in the end.

ML: Here it’s just the colours and the darkness around it evokes to me Bosch. It is this world. There’s the blackness, and they’re running around, and this whirlwind of figures.

JW: It has to be gnomes not dwarves because gnomes come from gnomic, and knowledge, and gnostic. Dwarves, forget it! !40

JA: But let’s take it as not anthropomorphic but relate it to the geometric abstraction. For me, it’s very fascinating to describe it within that kind of history.

WD: To describe it as an arrow is very convincing, so it’s not a hat. It’s the reduction of what in the black painting are lines, and direction, just merely a sign of directionality, pointing.

ML: But then they’d be pointing also downwards or sideways.

HV: The lines are broken. He starts to make broken lines at a certain moment. He does it in his drawings also.

ML: How about Thomas Schütte and […]? Having colour patterns in something repetitive of the same size, not as a motive, but something that is applied.

AD: And there the decorative comes up again, in that kind of patterning of colour. And that’s why I think I agree with you about him trying different ways of painting and representing, which comes up here again. I find this image very difficult to deal with because it’s very different systems of representation. You have swastikas, that’s a symbol, and then you have the broken line and the diagram, and then you have these colours, that some of them are white and painterly, so we read them as painterly but you can read them as pointy hats. It’s this overlaying and intersection of different systems of representation, which I find quite unsettling.

JvW: Also the fact that they are all pointing in the same direction, except the blue one, seems to signify something that you can’t put a finger on.

MvT: It’s also a bit like a cutting pattern.

WD: It’s like what Jo was saying, that if you cut it out you could surface this in different shapes. And then you can recombine into a geometric figure or volume.

MvT: It’s interesting that there’s this schema of thinking, but it is not accessible in a direct way.

WD: It’s rather a trace than a model. Because of you say a model of thinking than it has some kind of normative quality but it’s rather a trace, a meta-representation of a way of thinking.

AD: And even a fragment.

ML: These are kind of miniature paintings, because it has this suggestion.

JvW: He would experiment with these kinds of formal elements in different kinds of constellations and a certain point, completely different things would come together in a different work that would open up different interpretations.

WD: You can also see that the final black layer is the last one applied. It’s painted around and then you get the black layer.

ML: The scale is really important.

JW: Some are after and some are before [drawn/painted?] He’s definitely gone back here and over-penciled.

WD: Here he re-drew the swastika.

JA: What year is this?

JW: 1939! !41

AD: An art historical joke made everywhere.

JW: It was upside down!

[Unintelligible] JvW: He started on the right in a very orderly fashion and then got more and more confused on the way.

JW: And go back on the top right.

GV: The title is Cycle Mama Swastika. Actually, the loops are on one side, so he hung it vertically!

JW: He had to have painted it in the other orientation and decided to put it this way!

JA: With this one, the grey pattern and the white we see seems to be the text that’s been erased. So it seems to be much more clearly tied to [?] the material use of paint that cannot be tied to much else. This is simply what one does with paintings that simply do not work. Materializing that failure in a spectacular way. I didn’t have a huge amount to dwell on this, but again it’s one of these moments in his practice that I find quite arresting. The kamikaze act. In terms of the allegory, I am still wondering what that might be in painting. Painting as an alibi…

JW: It takes you away from the scene of the crime. Which is probably why.

WD: It’s a way to mediate. It’s an alibi.

JA: I like the idea of mediation. It’s one step away from the idea that this is immediately absorbed into the figure of the artist, this idea of absenting the scene of the crime.

HV: He always said that had he not been an artist, he would have been a criminal.

WD: Then painting is more a salvation from a criminal destiny.

MvT: But he also said that painting can not be salvation.

JvW: It means that you are not culpable of an act that you didn’t commit.

ML: But an alibi can also be to have to proof that it’s not a real proof. It comes with the connotation that you have an alibi, but it doesn’t have to be the truth.

JA: It’s a form of witnessing as well, because your alibi relies on you having been seen by others. Visibility.

AD: You say it’s an impasse. But it’s an impasse if you only kamikaze once. That’s the irony. It’s kamikaze repeatedly, and that’s how he’s achieving something. And that’s what is interesting. What happens when you operate a kamikaze operation again and again in different supports and in different ways. And back to the idea of failure that is coming up.

It’s maybe explicit but at the same time contradicted.

WD: It’s probably too biographical, but I read the kamikaze as a kind of description of an artistic position that refuses to conform. That you somehow kill off your own position by refusing to adopt to trends to expectations. You simply follow an internal logic that is not dictated by external demands. I think the second painting we started with, the kind of extreme moment of misunderstanding, but somehow adopting that position as a stance, as a wilful position. To refuse as an artist to accommodate, is somehow acting like a kamikaze in terms of a success and public approval. You rather not make choices that will make you lose all public support that you have. So I read it as a kind of meta attitude. If you look at the variety that is here: it’s difficult for a gallery, or the art world, to accept !42

this, and to juggle with the diversity. What we’ve done here today is really unveil a driving force. I’m not sure we’ve completely put a finger on it but I think we arrived at seeing something that binds all the works, not only on a stylistic level but on the level of somehow working out a series of questions through painting. Painting is an alibi to work through a set of questions. But doing this at first in a pretty inconsistent manner.

JA: It’s almost sabotage, self-sabotage.

WD: It could be read as sabotage. Kamikaze is maybe just a posture. If we look at it, it’s pretty consistent, but in formal terms. And so it’s been seen as kamikaze. Don’t start another type of work. You have signature work, why don’t you continue to do this. If you have success. So it’s a kind of posture, but maybe one that is imposed, rather than adopted. Or both. At some point I think he adopts it. Because he recognizes that what he is doing is acting out a kamikaze while he is maybe not experiencing it himself.

AD: There’s something in me that wants to resist that reading because it’s too biographical and almost a bit theatrical. You can almost imagine it as a kind of Hollywood film. And that’s maybe that’s where the difference between sabotage and kamikaze comes in. It’s interesting that he chose this word. Because there it’s about disappearance. Disappearance of the works, of the meaning, of the artist. So the kamikaze operation is enacted in the work itself. In a sense we don’t really have to relate it to the kind of biographical…but I agree with you but I am a little squeamish.

WD: I think it’s interesting to have both. The reading I just made has very little to do with painting. So you’re bringing it back to the literal object in front of us. So if we could combine both, that would be really strong. So what I was saying applies to all painting, but if I bring it back to this example, and what we’re seeing, I follow your reading.

AD: And it’s really interesting that Jo chose this one and the black one because it encourages this kind of reading. The gesture of painting.

JA: It’s interesting how seeing all the other works in between has confused what I was going to say but. It of course hasn’t really disappeared. It’s got the same size, it’s got more paint on it. A posture is probably quite a good term for it.

