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* Note from the author - writing is always difficult.
Whilst an admission of this kind would usually concern, perhaps I could qualify the above comment by saying that in relation to art, I have found that transferring the notion of an image into text is seldom beneficial to the interpretation of a work’s own abstract qualities. If one is to write on a work of art, perhaps it is best to focus on the aspects of it that can actually be written upon - maybe even including the works’ own attempt to enter into a process of ‘rewriting’ itself.
As an artist myself, I find great interest in writing on the processes behind the interpretation of art. In writing on such a level, one can essentially clarify thought processes associated with looking at an artwork of a certain kind. In the case of this essay, as a viewer and a writer, my ‘reading’ of Jan Maarten Voskuil’s work is primarily concerned with the notion of understanding and clarity.
JA
Jan Maarten Voskuil
Visual Democracy
To better understand the workings of something, it is often best to dismantle it then reassemble it again. That way, one is able to see what it is made from and understand the thing as a sum of smaller (but important) elements. In writing on Voskuil’s work, I feel as though I have done something similar to this.
My main understanding is that within Voskuil’s modular artworks, the idea of the formal object has been dismantled. For a further understanding of it and its parts. Whether it is before Voskuil dismantled the idea of an artwork as a final object, or after he began to reassemble the idea of the formal for himself as an object (that is more a concept of an object than anything else) is unclear to me. It doesn’t really matter either way. Voskuil’s practice appears to be made from the activity of reassembly, reconstruction, repositioning, and response to the idea of the formal object.
Here I use the understanding of the ‘formal’ as something that is in accordance with convention. The convention here being Concrete Art. But instead of his work being another direct example thereof, Voskuil’s Painting Object III of 2007 (fig. 1) is an example in both the primary and the secondary sense – it makes a statement as a work of Concrete Art in itself, as well as making a wider statement on the current predicament of Concrete Art. It is in fact a witness to the predicament of Concrete Art.
That predicament is one of being in a state of flux. Within Painting Object III lies a reviewing of the conventional understandings of Concrete Art. With the blessing of hindsight. Art is a practice that moves in generations. Voskuil belongs to a current one. Each generation of its practitioners examine reoccurring ideas. Artists enter into the process of making these ideas their own through re-examination according to their own context. Voskuil’s Painting Object III is an example of this ‘turning around’, or current generational reinvestigation of Concrete Art. Painting Object III is an artwork that emphasizes the shifting terrain of criticism that both it and its maker are situated within.
What we are looking at here is an example of a hybrid form – constructed from contemporary expressions such as critique, interpretation and reference. As a form of critique, through the work the artist may be suggesting that there still is a future in the business of object-making; that there is plenty of room for the development of modular specific forms within that multifarious thing called Abstraction. Indeed, Voskuil may even be making some kind of critique on the actual practice of making objects; what it means to make objects in a world that is full of them, and what connection his Concrete Objects may have in relation to those that have come before him. In essence, Painting Object III is one return to the question of form - what form of Concrete Object is even possible if reference to convention is to be maintained whilst still striving for some kind of contemporary development, some form of innovation?
Voskuil’s practice maintains a level of currency through its focus upon interpretation. Being abstract, the authority of meaning lies with the viewer’s reading of the work according to their own lived experience, their encounter with related objects or their own bodily connection. Voskuil purposely leaves interpretation open, as a task for the viewer. Perhaps to give the viewer entry - some place within the work, to further push the work towards the direction of being not just a work, but more interestingly an idea of a work.
And I think it’s a very reasonable thing to assume that if the work is to have any kind of resonance with the viewer – the post-modern viewer complete with pluralistic and individualistic views – then that viewer should be given the opportunity to see the work in a way that is as transparent and as obvious as possible. This gesture could be called visual democracy. Painting Object III is a visually democratic Concrete Form; a certain object that is certain of itself and it’s own context but maybe not so quick to assume its own interpretation.
This is left for the viewer to do.
A wise level of refrain occurs here.
