Erik Spinoy

Alien in Wonderland
About Tamara Van San

‘The way your mind works is God’s own private mystery.’
[Nicolas Cage to Laura Dern in] David Lynch, Wild at Heart

Tamara Van San has made her appearance on the artistic scene in the Low Countries only recently, but her name is already being whispered around by those who have gotten to know it. Comments on her work generally refer to the remarkable power of her unconventional sculptures, and in doing so also often mention their extraordinary ‘poetic’ quality. This association with the poetic is, however, not without its dangers, as it may give rise to the use of a whole range of clichés connected with the term ‘poetic’. As a matter of fact, many believe the poetic to be synonymous with some sort of idyllic, fairy-tale reverie and ‘soft’ romantic unworldliness. These associations can be considered adequate for Tamara Van San’s work at a first glance only – by a spectator allowing himself to be beguiled by the seemingly cheerful, intensely colourful, highly playful character of the sculptures at hand.  If one would leave it at that, the use of the term ‘poetic’ would, therefore, lead to a fundamental misrepresentation of the stunning and strangely moving shapes and objects we find ourselves confronted with here.

A more profound reflection on ‘the poetic’ in Tamara Van San’s work can, on the other hand, contribute to revealing one of its central qualities. A remark made by the artist herself shows us which way such a reflection is to follow: ‘Sometimes I think my work is most related to music: a series of forms distributed in time and space, purely formal and textural in its being, but evoking the most powerful thoughts and feelings.’ Does this remark not amount to the rediscovery of a truth which has given most of twentieth-century art its drive, but which had almost sunk to oblivion following the onslaught of recent tendencies stressing the inevitably conceptual and discursive character of all creation and reception? Does it not remind us of the Real of the work, presenting itself to us in all its traumatic palpability, after decades of obsession with the meaningful context, the symbolic order in which this Real inevitably and immediately becomes embedded?

My background as a cultural theorist and as a poet writing in Dutch and reading mostly Dutch and Flemish poetry causes Tamara Van San’s work to resonate with the ideas and poetic practice of such poets as the Fleming Van Ostaijen and the Dutchman Faverey – leaders in Dutch poetry of the twentieth-century avant-garde tradition, with its strong focus on ‘form’, ‘music’ and ‘texture’. Referring to a famous poem by the French symbolist Verlaine, Van Ostaijen defined poetry as ‘De la musique avant toute chose’, aiming to move the reader primarily through the formal organization of the language material. For Faverey, too, music provided the model for what poetry should bring about. It is impossible to freeze the meaning of his deliberately – and not seldom frustratingly – hermetic poems and arrive at a correct and conclusive interpretation of them. However, their subtle melody and the complex associations they call forth usually provoke, in a readership willing to accept the absence of a readily available interpretation, a profound non-sentimental emotional impact.

The avant-garde tradition has of course been of crucial importance in the modern visual arts as well. In this context, it is highly illuminating to reread one of the key essays of this tradition: Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), a text published almost a century ago. In this famous essay, Kandinsky defines the principle that should underlie the use of colour: ‘IT IS EVIDENT THEREFORE THAT COLOUR HARMONY MUST REST ONLY ON A CORRESPONDING VIBRATION IN THE HUMAN SOUL; AND THIS IS ONE OF THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE INNER NEED.’ Colours have to be chosen and combined in accordance with the ‘inner need’ – of the work of art, but also of the human soul. The use of colours in a work of art serves its purpose if it succeeds in moving our soul, in making it vibrate. According to Kandinsky, the ‘principle of the inner need’ should also determine the use of form, the second of the two ‘weapons’ painting has at its disposal. Now, what Kandinsky calls ‘making the soul vibrate’ – what is it but Tamara Van San’s ‘evoking the most powerful thoughts and feelings’? As a sculptress, she can of course wield more weapons than colour and form: the texture of the materials used will make our souls vibrate as well, as will the way the sculptures relate and react to the space they are in. Nevertheless, the similarities with Kandinsky’s position are striking.

This is all the more true because Tamara Van San believes her work to be ‘related to music’. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky claims that other arts ‘are finding in Music the best teacher’, since music is the most abstract and ‘meaning-less’ of art forms and can therefore make a ‘direct impression’ on the human soul. Painters, Kandinsky argues, should learn to work with colour and form as composers do with notes and rhythm. If they do, they will succeed in playing the human soul like a piano: ‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.’ It is no coincidence that, when discussing the specific effects of the various colours, Kandinsky frequently falls back on references to the sounds produced by musical instruments: ‘in music the absolute green is represented by the placid, middle notes of a violin.’ Or: ‘The vermilion now rings like a great trumpet, or thunders like a drum.’