WD: Am I right to see traces of fingers on the bottom. So it’s much more of a fight, literally with the surface. That one is application, or layering of paint, while here it’s as if people have struggled.

JA: But we don’t want to talk about this one being a terrain or landscape ina way that that one is.

WD: Less. This is a kind of image you would get, to use a cheap metaphor, after two people have wrestled in the sand. And you get traces of dragging and being dragged. I would never write this down in a text.

HV: Actually he always wore gloves. He never wanted to have dirty hands. So I don’t think it’s hands.

JA: But you could do it with gloves.

JvW: Something in me resists the idea of fingers. It actually doesn’t look like fingers, really.

WD: I was not convinced, but it has the appearance of it.

JvW: It could be with gloves on. !43

ML: But what about the word kamikaze. It’s something I associate with the swastika as something that comes from an oriental tradition, starts to take up another connotation, something violent, also aesthetic. There’s also the question whether it is possible. To have a repeated kamikaze, what does that mean? And is it an inflation of kamikaze or not? As an analogy to what happens if you build up those strengths in an oeuvre working through this figure of the swastika, which sometimes becomes very weighty and sometimes seems to be very playful. So I’m also wondering if this applies to this. Because we had le sang, la nuit, these idea of words like kamikaze. But if you see it in relation to the swastika.

JW: The K is a swastika basically. Especially when he messed around with it.

JA: It’s in a sense almost like a kind of wall writing or graffiti, or a kind of statement.

There is a sense in which you can of course connect the idea of a person, the introspective, and the artist in a studio with a message that somehow connects them. The type of thing you might find on a wall, a public statement. Which isn’t to say that it’s literally that but as a way for it not to be disconnected.

WD: Can we see logic in what has been raised?

JvW: It continually says: L’important c’est le kamikaze.

MvT: No, because l’important doesn’t fit before c’est anymore.

HV: But it doesn’t stop. It’s just to say that it doesn’t stop.

WD: I’m just trying to figure out why it’s basically the middle part of the painting. It’s a movement that starts at the top and then in one big wave, a sponge or something, and the left part is relatively untouched. I just don’t really see what happens.

MvT: To me it connect to all the things we’ve been saying about the screen and expression and the letting go of language. And now all that’s left if you read it, what is left is a stammer. It’s a person who can only say the first syllable. And then it doesn’t come. The second thing is if you repeat the same thing over and over again it’s the poetic truth for Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, it becomes the absurd. So language loses its meaning if you repeat it.

RP: And you can be a kamikaze just one time.

MvT: Yes, so if you don’t get there, it’s also a jumpstart, he keeps starting but you don’t jump.

HV: He says I go from failure to failure.

JvW: Actually I think the term kamikaze is highly problematic. It’s a Japanese act of ultimate heroism, the ultimate act of stopping your own life in a specific way to a specific part of your body and adopting that term with the specific connotation of bravery and to use it over and over again. It’s posing for something that…it’s an overkill of a motive, that is intended as a totally different thing.

WD: So you’re saying that it’s an act that he doesn’t leave, it’s something that he advances forwards rather than identifies with. Or if he would, it’s highly problematic.

JvW: I think he identifies with the connotations and symptoms of it, and that’s why he might like to use the term, but also because it connotes this heroism.

HV: For him an artist was a kind of hero. He likens himself with Arafat, people who tried to save the world in their way against the whole world. He had this very idealistic thinking. !44

WD: If we return to one of the first notions that was dropped this morning: irony. Was there any irony involved?

HV: Always.

MvT: I had a question. What Wouter was saying, if this part is left intact more or less, and here where language is supposed to be starts with a void, and there’s this falling down, so it’s also a kind of kamikaze. But there’s a shoot. This is too much interpretation, but there’s a downward movement, heroic movement.

ML: The accent also suggests a downward movement.

JA: Kamikaze has been adopted, it’s used very frequently. The idea of noble heroics is kind of drained from it. It’s when someone auto-destructs.

WD: So the notion of kamikaze is quite different, because the…

JW: It’s ubiquitous by the time he picks it up. And I don’t know why. Is it connected World War Two or Japan? Is he referring to the kamikaze pilots, or other kinds of rituals that you alluded to that are quite different. Obviously one stands in for the other one, a shorthand, in Western culture, in Japanese not so much. In Western press it was the one word used to describe suicide.

MvT: Isn’t that hara-kiri?

JW: I think kamikaze is another ritual, I am not sure.

WD: If we try to read the thing in and of itself. Try to address as an object rather than contextually.

JW: In a sense it combines the two places that have been at the edges of the semantic universe. One is the black all-over textured painting, which this resembles, at least somewhat, and the second is the reapportion of language, which we discussed in relation to that work, where we’ve got words that still hold, that you can split, that can be slightly cut off, the bottom of the G’s you lose the bottom, but that’s it. But here’s it’s all about loss. You can’t get anything out. It’s good to read it onomatopoeically, these syllables, these unarticulated syllables. One is overlaid on the other with you know, things going on like the scrapes and the indentations, which seem to be a little different from that one almost acts of desperation. You’re grasping at the surface. Whether it’s done by the hand, or the blood or the spatula. I don’t think it matters much, although I think it matters here, because if it’s been done with a tool, it’s much more mediated than if it’s been done with the hand. So we got to a certain extremis with this.

ML: We also have the issue of what we called blood by implication or not. It’s interesting in relation to the falling. Is there an association of the downward gestures with kamikaze or not? It’s the same ambiguity that we couldn’t completely dissolve with the overpainting/blood by implication.

WD: I like this idea of the stammer. When language comes to a halt and never comes to a proper utterance. It’s a beautiful metaphor, rather than failure. Because failure implies that it did something and it’s wrong. Like the result just doesn’t comply. Whereas stammering is trying and you go halfway, if you’re lucky.

ML: The stammer is also nice, because it’s just the idea of repetition. In the retrying doing something different, opening up. !45

WD: And then maybe every single work is never a failure, but never a proper arrival, which is something completely different. And then the kamikaze sentence, maybe it doesn’t stick, or doesn’t coincide one with the other.

MvT: If you repeat it one after the other it also loses meaning. But this point that you just made, I want to connect it to what Rafael said. If stammering is a vector towards language and that connects with this schema, which is not a model. It’s a system of thought that is inarticulate, which only starts.

WD: In the notion of trace.

JA: And the silent screams we were looking at earlier, which is not the same as a sound, still inarticulate. It’s a register of speech, but it doesn’t articulate language.

MvT: But than it gravitates between hope and despair somehow.

