print May 1989

Jan Fabre

Before Jan Fabre made his name as a performer and theater director, he was known as a draftsman. He made the transition from one to the other eight years ago, when he had himself locked up in a barren room, which he covered entirely with scribbles of ink from a ballpoint pen. His Robert Wilson-like performances—in particular, his obsession with creating a European counterversion to the American master’s “theater of long duration”—showed clearly his preoccupation with the world of visual arts. And, in fact, the only work in this exhibition was a large wooden wardrobe that took up almost the whole

print March 1989

Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas presents nude bodies in a very disturbing way. The intimacy of the contact with these vulnerable looking figures holds a strong attraction, but at the same time the vagueness of their delineation is so distracting one almost begins to squirm. Dumas paints bodies in the intimacy of their most mundane nakedness, yet she seems to want to distract us with all kinds of peripheral gestures. She makes us feel as if a voyeuristic look at these defenseless bodies could be as dangerous as any other aggressive act. Dumas protects her figures from an obvious visual assault with the help of

print November 1988

Erik Andriesse

In no other country is the tradition of painting as burdensome to contemporary artists as it is in Holland, and there is no other genre which respects traditional values as much as the still life. Whoever refers to specific parts of this tradition has to realize that he not only is stuck with an artistic but also with an exhausting moral baggage, which can offer hardly any relevant answers to current questions. Therefore, a contemporary painter who dares to tackle the still life anew has to have his senses tuned as much to moral as to artistic questions.

It has taken Erik Andriesse a lot of energy

print October 1988

Niek Kemps

The true intent behind Niek Kemps’ sculptural objects is not easy to discern. The viewer recognizes an artist who appears to be moving toward a kind of post-Modern design, an artist who is testing one form after another. But in his search for meaning, Kemps seems so distracted by the ever-expanding possibilities of his formal experiments that he winds up injecting content, sometimes as an afterthought. He integrates photographic fragments, texts, and dark discs into his shiny, reflective constructions, which are sometimes quite rakish and at other times elegantly baroque. These elements suggest

print September 1988

Ton Van Summeren

Are we ever disturbed, surprised, or awestruck nowadays when we encounter the lovely presence of gods and goddesses in an artwork? Maybe in the Middle Ages the mythical appearances of the classical gods could provoke the necessary shiver in the observer. But since the Renaissance the presence of gods and goddesses in fine arts has returned to the playful character it must have had during early Greek times. The erotic-playful connotations these figures suggest can offer great pleasure when we notice their presence anew in contemporary art.

In much of his recent work, Ton van Summeren seems to have

print March 1988

“Regenboog”

Luciano Fabro’s six-part Attaccapanni di Napoli, 1976–77, has been shown on earlier occasions, but here, in the uneven company of the “Regenboog” (Rainbow) show—Rudi Fuchs’ last event as director of the museum—it looked more magnificent than ever. The show, mounted in the ideal surroundings of the museum’s almost monastic environment, emphasized once more Fuchs’ ideas about exhibition. His dialectical concept, which he also used at Documenta 8, revolved here around the theme of color. The “rainbow” of the title referred not only to color but to the heterogeneous collection of paintings that

print December 1987

“Century 87”

Amsterdam, designated by the European Economic Commission as the “cultural capital of Europe” in 1987 (succeeding Athens and Florence in that title), has been celebrating this occasion by organizing various art events here with the aim of strengthening the cultural ties among the nations of Europe. As part of this celebration, three young Dutch art historians—Sjarel Ex, Nicolette Gast, and Els Hoek—curated “Century 87: Kunst van nu ontmoet Amsterdams verleden” (Today’s art face to face with Amsterdam’s past), a contemporary art show organized as an art walk in the old center of town. Twenty-nine

print November 1987

Neue Slowenische Kunst

The artists’ collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art) comes from a Central European city of tempestuous tradition, a city known to us as Ljubljana in Yugoslavia, but found in older atlases under the name of Laibach in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These days, the collective consists of about 35 members, but the number constantly changes. The many shows put on by this group in Amsterdam on their European tour this past summer—rock concerts, theater works, and art exhibitions—suggested a cross between straight nostalgia and the absurdist humor of a slapstick comedy of manners. Their

print October 1987

THINGS THAT GO BUMP

LISA LIEBMANN

Discombobulated and cacophonous, with a populist bent, Documenta 8 was almost entirely free of the lofty airs that surrounded its elegant, smug predecessor in 1982, and that to some degree hovered over many of the more ambitious and large-scale international exhibitions in the five years since. Absent, for instance, was any sense of highbrow intellectualism or formalism, and gone as well the sense of giddy congruence with recent commercial, critical, and promotional dicta. Painting, for one, seemed relatively scarce, and while classicism and mannerism, minimalism and expressionism,

print April 1987

Anselm Kiefer

The success that Anselm Kiefer has experienced over the last few years both inside and outside Germany made this exhibition of new and recent work by Kiefer into a media event. In the newspaper articles and “exclusive” interviews that preceded the opening, Kiefer was portrayed as a visionary painter, strongly connected to German history and mythology, who also wanted to be regarded at least partly as a conceptual artist.

There is no doubt that he sees his art as an instrument for communicating more than just an esthetic message. And indeed, whereas in previous exhibitions his work seemed to be

print February 1987

“Correspondentie Europa”

It was a joint decision of four curators at the Stedelijk Museum to exhibit the work of ten artists from six European countries under the title “Correspondentie Europa” (Correspondence Europe), assembled under a concept dictated primarily by democratic principles. However, the very title of this exhibition promised more than it delivered. Those who anticipated discoveries by industrious correspondence artists were as disappointed as those who expected a carefully planned harmony of Baudelairean correspondances. And although one could argue about the choice of participants—Jean-Charles Blais,

print September 1986

Paul Groot

Luciano Fabro’s Jo, l’uovo (I, the egg, 1978) is included in Sonsbeek 86, but it particularly stays in my mind from a photograph. This shows a Roman fountain, in an almost fairy-tale light. In the waters of the basin floats the sculpture—a glowing bronze egg, open at one end so that we can see the gold-veneered interior. Do I remember seeing Fabro somewhere in the picture’s background? Or is he present only through the marks of his hands in the gold, and through a small image of him, in a fetal position, engraved on the bronze shell? The photograph has a quality of the ideal for me, and I often