Kandinsky’s text is, of course, obsolete in many respects. It is based, for instance, upon the conviction that his epoch witnessed the beginning of an all-encompassing spiritual revolution, of which artists such as himself would be the front-runners.  And of course the text was written in an era before abstraction in art had become a powerful and many-faceted reality – when ‘[t]he revolt from dependence on nature is only just beginning’ – and can therefore seem naive to us today. Still, it was one of the first texts to draw attention to the great discovery of avant-garde art: the fact that the material of a particular art form is not just a vehicle for depicting reality or conveying meaning, but also a powerful tool for eliciting a profound emotional impact. This discovery resulted in a stunning variety of experiments with ‘autonomous’ artistic forms. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the widespread repetition of the truth of ‘autonomous’ form became so tiresome that many artists understandably believed that the time had come to emphasize other aspects of art as well – most notably the importance of the conceptual and textual context for the artist’s creativity and the impact this context could have on the work’s reception.

Could it be that, in this early twenty-first century, the time has come to unemphatically, in a non-polemical and ‘pragmatic’ way (because it is a fact that cannot be denied), restore the old truth of autonomous form to its rights? That is certainly what seems to happen in Tamara Van San’s work, which comes about in a process strongly reminiscent of the way Kandinsky describes the practice of the artist working in accordance with the principle of the inner need: ‘The inner voice of the soul tells [the artist] what form he needs, whether inside or outside nature. Every artist knows, who works with feeling, how suddenly the right form flashes upon him.’ Because of this, Van San’s work has deep affinities with the work of the poets I mentioned above, but also with a whole range of other twentieth-century poets. One can think, in this respect, of T.S. Eliot’s injunction to strive for the creation of an ‘objective correlative’, i.e. a composition of words able to arouse forceful emotions in poet and reader alike. Sculpting, painting, writing poetry, making objects and installations, composing – each of these artistic activities can be executed in accordance with the principle of the inner need, but of course in every case the material at hand – ‘the material’, Kandinsky writes, ‘which these arts alone can manipulate and through which they speak to the spirit’ – offers specific opportunities waiting to be explored and exploited.

In short, Tamara Van San’s work can be called ‘poetic’ in the sense that it, too, speaks to the spirit – that it is deeply moving without being in the least sentimental. The question is, however, if this quality can be adequately explained by simply referring to her sensitive manipulation of colour, form, texture and/or the sculptural qualities of the objects she makes and allocates a certain place in a specific room or space. How is it that these objects succeed in stirring up these ‘most powerful thoughts and feelings’ she strives for – in being, that is, much more than simply pleasant and agreeable? Had not Kandinsky already warned that abstract art has a tendency to turn into ‘mere decoration, [...] suited to neckties or carpets’? I believe Tamara Van San skirts this danger through the nature of the forms and shapes of her objects. These are decidedly abstract, i.e. they do not represent any pre-existing object. However, and surprisingly, most of these forms and shapes have an undeniably organic quality. This is – to say the least – paradoxical, as Van San generally works with decidedly modern, sometimes even high-tech materials (PU-foam, silicones, fibre-glass,...), and also because she more often than not integrates industrially produced objects (sponges, polysterene foam balls, footballs, balloons,...) in her sculptures. It is surprising as well because the word ‘organic’ holds reminiscences of an art dating back to remote romantic times, when nature was worshipped as a source of harmony, goodness and purity. It is highly typical that the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose origins lie with nineteenth-century American romantic traditions and whose veneration of nature is well-documented, aspired to create an ‘organic’ architecture – a good example of which is his famous Guggenheim museum building in New York. And yet, the shapes and forms of Tamara Van San’s objects are undoubtedly organic as well, be it that they produce effects that have little to do with the ‘natural’ harmony Wright and other romantics were seeking to achieve. What is it that causes these effects? Kandinsky writes: ‘However diminished in importance the organic form may be, its inner note will always be heard’, but that claim does little more than repeat that organic forms are prone to elicit profound emotional effects – it does little to answer our question. It is time, therefore, to turn to another source of theoretical inspiration.

Let us do this in a discussion of one of Tamara Van San’s objects: ‘Untitled’ (2006). What we are presented with here is a smooth and shiny orange ball with red dots, a large part of which is covered with a sort of pale, coagulated slime. In the middle of a bilious green ‘flesh-wound’ in the ball one sees a dark hole. And out of this hole, a lighter green growth sprouts irresistibly. Is it the bud of a plant, a curved stem or stalk, a repulsive tumour? It does not matter. What matters is that here, in this and in various other works from this unfolding oeuvre, some sort of unstoppable growth is caught in the act – a growth of a parasitical yet stunningly tenacious and vital life-form, reminiscent of weeds, ivy, algae, vines and lianas, fungi, mosses, reefs, rhizomes, root systems, centipedes, beetles, wood lice, larvae, molluscs, nervous systems, capillary blood vessels, entrails, organs, a stubbornly pulsating heart, and so on. Reminiscent of all this, calling forth deep echoes, most of Van San’s objects show us – in a wealth of guises previously unseen – this sometimes delicate, sometimes brutal vitality of the organic, and they generally do so in a breathtaking display of colour.