WD: If you speak to the notion failure, you have someone who tries, and then you have failure. But the notion of the stammer is continuous tries, someone who wants to achieve something. So the position towards the world is fundamentally different. One is completely implied, misses, while the stammer is trying to address and never properly arriving. As a metaphor it’s a completely different reading of the works as a whole. And it applies to many other things, and then the trace of process, or line of thought that also never properly arrive. They go in the same direction but…

MvT: Yeah but it’s also impotent. If we can go back to central metaphors. Too afraid to put the word in for the possibility of failure.

JW: When Deleuze writes about stammer, it really is a complicated way of saying it’s not inscribed in the symbolic order. I would say thought that Philippe goes in the exact opposite direction. All he wants to do, he is driven to re-inscribe himself back into the symbolic order; the symbolic order of evil, the symbolic order of the cross, the symbolic order of medical torture. He’s got to get it done, his recesses of what has already been symbolized, and done and received and become a cliché. And he wants to go to the other side of the cliché and reinvent it as a new form of heaviness, burden. That he then wants to be burdened by. For me what is interesting is that it resists the kind of easy speak of the post-structural analysis of the situation, resist the symbolic order. To me he does go the opposite direction, in language, and in objects and things, and symbolization. It’s not that he wants to resist it, he wants to go deeper into it than he’s been allowed to through reproductions and magazine or newspaper illustrations that he keeps all those things.

ML: The question of going deeper…because sometimes he seems to go deeper into it, but sometimes by going deeper he ends up making it light, or by making it disappear, it becomes something very different. It’s a current working through or with not to resist to resist the symbol.

JW: It’s never successful, one would have to say that. Whatever that quest is, it’s dark, it’s obscure, it’s difficult. It sometimes becomes subject of levity. Gnomes become a manifestation of that. Gnome hats on top of swastikas is a pretty crazy thing! It has all those moments. They’re all moments of escape from the oppressive possibility of further reaching that push.

AD: It’s interesting that you say that, because reading the text that was what was bothering me. This kind of heroic stance that comes up again and again, the struggle and !46

he’s fighting, and the wanting to reach the light, and divine. And that really bothered me because I read it as kind of a romantic trope and why is he talking like that in this day and age. And of course comparing himself to a hero, I find it problematic. That’s why I use failure but the right term I needed is this kind of struggle that kind of is always happening. So there is never this moment of heroic mastery, arrival to the object of the quest. So that’s why the texts, the ones that are online, are misleading in a sense, because reading the text you imagine this quest. But when you look at the work, as we’ve done, you realize that this quest doesn’t happen at all, and it made me happy because that is what I was finding troubling in the text.

MvT: But he says in the film the artist is not a hero, that would be the wrong interpretation.

AD: I didn’t see the film, so that’s why.

JW: And authenticity becomes but the method and the ruin of this possibility, simultaneously. That’s why it’s not just a romantic authenticity, while absolutely tinged with the elements of romantic tragedy and romantic mortality and so on. But it doesn’t quite answer to those.

HV: Maybe in writing the text he was trying to find a clear answer, but he knew there was none. Because it’s true, the texts are much more romantic.

WD: What you see in the mirror is not always what you do. It certainly applies to him as an artist that what he is seeing in the mirror, how he saw himself, is not necessarily what he did. Very few artists are on top of it, and if they are, it’s often very explanatory. But then I like the friction because he was also sometimes misleading. I like the tension between work that gains a kind of autonomy of its own regardless of the voice of the artist who whispers in your ear how you should read it. And in this case, the biography, which you’re right in pointing out that the reading might be too biographically driven.

But there’s a really interesting tension that today we’ve managed to escape from or not.

Are we led too much by that context or frame of reference?

AD: But I think what you say John about authenticity of method is really interesting because we’ve had so much authenticity as subject matter in post-modern art. Whether it becomes the subject, and deconstructing it, and parodying it, and there to actually imagine it as a method, it’s very interesting I think. To set this kind of work apart from others.

WD: And ruling [ruin?] was the first term?

JOHN: It’s simultaneously method and it’s ruined. Everywhere you see incompletion, falling off, failure, language falls, language is stuttered, language is cut, signs are picked up and morphed through the virtuosity of pictorial and imagining and conceptual tropes.

But where they end up? They end up as swastika patterns. Every avenue becomes a form of cul-de-sac. And it’s about avenues, I mean avenue as another word for gross communication.

MvT: Does this resonate with terms that Helene put on the table of construction and deconstruction?

JW: It probably does but it’s going to be hard to get there. !47

MvT: I don’t want to keep to terms, but I think it’s the same kind of process. At the same time the method contains both. It’s the direction toward but it doesn’t arrive. If you see ruin as the opposite of success. But that’s very difficult to say then what is success. So ruin, and that there’s already the potential of its own kaputtmachen.

ML: I find it difficult to think in terms of failure or not achieving. The suggestion of avenue is much more productive in the sense that what we see is all strands of developing research and on the way it produces so much, so many things that go in different directions, but that it’s not a not arriving, as in it never comes to what it should achieve.

It’s achieving all the time. This idea of failure…

WD: It’s more ruining as an image, than as a fact.

JW: But this is a deconstructive-constructive manifesto: God, serenity, acceptance, change, knowledge, difference. If you wanted the “learn words” to put on your textbook, there they are.

WD: But along with what Maarten said, he does achieve because what you’re saying is he does achieve because he finishes works.

ML: And working through but never repeating.

WD: But there’s one interesting note to that: the works that were finished, his own works, were painted over. So the idea that a painting is finished, because he put a date on it and considered it finished. He never returned to it. While there are works that after some time, even if they were considered achieved, they are over-painted. So there’s an interesting…I am thinking of the moment when Richter is making these scrape-paintings.

When is it done? There’s a moment in a film when he looks at it and says: they’re all bad, we have to restart. And you can’t say why. Why would this painting be finished? The struggle of when a painting is finished, except the very first one, because it’s resolved, but most of these, are like the rule you’re talking about. This unresolvedness that is translated into image, it’s something that you can see, not as a fact. “You forgot to paint the right-hand corner” is not something we can say. But the unresolvedness here is something almost trying to arrive at. Especially because at some point he reassesses his formal judgment. Maybe pragmatically because he didn’t have any canvases left so he had to use existing ones, but I think the pragmatic doesn’t really apply. But rather it no longer corresponds to what I consider to be a finished painting.

MvT: I think the ruin is in the method. It’s not an opposition.

ML: We should be careful not to use the words like finished or achieved. To me they’re all seem finished and achieved. But what’s interesting is if you think of them as series, and the series is always research. So it’s different to think is that intentionally driven, and is it trying after something and it’s not found. I don’t think it’s like that. Work through until all this is done and is exhausted, and then you have to start something new. That’s how it seems when you see the him speak in the film, but the more I see the more I feel that it’s not so much different series, but there’s so much continuity and ambiguity in working through the series that these explode into new ones. So I see it as a much more productive sequence of things that are variances, than something that comes to an end because it’s exhausted. I don’t have this feeling. It seems to continuously open up other !48

things that then are explored again, like the swastika. You can see the cosmos coming in already there.

