Explore, Search and Inquire
Explore, Search and Inquire
The Phases in the Art of Mieke van der Voort
She rebuilt a terrace house into an aviary and dwelling for an animal rights activist, had soldiers appear at the Rijksakademie in antique costumes to breathe new life into the cavalry once billeted there and, for the Shanghai Biennial, reconstructed the journey across China of the famous communist Henk Sneevliet. Mieke van der Voort’s work is colourful and diverse, at once documentary and poetic, discerning and vague. Her newest project opens this month at Casco.The 2008 film Kial vi ne skribas min plu? (Why don’t you write me any more?) begins with a poetic scene of a train travelling diagonally across the screen. The contours of the moving locomotive fade, to be followed by a uniformly red surface. Gently urged forward by the mechanical sound and rhythm of the moving train, combined with long camera shots, we are carried along, past train stations, to the cities that grew up over time along the railway tracks. The places that we pass by were also seen by the Dutch activist and communist Henk Sneevliet (1883-1942) on his first journey across China in 1921. Kial vi ne skribas min plu? was inspired by Sneevliet. This impressive film is a part of an installation by the Dutch artist Mieke van de Voort (b. Nijmegen, 1972) recently shown at the Shanghai Biennial, TransLocalMotion. Van de Voort also participated in the CO-OPs project, part of a scientific programme to investigate ‘transformations within cultural practices’. This winter, the Casco contemporary art centre in Utrecht is presenting a solo exhibition by Van de Voort. She had earlier attracted attention with the performance with which she concluded her study at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. The Revolution that Didn’t Happen (2005) was an alienating, costumed staging of an uprising incited by the socialist Pieter Troelstra in 1918, but which in fact never took place. That revolution failed because of the ensuing confrontation between demonstrating communists, anarchists and soldiers quartered in the cavalry barracks, the building that is now the Rijksakademie. For her final project at the academy’s Open Ateliers, soldiers performed in stunning early-20th century uniforms. There were horses in harness and a communist veteran who passionately sang the Internationale, all of which made people realize how unaware they were of what had taken place at this very spot. In remembrance of the victims of the shooting, Van der Voort had a memorial stone installed under what was once the barracks gate. Who is this artist, in whose work fact and fiction, poetry and documentary investigation, performance and theatrical play all combine, always in different ways? And what is it about the radical activist Henk Sneevliet, whom few have even heard of, that intrigues her?
Sneevliet
‘For me, it is about what is hidden behind Sneevliet’s story. I have never believed in communism,’ Van de Voort explains in one of our conversations about her work. ‘I want to understand what the reality is all about. History is an abstraction, a human fabrication.’ Presenting a work based on the history of a radical communist activist at an exhibition in China, where censure is still an issue, is certainly no trivial gesture. ‘When Henk Slager [one of the curators of TransLocalMotion, ed.] invited me to create a new work, I was bothered by the ‘biennial syndrome’, the fact that many works of art are almost unthinkingly presented at biennials, with no awareness of the surroundings. The intentions behind these works can be good, but without a feeling for the specific location, those intentions can also be arrogant. I do not want that…. I had an affinity with Sneevliet because he was also a Dutchman in China. I had already been interested in him before that, in Surinam, where I met someone who had the same name – “You know, the famous Sneevliet” – but I didn’t know about Sneevliet.’ The invitation from Henk Slager provided the incentive to look into the ‘famous’ Sneevliet, who was originally from Rotterdam and who, with a group of well-known Dutch personalities at the time, hoped to realize their communist ideals by travelling to China to help set up the communist movement (it was reportedly Sneevliet who proposed Mao as a leader). Sneevliet was the instrument with which Van der Voort found her way to that unfamiliar land. Although it did give a context to the work she presented, it did not necessarily legitimize her stay. Even after lengthy research into Sneevliet’s activities in China, Van de Voort still had reservations about both him and the land of communism. ‘I do not pretend to know what it is all about.’ The resulting work equally avoids too pronounced a judgement.Van de Voort undertook her investigation of Sneevliet’s actions and their consequences from several perspectives. She sought to discover his personal motives and intentions by way of his letters and the reports he wrote to the Komintern [international organisation of communist parties, 1919-1943, ed.]. Van de Voort worked closely with a Chinese historian who specializes in the Sneevliet history, and who had moreover personally experienced the adverse effects of the re-education programme implemented by Mao Tse Tung. The various standpoints can be seen in Kial vi ne skribas min plu?. In addition to the film, the installation includes a fictitious correspondence in Esperanto between Anna, a Dutch woman, who repeats Sneevliet’s journey 87 years later, and Ming, a Chinese woman. Van de Voort has here incorporated quotations from Sneevliet’s writings and notes. The film and the translation of the exchange of letters are shown on two separate screens. The viewer unconsciously connects the text with the images, but because of the fictitious quality of the text, something that is underscored by the unfamiliar, melodious Esperanto in which it is spoken, we are not in a position to perceive this as a form of subtitling, nor as an illustration or commentary on what we are seeing. When we realize that the Esperanto is an artificial language, with no historical roots, and that it is being spoken by a relatively large number of ‘anti-imperialists’, we can at best conclude that not only the text itself, but also the installation as a whole, is made up of coordinates: layers of history whose exploring, searching and questioning are being forged into a whole.