Maybe this is what makes the work of Tamara Van San poetic: the disturbing confrontation with what the psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls the life-substance, the wordless vitality throbbing behind the smooth, comfortingly familiar surface of what we call reality. Whenever this life-substance pierces through the façade of reality, as does the outlandish glistening sprout through the flesh and skin of the gaily speckled ball, our environment suddenly takes on eerie, disturbing qualities.

In this respect, the universe created by this strong-willed young artist is not without affinities with the world created by David Lynch, about which Žižek writes: ‘His elementary procedure involves moving forward from the establishing shot of reality to a disturbing proximity that renders visible the disgusting substance of enjoyment, the crawling and glistening of indestructible life.’ This procedure, Žižek tells us, amounts to the flaying of the skin separating us from this substance, which under ‘normal’ circumstances remains out of sight:

Lynch perturbs our most elementary phenomenological relationship to the living body, which is based on the radical separation between the surface of the skin and what lies beneath it. Let us recall the uncanniness, even disgust, we experience when we endeavour to imagine what goes on just under the surface of a beautiful naked body – muscles, organs, veins…. In short, relating to the body implies suspending what goes on beneath the surface. […] skin itself functions as the ‘dress of the flesh’. This suspension excludes the Real of the life-substance, its palpitation: one of the definitions of the Lacanian Real is that it is the flayed body, the palpitation of the raw, skinless red flesh.
That is why Lynch’s cinematographic universe abounds with ‘creatures made of skinless, raw flesh’, representing ‘the indestructible life-substance, the pure embodiment of enjoyment’.

Does not the same hold true for the work of Tamara Van San? Is the curious sprout in ‘Untitled’ not one of these ‘‘sprouts of enjoyment’ in which the inside of the body breaks through the surface’ (Žižek)? Can one not observe comparable outbreaks of the ‘Real’ in the abstractly organic forms of most of her sculptures? Another illuminating example of this would be the work Tamara Van San recently showed in the Margalef & Gipponi Gallery in Antwerp: twelve objects aligned on a wall, more or less at eye level, each of them executed in very different shapes, and most of them splashed with gaudy colour. The scene could very well be a still from a science-fiction or horror movie in which a series of freakishly fantastic plants, mutilated animals, bloody lumps of flesh and/or strange organs burst through a flawlessly smooth and grey-white skin – the bland surface of the wall. The film this recent work most forcefully reminds us of is not one directed by Lynch: it is Ridley Scott’s Alien, in which a seemingly indestructible slimy creature can, at all times, come breaking through surfaces – through walls, through the skins of the film characters. Tamara Van San’s sculptures seem to capture such outbursts of the attractive-repulsive life-substance that destabilize ‘the balance of our lives’ (Žižek). That is why the use of the term ‘poetic’ in the domesticated sense would be so ill-fitting for this work. It is true that we dwell in the realm of fantasy when contemplating Tamara Van San’s work, but these are not fantasies of beatific wish-fulfilment and mindless escape. Instead, they bring us in touch with the Real of our desire. Tamara Van San reveals what is lurking behind the confines of our well-ordered reality, at all times threatening us with the dissolution of the world as we know it.

If this explanation is in any way valid, it could help us understand why Van San’s objects succeed in stirring up such ‘powerful thoughts and feelings’ – to a much higher degree, for that matter, than the work of many twentieth-century abstract artists, who genuinely strove to make the soul vibrate, but often did not succeed in going beyond what Kandinsky scornfully called ‘pure patterning’. The colours in Van San’s work may seem bright and cheerful and the shapes we see unfolding may look like the products of a playful spontaneity and an almost childlike imagination, but the feelings they arouse have unmistakably dark – ‘Lynchian’ – overtones. Because of these unsettling qualities, the domain we dwell in when confronted with Tamara Van San’s sculptures can be termed a Wonderland, as one critic did, but this Wonderland is certainly no amusement park.