HV: He says the ashes of my destruction will create a new world.

JA: But that’s why we have to be cautious of the world failure even if the artist isn’t because of course it’s of course just as heroic. “All is well with this painting, I’ll do another one.” That’s not what we expect from painters.

WD: It’s a posture as well.

JA: Absolutely! It can be a productive one, but then we’re used to the idea of failure as genitive. A big failed encounter would just be, I guess they wouldn’t be a painter, they’d be doing something else. It needs to be understood in this narrative of self as well JW: But it’s ubiquitous, isn’t it? That sense of failure with painters. Everywhere you look.

JA: Pollock, Picasso. They’re mythic, and they’re super helpful and productive.

WD: It’s even in the film I think, where he says “Waking up in the morning, I don’t know where to go – I’ve lost my capacity to paint.” Someday, it will be over. The exorcism is the fighting that.

MvT: It’s this belief that it comes from elsewhere. The waiting for it to come to me. And someday it might not come.

JW: Exhaustion is good though, not to be too demotive about it, but it’s the other great essay in that anthology on […] it’s about repetition, about compulsion.

WD: That might be a position he shares with Twombly, at least how I read it. Starting something, and then backing off. Starting again. Nothing is resolved, but the totality is!

AD: This is just to make a very simple connection between Artaud and Vandenberg. I have to say that I stumbled upon his work at the Maison Rouge show, together with the work of Berlinde de Buyckere, which was an incredibly dark show. I came out feeling like the world was a terrible place, violence, and torture, and suffering. And just when you look towards the Catholic faith, there’s more violence and more torture, and more suffering. This is the image I had of the work before coming today and in a sense I almost chose this one anecdotally, because of the […] Artaud, that is for me the most striking connection I see between Artaud and Vandenberg. So I was looking at the terms they were using, so cruelty, the connection between cruelty and beauty, between violence and sex, and sexuality, and obviously the Catholic religion being full of these connections between eroticism, sensuality and violence, in relation to destruction, but in relation to truth as well, the idea of trying to find some kind of truth. And the other connection is more formal, and it worked better in my head than when I see the work. I was thinking of these drawings by Artaud where he attacks the paint, burns it, makes holes. So this idea of when Vandenberg talks about injuring the painting and wounding the painting resonates very obviously with Artaud’s writings and drawings. And one of the things I thought was quite interesting is when Vandenberg makes these works that take the form of prayers. That’s something you see in Artaud’s drawings, which are like spells, he talks about the talisman, and casting the curse through these drawings. He actually sent them to people to cast spells on them. So the kind of wounding and injuring of the support of the !49

drawing is also a wounding or injuring of somebody or some evil. So that was a connection that struck me. There’s number of works that read like prayers, so to God, as if they’re some kind of magical…

HV: You know this prayer? AA uses it also. It’s a very old prayer from the Roman times, and the Catholics took it over. My father had been to the AA for a very short time and he didn’t like it.

JW: The AA was set up by a Jesuit under the 11 articles of the faith.

WD: I really like the upper left part of the painting. It mesmerizes me what is happening up there.

AD: I was focusing more about the resemblances as I was reading the texts, especially with both of them writing about Van Gogh, and the kind of artiste maudit, which in both cases becomes a model with which they identify.

JW: And the title of Artaud’s text is “Van Gogh, Suicided by Society.”

AD: So I saw echoes in both of their readings and the painting and the act of painting itself, talking about force, and terror. Both seem to use this image of the whirlpool to talk about the internal force of the painting. Vandenberg says this when he talks about Bosch’s Christ Carrying the Cross, and in Artaud’s case it’s when he talks about Van Gogh. And they talk about the infinite, le néant, so there seems to be this commune vocabulary, but then the differences are striking, the difference in terms of the attitude. Artaud is really in the romantic quest for authenticity, which as we saw, is much more complex in Vandenberg’s work. That’s where the gap opens between the two of them. And the difference in terms of the way of working. With Artaud’s spells, and drawings and grisgris, the connection to writing is very clear. Sitting in front of this, we can’t look at the painting as a form of writing, it becomes something very different. What strikes me now, looking at this work in changing light, is that with Artaud, the act of destruction, is very palpable, whereas here, you could initially look at the effacing and disappearing words as an act of destruction, but it’s of course a completely different kind of destruction. Maybe we are in this space of the stammer and the doubt and the hesitation. I want to utter this prayer but maybe it’s not enough. Or maybe I’m not so sure it’s going to work.

WD: So you’re saying there’s more determination in Artaud?

AD: Yes, and I am not an Artaud scholar, so I am sure there’s more subtle readings of his work.

WD: But the fading in this work is of a totally different order than there. There it’s been wiped out, there it’s time that has taken off letters. You see much less of a wiping out.

The upper part, yes, there’s purposeful or wilful erasure of words. With the chalk I am not so sure. He could have just effaced it by walking against it with his jacket. It seems more random.

RP: And have you thought about the relationship to God? […] “My” God. ML: [Reading lines of painting] God, you’ve forsaken me, yes. Up on the cross, and there’s this moment before he gets dragged off and it is his final fate. It’s no longer in his hands. It’s no longer my world now. I accept what fate asked from me. I don’t know if I even believe anymore. What happens, the erasure, is maybe fate. It’s the contingency !50

maybe. What happens, what falls. Erasure seems to be not the act of erasure but something that happens to it.

WD: It’s a minor remark, but there’s some beautiful sparks of blue, it’s absolutely stunning.

MvT: But also, there is right at the centre of the painting. If there, the centre is empty, here, in the form of white and blue, there is light at the centre, leaking down to the bottom. It’s the centre that is missing from the words. So it’s giving up the most central part of the sentence.

ML: It’s spectacular how the change of light lights up so many different words that it seems right. Il faut accepter.

WD: It’s a piece you just have to see in daylight, without artificial light.

JA: It’s interesting that it’s chalk and not blackboard paint, on which you could write with chalk, and is more punishment and incantation.

JW: It definitely looks like there was something much more image based than what we see now in the background.

HV: There was one of those women clad in a burka underneath.

AD: I have no idea what to think about this one.

WD: It’s part of a study series, so they’re very fast.

AD: Did he make an actual painting from that?

HV: No, he made several. But he actually also made several portraits of Artaud, so he was very busy with Artaud at this moment. He also made the same types of studies of Ulrike Meinhof, how she was tortured in prison.

JW: I almost chose the portrait of Meinhof.

ML: There’s scenes of the saints being…

WD: I’d like to have some kind of wrapping up session, to think about what we think we’ve achieved today and how we can move on. We need to think through how we have clearly formulated an incredible amount of things.