Alternative History
The precarious distinction between the legitimacy of one’s own actions and the social consequences of those actions, or their bewildering lack of ethical awareness and moral significance, is an issue that regularly concerns Van de Voort, as was the case for the work that she created for Shelter 07 in Harderwijk. Although she had been asked to respond to the city’s historic centre, she became fascinated by an adjacent, newly built neighbourhood. For Van der Voort, that neighbourhood was a model for a makeable society and bore a certain inherent hypocrisy. She does not know what is hidden behind the impenetrable façade of the anonymous, affordable terrace houses, their tidy appearance that is held in high esteem and which is reinforced by the uniformity of the residences in the neighbourhood, and by the neighbourhoods within this and similar provincial cities in the Netherlands. It was in such a house and such a neighbourhood in Harderwijk that the animal rights activist Volkert van der G. lived when he murdered the outspoken politician Pim Fortuyn. Mieke van de Voort turned an unoccupied terrace house into an aviary. In amongst the fluttering, twittering, yet imprisoned birds lay piles of Calvinist literature. By way of the drab and familiar, yet in fact neutral space, visitors were expected to call on their empathic capacities: ‘Imagine that one of the most dangerous criminals in the Netherlands is your neighbour.’In Mieke van der Voort’s installations take the edge off history without undermining it. Underexposed periods are brought up to date. Nuances are added to historically important phases, and personalities looked at from a different perspective. History’s principal protagonists are robbed of their masks or demythologized. Deeds are illuminated in the light of individual, personal actions. But no judgment is passed. In this sense, Van der Voort does not make her subject matter her own. And no, she is not an activist, something she will make emphatically clear if asked. She is ‘neither a moralist nor a social critic. For me, art is not intended to express a political message. In my work, the personal transcends the political.’As she explains her method of working, ‘When I begin a project, I start out in several directions. Some of these partial investigations die out during the working process, while others come together.’ Her fascination with Esperanto was one such path, and Van de Voort spent some time studying it. These broadly cast investigations-without-purpose, her open working method and questioning approach, are the basic elements that reappear in the still young career of Mieke van der Voort. It is a working process in which she involves multiple experts, or even the public, in an uncertain, ephemeral final result.As she has done in The Revolution That Didn’t Take Place and in her recent Kial vi ne skribas min plu?, Van de Voort intensively questions the methods of any investigation and the way that it is reported. This was clearly evident in her 2007 CO-OPs-project, in which scientists and artists were invited to together research the possibilities of exploring new methodologies. The results of the investigation that Van de Voort conducted with virologist Ab Osterhaus were presented in a publication, a work in progress and an exhibition at the Scheltema complex in Leiden. Een leprozenvertoog written by the artist for the CO-Ops book, is a fragmented essay, a collection of aphorisms, an assemblage of her own written pieces and historically theoretical, literary, art historical and philosophical theses about the interpretation and representation of contagious diseases in history and the social consequences of a threatening, grave danger. The book refers to the way that St. Sebastian, the plague martyr, is depicted ‘In etchings and paintings, the number of arrows varies from none to fourteen and more’. There are also references to Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish (1975), to the ‘logic of order and analysis’ in times of crisis: projects meant to create discipline and strict regulations that resulted from outbreaks of plague. In the CO-OPs publication, Van de Voort placed hand-copied passages from Foucault’s book alongside schematic diagrams in which she tried to untangle the hierarchical structure of CO-OPs itself. She admits that she is distrustful of the world in which she finds herself. She sees writing out the text as a form of transformation of the facts she collects. The reader, in turn, wanders through Een leprozenvertoog in the same way that Walter Benjamin promenaded under the arcades of Paris, with an equal interest in all of the objects that had been put on display.
Social Play
The work Generale Staten, a reference to the Dutch States General, is a meeting, a performance that will be enacted in December at Casco. An imaginary state, Orania, is the décor for States General. Its borders and walls are sketchily suggested by stripes and lines marked out on the ground. Like the city of Oran in Albert Camus’ 1947 novel La Peste, Orania is struck by a highly contagious disease. Participants show certain symptoms (they drag a leg or roll their eyes). Van de Voort, who is not merely interested in the physical results, but in the social consequences of an epidemic, gives the performers rules according to which they are able to act. They are otherwise free to determine their strategies themselves. As a community, they can decide to isolate the sick, or to get help from a doctor. Their emotions soon take control. Van der Voort explains that in this exercise, the actors are themselves surprised by their own responses. As soon as they identify with an extreme, a different perspective, they are less able to control themselves. For the artist, the dynamic form of the ‘game’ is a means of losing control of her work and its ‘end product’. Each result is different. This makes the whole a surrealistic process that assumes that fear generates unexpected behaviour. The game is not so much intended to conjure up a latently extreme, illicit behaviour as to make a metamorphosis possible by means of a new reality, one that has alternative rules or is a fictitious reality. That fictitious story or the ‘other’, parallel world, indirectly question existing structures and worldly laws. Taking a step back, by means of a ‘mime’ of life, one can reflect on social issues, and on issues of power. The schematic setting of Generale Staten is reminiscent of Dogville (2003), the film by Lars von Trier. The décor-as-décor partly unmasks ‘characters’, who are then unpleasantly visible, vulnerable and exposed. The vague lines that separate here from there, public space from private space, are the instrument and the subject of investigation leading to apparently complex, but in every way familiar, refreshing forms of study and of the works themselves. This makes it all the more evident how much Mieke van de Voort’s projects are not so much layered – a characterization that presumes a hierarchy – but phased. There is a coordination of different phases, of edited fragments, which sometimes continue to develop in time. They reveal that a ‘naked exhibition’ of data and facts always remains specific and selected, a standpoint that, in the case of Mieke van de Voort, also leads to unexpectedly rich poetry. Mieke van de Voort. Solo exhibition at Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, 10 December 2008 through 25 January 2009.
Ilse van Rijn