To clearly advocate a point, one must maintain a level of closeness to it, a sustained period of working through its parts and problems, then displaying it as an ongoing investigation, fraught with as many difficulties as there are successes. Given their modular nature, Voskuil may be seen to be making the same artwork repeatedly. This is the very line of his project that causes his work to be so hermetic; for it is the same point of investigation within them all, their interrelated principles of design, their repeated twists in form and art historical reference that allows them to produce their collective development upon the practice of Concrete Art.
Voskuil also uses the serial phrase Spare Parts to title his work (fig. 2). I am not sure if I am meant to focus upon the humorous nature of the title, or if I am meant to see it as a reference to comodification, miniaturisation and possibility for interchange within our western consumerist culture. Perhaps all of the above. But if they are in fact Spare Parts, what for? A larger as yet unseen work that remains unfinished to date? Is this larger unseen work actually the sum of all the dispersed Spare Parts, remotely located so as to be impossible to assemble as one object? …Or is that re-assemble?
Whatever the function of these Spare Parts may be, my proposal remains - that Voskuil’s works exist as Concrete Objects with conceptual development. Perhaps similar in nature to Sol Le Witt’s Incomplete Open Cubes or Lygia Clark’s Bichos, both of which are cases of Concrete Objects being specific in physical form, but at the same time also requiring a very specific interpretation. In the case of Clark’s work, immediate interaction via manipulation by hand constitutes a vital aspect to the work’s meaning. Voskuil’s works are constructions from ideas. They are conceptual because they contain ideas that support their own physical existence.
How do artists develop directions through the seemingly pre-defined passages of minimalism?
How do artists return to the Concrete Object?
Maybe there is no need to think of it as a return, as if it were something that was left.
Perhaps the answer lies within the idea of variation. When Voskuil produces an interchangeable Spare Part, he is inadvertently displaying it’s theoretic dimensions (as it may be in only one of many possible configurations), as well as its realness - it’s predicament as a physical thing, fixed in form for the moment. Here I often find myself thinking about Voskuil’s artwork as being both a confirmation of the already existent as well as an opportunistic gesture – an invitation towards configurations as yet unmade…
When Voskuil produces one Spare Part, or one work made from a number of Spare Parts, he is in fact using a self-referential form of language, a process that is universal to that single part, the work as a sum of parts, and/or his practice as a sum of works (of parts). Surely these concentric frames of reference are no mistake.
Voskuil, his works and the viewer inhabit the same world. This is a world flooded with information, imagery and technology – processes of miniaturisation and dematerialisation push objects further from the real into being concepts of objects. Being connected to the world around them, Voskuil’s works have also adopted this process of dematerialisation, making them not only objects in their own right, but conceptual forms towards the idea of an object.
Which brings me back to my original suggestion; which is that Voskuil’s works may be best understood as objects in concept. If Voskuil has in fact adopted this philosophy towards the currency of objects, he may well be producing his modular Spare Parts knowing that they will in fact have some kind of resonance with not only the legacy of Concrete Art, but may also neatly fall into some kind of classification of contemporary design object also – they are highly refined, modular in nature, tonal, ranging from modest to architectural in size, and mathematical in their production.
These Spare Parts exist in between the visual and the conceptual. They are the embodiment of Voskuil’s project to approach the idea of art as an object; an object of form as well as an object of concept. He employs white for its institutional power, but enables the curved surface to present an ever-changing tonal gradient - visible proof of effect between the Spare Part and the ambient light of the world that surrounds it.
Their lack of complexity is deceiving, for underneath the surface of each structure is a carefully manufactured subframe. Each frame supports a parabolic canvas surface. It is the frame that could be seen to support the conceptual debate behind Voskuil’s practice. The delicate fabrication of each painted object proves Voskuil’s strive for clear experience – to produce a form that enables results from looking clearly…and then learning.
Not only does the agenda behind Voskuil’s art struggle to revitalise the tradition of formalisation; his work attempts to offer or clarify a definition of Concrete Art. In doing so, perhaps Voskuil also makes something of a comment upon the ever-changing world of objects that surrounds us each and every day.
Justin Andrews
Melbourne, May 2008
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