CONCLUSION WD: I have no ambition to summarize. That would be near impossible I think, unless you think that that’s a good thing to do. To try and rephrase a few of the main thoughts of the day. We had three aims. To come up with general terms, a set of five to seven terms that apply to a whole bundle of works that could be used as keywords. The second one was to determine groups of works within the oeuvre and to label them. Labels that are not too biographically influenced, not too much by the titles. They could, but something more general. And the third part was a methodological question, how to re-inscribe the work in a larger art historical nexus.

RP: To the methodological question maybe, and to also reframe the corpus, for me I cannot connect it.

AD: No. It’s so contingent on our choices.

WD: I realize that it was a kind of vain aim to have. !51

JA: You must already be somehow doing this yourselves to make sense of it. You could tell us what you’re working with at the moment. You must say, where are the language pieces, etc.

WD: Our initial aim was to already present a first sketch of that mapping of the oeuvre at this seminar. We need to move on to that step. How do you think we should proceed, given what you have seen and what we’ve talked about?

HV: Maybe each of us can just say how it was for them. It’s too hard to connect all the themes.

JW: When you started to list the areas that we might go through, in order to do something like get the artist involved in exhibitions organized by subjects. We have gone through some of that. There was a discourse here on corporeality that has come out in many ways, quite complexly articulated. Different aspects brought out with each work. I think the same for language, there’s no question that exists. I think the same for networks and network orderings, which we talked about mostly in relation to these works. I think we were beginning to talk about things like his resistance to a symbolic order. It is big enough to be an over-subject, and we have said enough things about that. There’s a discourse on pictoriality, on the nature of paint, as it’s applied, as it’s a seep, as it’s a drip, as it’s a splatter. Pictoriality and materiality. Obviously there’s a lot that he’s doing in these interconnected areas that’s actually intercepted all these other questions. That’s five.

And there’s probably a few others. I would say what interests me most is his relation to graphic, photographic, and popular culture, which seems to constitute a subset. And it doesn’t apply to all the images, but it applies massively to others.

WD: It’s not recurrent, but it pops up.

JW: Well there are several of those things. They’re not unimportant, but they only occur in half of the works, or twenty percent of the works.

WD: For me what all the works, in one way or the other address the very fact of making things. So there’s always an embedded reflection on making, and making art. And it’s not about art-making literally, but all of them embody reflexive attitudes towards art making.

JW: But to me the problem with these big overarching concepts is that you could say that about certain artist. You could say it about almost every artist I’ve worked on. In different ways, or the same ways. But what makes it interesting is how you’d say it in a different way. So the actual general categories, it’s too transient, there’s too much in it. And that’s maybe what we learned in the end. In the end it’s not about “italicize the body of work as a whole!” It’s to look at passages through it.

WD: We’re exactly facing a body of work that very wilfully resists that type of attempt.

AD: And that’s a good thing!

JA: And certainly at this stage, when it’s an big overwhelming body of work. I’ve done this with artists that have a wide range of motifs and stylistic changes. Chronology is I find something that really helps at this very early stage, as a scholar, to kind of plot it.

That doesn’t mean I am working against their life or against their biography, or necessarily a kind of morphology, but it is somehow, it’s kind of how we think. And you can undo that in various interesting ways, which is I think what we’ve done here today, by scooting around. But something seems to work, thinking in series and sets. !52

WD: We made a drawing when we were discussing it to have like a collections of works, and they slightly overlap, so you can make almost a chain. The notion of a chain, and there’s another one ML: If you keep things in mind, once you start doing this, these will restructure the sequence. Like if you try to chart the sequence of series that are sometimes similar, but sometimes these will be the connecting or fault lines. But I was thinking the categories that would help. And some of the things can be categorized underneath them, like overpainting. It’s probably on the level of on the one hand pictoriality and materiality, and a subset of that. It’s also related to the resistance of the symbolic order, because it’s sometimes the means toward having this resistance. You can probably think of some more. What was a real surprise for me today, is the discovery of how all of this paradoxically comes together: weight and weightiness sometimes along with the development of something strangely light and searching, playful, tentative, and not defined, open, also in terms of meaning.

WD: So how do we tackle the notion of, what you initially phrased, Anna, this very heavy and dark subject matter. It’s one of the things we face on a methodological level.

How we can counter that kind of perception of the depressed artist, to put it bluntly, someone with a dark outlook on life. I think somehow…Can you say something about that.

RP: Si on supprime toute projection du question morale, sure cette question la, la méthodologie va s’appliquer le même je pense. Là si on qualifie deja l’individu et aussi le travail comme étant traversé par quelque chose qui leur donne une forme de négativité d’une conscience humaine rationnelle et normale. Si on tisse cette perspective la, la en effet on va commencer à arriver dans une interprétation un peu problématique. Donc si on casse un rapport moral a ca, je pense qu’il n’y a pas de problème en fait. Que la métodologie va s’appliquer d’elle même. Que ce sont les concepts, des opérations, mais qui n’ont pas à être jugé, point. Ils n’ont pas être qualifié et surqualifié. C’est comme ça.

JW: Attestations of mortality. He is attesting to mortality, bearing witness, witnessing, looking, voyeuristic. It’s a whole conjugation around this having to bear witness to mortality in its different manifestations, from medical experiments, to Hitlerian extermination rites, through to existential self-doubt.

ML: I agree but I also see other things. I agree that it’s there, but I think that it’s more difficult to connect terms to that other side. The swastika that we were looking at, and the swastikas turned into vibrant lines next to each other with color.

JW: But that’s formal morphology and it’s another thing, maybe a subset of something, it may not be big enough on its own. But I think he’s an artist, the only artist, who really deserves this attention. He’s very particular about the way forms and shapes and logos and emblems and signs shift and morph. You see it everywhere. And that extends to language too. Language is also is also something that shifts and morphs. It overlaps with several categories. And that doesn’t necessarily and always comes up against these heavier questions of mortality. It sometimes does.

WD: Are you saying that heavier questions of mortality are driving the work? Or are these what someone working with painting is confronted with or encountering? Somehow !53

I have the feeling that there’s a misunderstanding. It’s a classical, not mistake, but trying to see what the work is about. In this case, I don’t think the work is about questions of mortality, but in a way, the adventure of painting is being enrolled throughout a life. It encounters issues of mortality as a mode of relating. As a person you relate. Painting is a way of relating to the world, and that is his choice. He could have been a dentist. It’s a choice, as painting is a way of expressing the relationship with the world, and then you encounter. It’s a choice to have that as a driving force. It’s really a difference between a subject and a mode. It’s something that today really surfaced, that this is key to almost develop a new kind of reading of the work. It’s very often also entangled. It’s not as clear as a formula.

