Q and A - the gaze, colours and tables

Sketch for drawings installation Hatterman’s Hand, after Arbeider, Neger (1939)

Hatterman’s Hand, after Arbeider, Neger (1939) consists out of three low tables with a selection of the complete drawing series. The drawings are placed under a large passe-partout. Some drawings are cut off by the passe-partout, and partially hidden. Why did you decide to present the drawings horizontally and under this passe-partout?

In the show in 1646 in The Hague, the complete series was placed on a large wall, where the drawings lost a bit of their individual quality. For a better presentation of the work I chose to show a specific selection in which I could emphasize certain qualities and movements of the drawings individually and in relation to each other. In 15 drawings I am able to represent the time spent on the series, the duration of looking, and the different forms that the hands have - the repetition as well as the difference between them.

The passe-partout is cut with a consistent frame size, to be able to look without distractions. The placement of the cut outs is done in a slightly circular way to stimulate looking at the table from all sides, to maneuver between the drawings to find ones preferred point of view.

By purposely revealing the cutting and framing in the presentation of the drawing series, my own hand has become an important part of the display, visually and conceptually.

There is a distance between the painting, which I looked at and drawn intensively, and me. But this distance became more understandable and maybe even a bit smaller through embodying the parts I saw, through this repetitive drawing gesture.

The tables and passe-partouts are there both to exhibit this distance I experienced in the work itself and to make the viewer more aware of the actual distance between the surface and the eye. At the same time the structure makes the work more accessible through a stronger visibility of the drawings and several points of view.

And why horizontal?

The horizontality is important because the drawings are not a representation of the painting of Hatterman, if I hang them on the wall I feel they are in the same space again as the painting is. They belong to a different time. This is also why I chose to paint the tables in harsh blue-ish white. A color that relates to contrast more than to harmony is a better fit to the work because I want to show the attempts of coming closer to a person, or a surface, not a melting together of two bodies or surfaces.

When you are explaining about this distance and the place and structure of looking, I am wondering in what way the Gaze is present in this work?

These days I am reading a chapter from Hal Foster’s Return of the real. After a clear description (taken from art historian and critic Thomas Crow) of the effect of repetition and the political engagement in Warhol's Death Images, Foster wants to see if there is a possibility to understand the power of Warhols work in more than one way - through referential (images attached to referents, iconic themes or real things in the world) as well as simulacral (all images can do is represent other images) readings. In order to get away from this either/or constrains in art readings.

pag 130, Return of the Real

Then Foster uses the Lacanian Gaze to analyse these works of Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman. He included this great scheme of the gaze:

...explanation needed

I relate to this idea of the gaze, because I feel that there is something in Hatterman's painting that is looking back, something complex and hidden. The painting - the object - I looked at in the museum is part of many histories: part of an Amsterdam Artscene some 75 years ago, part of the history of representation of the black body by the west and also part of the few works of female artists in museums. I made my black hand drawings -the image or the screen- while I was aware of these contexts. It is as if these histories are looking back, similar to presence of the Gaze, the point of light in the scheme. It is necessary to realize ones own point of view, to be aware of ones modes and constrains of representation, in order to understand the image one is making. 

(Do you know this book by Vilem Flusser about Gestures? I have a favourite chapter: the gesture of making. I will write some soon about it...."Hands are monsters" !!)