RP: La question de contingence. Là aussi il y a quelque chose qui est super intéressant.

AD: What came through with the selection that we made. This overwhelming narrative of Eros and Thanatos that was in the Maison Rouge through the subject matter and the juxtaposition with Berlinde de Bruyckere, it has complete been out of my thought here.

HV: The show, it was a very narrow way of seeing the work of my father. But it’s a part of it.

WD: It’s a thematic reading. We’ve resisted, or tried to resist, a purely thematic reading.

JW: But I don’t think we want to overthink that. I can see the distinction that you’re making between reading in and reading out, between attributing volitionally, his intentions to do something, between us receiving and reading something, and the space between the one or the other. I can see all that. To me that’s all good. But to me, you can build that kind of complexity into your analysis, while still saying it’s reasonable, in terms of big markers, to say that the work is to some extent about language. It’s not about language the way a dictionary is about language, but it’s about language, it addresses language, it takes on language, it takes on materiality and signification. To me, it’s also about mortality. It absolutely takes on issues around mortality. Not in a naïve way and precisely not! And then we get more complex. Then we say, what forms of position, what forms of second order representation, how can you lift mortality from a Popeye comic book? There! How can you combine it with Hitler? There! It starts to get enormously complex the minute you think it through and move it forward! But I don’t think we can leave behind the basic markers.

MvT: Also if you’re thinking about the way this is done and it’s about the method, more than the thematic yes or no. I’ve a long-standing interest in the way painting thinks, if it ever does that, so I was very happy that you came up with the idea of painting as a system of thought, but then here, and it’s beyond language, so I’m just saying something but I hope you understand me. It’s an open-ended system of thought, and precisely the openendedness of the thought is in the way he paints, or he’s exploring that in paint. And not in words, but he’s also taking words because it’s about meaning. The method is the meaning – the meaning is the method. This is probably what Maarten was trying to say.

ML: Open ended thought and open-ended forms. Because it’s about motifs and the way they bend.

WD: I think what we’re saying about the show at the Maison Rouge is it becomes the illustration of a theme, and in the end a territory you don’t want to enter. It downplays the !54

value of the work that is within the method of exploring or addressing themes, but in the mode of address there is so much happening that coincides with the subject matter that is really important to…and that’s what you’re basically saying John, so I get that the distinction I was trying to make is too artificial. There is a danger of seeing work as an illustration of thematic research, while I think in the methodology, the subject is addressed as well.

AD: I think what is interesting is it is about faith, it is thinking about signification and contingency and open ended forms that we addressed today. But he is an artist who takes meaning seriously, and that is very different from a lot of artists today who are not remotely interested in meaning.

JW: Well that goes back to the heaviness, how heavy things are.

AD: I think that’s one of the things we could work on more in terms of trying to define what this concern is.

ML: If there is language, it’s never…These are all weighty things that come to full effect.

Even if they are deconstructed, to use that term, we still know that it was l’important, le kamikaze. Language is never just language. It’s always together with things that evoke existential issues.

WD: You had another term.

JvW: I think of embodiment as a central term, because we have been talking about corporeality and the way that a subject can identify with a lot of different themes, but especially also with more existential themes. So this on the one hand and on the other hand, the embodiment of meaning within a work. There you overcome the problem that if the work is about something, or if we’re reading things into it.

MvT: I wouldn’t do it because embodiment means a container and this is much more a process. Embodiment takes away the dynamic process. It takes away the dynamic search.

AD: But it is a process of embodiment. It’s very much what it’s about, and this giving weight to signs.

MvT: Yes, but I don’t think it’s thought embodied in something, I think the thought is developed in the thing. The thing is developing the thought.

WD: Every painting we have seen – and there’s probably 6, 9, 12 similar ones – the recurrent attempt to reformulate…I think that’s what Merel is saying. He could have just made one and thrown away all the others. But they’re there as valid options as well, or consecutive stages of arriving, of never arriving but at least getting at some stage of conclusiveness because he moves onto something else.

MvT: Maybe we’re not seeing the image of embodiment in the same way, because if you say that what is being embodied.

AD: I don’t like that we’re using the term thought, because that falls into these binaries that you have in Artaud as well as Vandenberg, thought and body and matter, and thought versus matter, and light versus matter, and I don’t like that. I don’t want to talk about thought. When I’m talking about meaning, I’m talking about how does a sign, an object, a gesture, come to mean something. So that process. It’s the act of signifying but it’s more than that. It’s the process.

ML: Or the material finding, because it’s not always there before probably, but… !55

WD: It’s finding out through making.

MvT: Or through unmaking.

WD: The unmaking is as much part of the making, because it’s like reversing a tape, and then recording over it again. So you have layers of sound.

MvT: This is maybe what you mean by embodiment.

JA: A slightly more prosaic note. First of all, lots of artists over-paint in different ways, and I think it’s really helpful to let that stand, that in order to contextualize his practice it’s okay that others were also doing this. So to define what’s specific and different about him […]. The other thing is, for us as people with diverse backgrounds, this is super interesting and important, and this is where scholarship and research starts. So to start to pin down the terms of how we want to frame an artist is not necessarily the right way of going about things. You need to have a kind of confidence to present the work and let people come to it. And then there’s all kinds of practical ways that that can happen, So as us having this conversation and coming up with different readings of his work so we don’t have to agree. It’s inviting particular people, and also in the future, and asking them to write on this. A body of work builds if you have the confidence to let it go in the world, and that’s what you’ve done today. You’ve said: “I don’t know, what do you think?” In the end of the day an open conversation is great, but to have us try to come up with keywords is not. We would never want to do that with anyone’s career at the end of the day, would we?

WD: So you’re basically saying it’s an inappropriate aim?

JA: It’s too soon. Just let the work go into different kinds of exhibitions. I think we will note that there’s language, that there’s existential crisis, that there’s a question of the human condition, and then we want to say, well who doesn’t? Well who else does? And then maybe we can think about his work in relation to that. For someone who is interested in abstraction, there’s the works that I’m particularly drawn to, that’s okay.

There are all kinds of ways in which the work just needs to breathe and let scholarship come to it. I think we’re all agreeing about the different of terms that one might use, but I would suggest that your task as an estate is to not overdetermine with a big statement.

You just say this is an artist, who lived through these years, worked in this period, in a range of media and forms. This very broad framing so that it remains open.

HV: You think even the story that I told yesterday is too much? Because a lot of people ask for it.

JA: Very interesting question. I think you invited a bunch of very informed people who know exactly what to do with that information. We can find things interesting and pick and chose and then we can put it in a box, and talk about the blue.

HV: We get a lot of visitors here who don’t know the work, also the gallery invites collectors or curators who never saw the work.

JW: I think I have the opposite point of view. I said in the beginning already do not not give us information. I feed on it. I’ll read a bad essay. I really can get a lot from a bad essay! I’m sure nobody around this table would copy the terms of the essay in order to dismiss the essay. Nobody interpreted the work with the worries that you had that they’re !56

illustrational or subordinated. Everyone opened up things in all sorts of interesting ways.

I just don’t think that’s, with decent people in the room, going to be an issue.

WD: You’re absolutely right, but it’s also because you’re not aware of the biography. Just put three or four people in a room who are very familiar with the personal history.

JW: Four or five times interesting biographical notes came out, and a few “corrections” were made when people misassumptions. It was simply built into the conversation. We used it, we went where we went with it. I just think it was helpful. I find it always helpful. I don’t ever find it not helpful. It’s knowledge, and I don’t even want to call it fact. Some of it will be fact, maybe, some of it will be archival documents, whatever. The more the better!

HV: We always have the feeling we don’t show enough, we don’t do enough, we don’t tell enough. But on the other hand we are afraid it will be too much.

MV: Imagine if we only had paintings like the small one, we’d have another layer. We’d have another idea of the artist. This is what’s difficult about when to show this work, when to show the “fresh” work.

JA: I just keep thinking about someone working on artists, say Lee Lozano, who also worked in abstraction, and conceptual art and then she wrote loads, and her notebooks, and her early works are really pornographic and funny. So I just kept thinking about how did I organize my thoughts. Well I just plotted it and once you’ve done that, unless you’re retrospective, you have a show that shows her tool drawings, and then one that shows her language piece, and then an essay that will alert you to the fact that this was a diverse practice so.

HV: But a lot of curators want to show everything.

JA: Well if they want to give you a big old retrospective!

HV: For example the drawing show now, in London. They picked works from 1982 until the end.

AD: Why would it be a bad idea? I don’t understand.

ML: There’s a difference between what you say and what you let curators do. If someone for the drawing show thinks this is interesting, why should you object? Then this person is taking responsibility, saying, here’s my selection.

JW: It’s the same as scholarship, curatorial choice is what it is. If I came here and said that I wanted to do research on “the face” you could say we’d much prefer to have someone do the abstractions, so you’ll pass me along for Jo there. But you’re not going to do that. I think you just have as a foundation you’ve got to have unmodified public and professional access. This, you could do. You could organize these things. You’re organizing a good deal of commission, a good deal of publication. You’re actually organizing, I should imagine, a good half or more of what happens. So you’ve got plenty of scope to self-curate, essentially. And I think the rest you should really leave.

HV: The thing is, should we build up something, or really leave it up to the curator?

JW: You can’t build it up the way you fantasize. That’s the first thing you learn as a foundation, especially with a complicated artist who goes in many different directions.

Mike Kelley is one, in a different way. You can’t do it. !57

HV: Because sometimes people say the eighties are now in, so you have to focus on the eighties. Or you just do the drawings because drawings are really important now.

JW: Yeah but that’s crazy cause tomorrow they won’t be. Making those judgments is dangerous.

JA: You’re doing things right. You’re making things digitally available, you’re writing people. You have a high profile gallery that’s going to be. You can’t control, or even be seem to be controlling it. That is too problematic. It’s just the psychodynamics of the family thing.

MvT: Giving the archive is also extremely important in what you’re doing.

ML: In this way it’s good the way you opened your talk yesterday. Add some kind of disclaimer: it is diverse and this is just a selection. That’s kind of okay.

JW: The thing is, everyone will give a different remark. If you ask three people around this table, you’ll get ten different answers.

HV: But how to present work that is so different, that is a little bit the thing.

JA: Very few artists have a very limited repertoire, but if they do what we say about them is, what’s interesting about this artist is that they have a limited repertoire. So most people don’t and have a long career.

HV: But sometimes the galleries comes to me saying how do we describe this? It’s sometimes abstract it’s sometimes figurative.

JW: In that particular case you have some room to think about what it is you want to prioritize, send out first. You have some room to think. If they say we’re going to have a show of the work of the artist and we don’t know what to show, it’s perfectly reasonable that you might help out.

WD: We decided to focus on the abstract work and there’s a consistent body of work.

And I think that’s the way to go for some shows, is to be relatively precise in what you put out.

HV: So we have to select then.

ML: I find it an interesting thing. Before I went through the PDF you sent me I knew a number of works. And they were one image, I would say. I mean they were one site. I am wondering if you’d want a succession of images that you put out of a work that are each in subsequent systems, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting to have in one show, feel that at the same time a consistency in that something is searched and developed but also that it never stops there. You could do a show on swastikas, you could maybe imply that it’s all variations of the monochrome, but actually we don’t know that.

RP: Ce qui serrait intéressant c’est de voir comment en arrivant sur une chronologie beaucoup plus serre et avec un répertoire qui est plus serre, et un répertoire plus serré, comment peut-être les dynamiques qui sont similaires a ceux qu’on a dégagé sont également en jeu. Au lieu de prendre chronologiquement de dates du début jusqu’a la fin, d’avoir une focus plus serrée de voir si oui ou non il y a des dynamiques plus ou moins similaires.

WD: What you’re saying is that there’s a logic that spans the body as a whole, but it’s a logic that applies to smaller bodies of work as well.

MvT: This selection and the three we had there !58

JW: The thing that struck me, in terms of constructing a narrative for today, was most evident. We were a bunch of art historians sitting around here, and we managed to come up with a number of forms of negotiations of Philippe’s work with art historical paradigms, which I think is useful. Because there may be platforms for further research.

We talked about the abstraction question, and we positioned him with in relation to one form of abstraction and more material form of abstraction finding that he didn’t fit with either. That’s just the beginning of a thought. One good thought that could go really far.

We did the same with language. You could do a lot with conceptual art, and handwriting, etcetera. There’s a lot that could happen in that space. And I think we did a little around the notion of transmission, exchange, nodal system, network. I don’t think we quite finalized that, I don’t think we produced the intertexts quite, but that could be done. I think also around the kind of artists who work on the cusp between figuration and abstraction, combining the two in works like this one. Guston might be a very archetypal artist for one type of negotiation with someone else. So we already laid out three four five grand words, and they’re quite different from the thematic overview things, which are quite obvious in a way.

WD: What you are you saying is to photograph the installation, even though it’s not an installation, just as a memento mori, if you could capture, the thing as a whole, and sequence it. If we go back to the discussion we had today, it’s very useful to see what was next to each other.

ML: It’s interesting because because it’s such a diverse oeuvre. It a problem of branding almost. And then you grapple with the question of what is the representative collection or sample. Maybe if you think of random systems, doing this. Some could be very consistent shows and others could be just almost random.

WD: You make a good point about, letting things go. Trying to define what you could do.

Anyone coming in here who wants to have developed her or his reading should be allowed to do so. If there’s a drawing show, what’s the problem? I don’t think you can control this. But what you can do is provide contextualized access. Oh if you’re looking for this, you can help them finding your way. And that’s what we wanted to do by naming the groups of works just as a kind of trajectory, a map that you can show. And then we can disagree, as John said, but you need something to start out. And as long as it’s not normative, or prescriptive, like this is how you should read it. If I’m giving you a map, you can still decide to walk the other way.

JvW: I’m wondering what you plan to do with those terms. If you anticipate on people looking for certain themes, to be able to provide them with those themes along the lines of those terms.

WD: I think the horizon will be the resume.

ML: But the catalog doesn’t need structuring, structuring is an interpretive assessment.

The catalogue raisonné is the registration of the entire production, and the only thing that it has to do is decide what we add from the oeuvre and what archival material is next to it.

WD: There’s the filing part, to make sure that everything is covered and in the right order, but catalogue raisonné has a mirror side to it that is interpretive, and that’s the monograph that goes with it. Ideally you have both at the same time. !59

JA: Or you have an edited collection.

ML: Those are very different things. If you have one author do a monograph or you just do the registration, catalogue resume, or you have an edited volume, with at least three voices giving their view on the oeuvre or parts of it that don’t have to be in consensus and don’t need to be authorized.

WD: So we are inviting you to shortly talk about what for you would be the next step.

How you want to return to this. We already planned to have a second seminar after the summer. And that could with new guests, or you could argue that we should reconvene and continue what we have already established.

JW: Can I just come back to something you said before because it’s really important. I think there’s a slight tendency to blur the line between two separate jobs, one is this kind of job. It’s about public outreach, it’s promoting scholarship, it’s knowledge it’s an epistemological journey you have to go on and it has to happen in a very open way that we’ve described. The other job with the commercial gallery is a very different job. And in your particular case, you’re dealing with an artist that didn’t show that much at certain points, didn’t enjoy an international reputation at certain points. It’s an artist whose market valency, frankly, has to be reasserted, and in order to get advice on that is I suggest you go to the one person who has done this really thoroughly which is Morgan Spangle at Dedalus and Motherwell Foundation, because Motherwell’s reputation, he was already a rather obscure abstract expressionist without a good market value. But by the 1970s and 80s. The executive director really cleverly established the market value of Motherwell by withholding certain things from the market, by precisely reorganizing Motherwell into thematic groups, by dealing with collectors in a very clever way. He was a genius on doing that side. It doesn’t really have anything to do with us, and that can happen as it happens, but that’s just some advice.

HV: It’s interesting you say this because we mixed it.

JW: You did mix it. And it’s going to be mixed to a certain extent.

MvT: But it’s also important to have a good monograph in this whole process.

JW: Of course and they feed into each other. And they’re not separable, but conceptually to a certain extent they need to be separable.

ML: Everyone will agree that it’s your job to succeed as an estate and to put this on the market. And it’s your role. And people will help you probably and others who will feel that their work is something different.

HV: Another question is what works should go to museums and what works should we put on the market.

WD: But where do you start with deciding what is important.

HV: And what’s happening with Hauser and Wirth is they’re just selling selling and we now realize a lot of things are already gone.

WD: But at some point if a major museum comes knocking at the door you need to have a stock, with absolutely important pieces. It’s a value assessment that is pretty hard to make. So therefore a session like this is interesting and productive, to sharpen what we think are the major parts of the oeuvre that should be kept. !60

HV: You say it’s important but then it’s our decision of how we treat this on the market.

It’s another discussion. You can discuss what are the important things.

AD: I now, but you’ll invite in other people and they’ll have completely different opinions.

HV: Isn’t it like museum pieces are recognizable by everyone?

ML: It’s not a category, but a museum piece has to be big enough, it’s not just about quality. And you also probably feel responsible for having representative understanding of it in the work [?], which is sufficiently complex, sufficiently diverse in terms of medium, subject, complexity.

JW: And you have conflicts of interest that you have to be aware of. And the law is different in Europe than in America, but for example a private foundation whose work it is to address the “legacy” of an artist in Europe does not have to subscribe to the American legal position, which is better actually, in which you cannot work to your betterment financially or even by reputation. So a private foundation for a living artist, which is different from a dead one, is not allowed to publicize the artist, but can only do things like give money away. When you become a public foundation, then everything you do is in the public interest, and all your assets are owned by the public. So for example our foundation, everything is owned by the public, we don’t own anything, it’s all in the hands of the state of California. And so it’s public commodities and it’s our duty to put them in museums, put them in the best places and get them shown. And we’re allowed to sell them but only to advance our mission, but only to advance our mission, which again is in the public good. So because of the European legal structure there are some conflicts of interest that you need to work through. You could easily slip over by making a group of neutral art historians suddenly be working towards the market value of someone. It’s easy! So you just have to be careful.

JA: And the bottom line with any art historians who are working and teaching and educating so we don’t want anything to go to private collections, we want it all in museums! We’re conflicted too!

JW: Well that’s not true, if you’re the type of art historian who consults for a corporation or a collector, and there’s a fat fee.

JA: As me another time!

JW: These are real issues though, and they’re percolating around the edges of things here.

ML: I am wondering in what sense the website is a point of representation in itself? You could maybe just have a complete bibliography. Just having the bibliography of what has been written about him, and provide texts that you make public.

HV: We will update the website actually and make more available from the archive also, open it up.

MvT: There’s another problem actually, on Google you find all these outdated heroic texts. Not of your father but about him. And you can’t do anything about it until you have new texts. But don’t put them on your website! That is one thing you can curate! This is not our voice. !61

JW: Although I must say I have a view about that. If those were written and they’re public record that misrepresentation was how he was constructed. Whether we like it or not. I don’t say the website should have ten of them in a row and that’s it.

AD: I think that’s why including works in various kinds of exhibitions is good. It’s only a good thing for the critical reception of the work. As an art historian I am interested in that at this point in time, this is how an artist was interpreted.

JW: One thing is clear: it’s going to be thrilling to get a new round of revisionist thinking. It could go into hundreds of very interesting directions.

WD: To end on that note. Thank you all. First of all thank you to the estate, Helene, Mo and Guillaume for hosting us and providing us with such a wonderful…and let me speak for the group. As academics we really rarely get these kinds of occasions to do what we did yesterday and today. Basically universities don’t allow us to do this anymore so you providing the ground for this is absolutely exceptional. And thank you all for coming and being so dedicated. It’s been a very enjoyable experience to see you be so committed until the very last minute. Seeing what could be the next phase we can do more informally I think. We’ve asked a lot from you in terms of concentration intellectual energy.

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