Are the eerie fantasies this work gives body to ‘poetic’, then? All depends, of course, on how one wishes to define the ‘poetic’ – but there is certainly is a deep complicity between Tamara Van San’s unsettling artistic practice and the type of poetry I cherish. This poetry is no longer of the type described by the literary theorist Roman Jakobson, a brilliant contemporary of the twentieth-century avant-garde writers and artists. Jakobson claimed that language is pre-eminently poetic when it is dominated by what he called ‘the poetic function’, i.e. when it is exempted from the task of conveying a message. Poetic language, according to Jakobson, serves its own purpose, by drawing attention to itself – by turning its form into an essential component of what it has to say, instead of subordinating it to the message as a simple ‘supplement’. Essentially, Jakobson applies Kandinsky’s principles to poetry: the material – in the case of poetry: language – is to be emancipated from its referential task and organized in accordance with its ‘inner need’ in order to speak directly to the soul. This is the programme underlying the work of such avant-garde poets as Van Ostaijen, Faverey and Eliot.

In poetry as in the visual arts, however, the tendency towards abstraction (towards formalism-autonomism) has to be taken one step further. Not only should the material the artist works with no longer be used primarily for depicting reality or transmitting a message, it should also become the stuff that dreams are made of – the texture in which everyday symbolism, conventional imagery and rule-governed discourse are penetrated and made inconsistent by ‘impossible jouissance’. In genuinely poetic language, this explosion of the Real in ordinary speech gives rise to what Jacques Lacan calls eruptions of llanguage, a type of language characterized by ‘sprouts of enjoyment’ breaking through the surface – in this case, through the texture of our seemingly well-ordered discourse – effectively undoing its mechanical workings.
In short, an acute awareness of the Real shimmering behind the symbolic order, forever threatening it with traumatic disruptions, is what constitutes the similarity between oeuvres in poetry and in the visual arts that succeed in ‘evoking the most powerful thoughts and feelings’. This is the precise reason why my choice as a curator for the work of Tamara Van San was a compelling and logical one. It also explains my keen interest in other contemporary artists staging, each in their own individual manner, the repulsive-attractive, circular movement of the indestructible life-substance.

Take, for example, Diego Perrone, of whom I saw at the 2006 Berlin Biennial an unsettling scene in some sort of mythically primitive, rural kitchen, rendered in sombre, brownish colours. Against this backdrop, the spectator sees muscular limbs of unidentified mammals – rabbits, dogs, foxes? – lying around. They are startlingly alive, caught in a vicious circle of spasms, twitches, convulsions – signs of a life that keeps going on where it should have been annihilated. In this same context, one can also think of the video clips by Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg. The mere fact that her clips are shown in a loop can be seen as a concrete embodiment, a technical equivalent of the unbearable deadlock that the life-substance is caught in. Especially the clip Tiger Licking Girl’s Butt (2004) springs to mind here: it shows a kitschy sleeping-room with a naked girl standing next to her bed and finding herself, curiously enough, in the company of a tiger. Every now and then – again and again, as the clip is repeated endlessly – the tiger sneaks up to the girl and voluptuously licks her buttocks, an act the girl seems to resent and enjoy immensely, as is suggested by her intense ‘oohs’. Here, too, we witness the deadlock of what psychoanalysis calls the death drive, the terrible force every individual has to find a modus vivendi with – a pact estbalishing a pacification that will be provisional and precarious at best. There can be no guarantee that one will not be sucked back into drive’s vortex at one moment or another – and this misfortune is precisely what seems to have befallen Djurberg’s girl, as the clip concludes with the desperate-sounding question: ‘Why do I have this urge to do these things over and over again?’ She seems fatally hooked on the filthy enjoyment provided by the tiger’s eternally repeated action, with no escape or even relief in sight.

The fascination with the maelstrom of drive runs like a (sometimes even not so very) secret thread through modern art, and it certainly seems to manifest itself with particular force in much of contemporary art – a state of things that may be traced back to the wide-spread dissolution of reference points that used to tell us what our location was and where we were headed, and to the concomitant ‘loss of reality’. This irresolvable deadlock is certainly a central preoccupation in my recent poetry, for instance in my most recent collection to date, the Englishtitle of which runs: I and other poems (2007). The poem below (of which I have tried to furnish an adequate rendering in English) simultaneously tries to find a metaphorical expression for this impasse – by focusing on a remainder refusing to be incorporated or digested – and to ‘translate’ it into the language material, which is colonized by excessive enjoyment:

There was no way
to swallow it

once down the throat
it split
the gullet
in vermiculation

the gastric wall
secreted
all its fluids

and the innards
turned
like hordes
of famished maggots

but there
was no digesting it

All this explains why I consider myself lucky to have stumbled upon the budding work of Tamara Van San, and why it exploded into my field of vision with such force. As the artist herself underlines further on in the present volume, her creative effort does not belong to any particular school or movement. Her work is dans l’air du temps in a much more fundamental way: it transforms the restless pulsation I have tried to capture in the above in a unique visual and tactile language crammed with enjoyment – a word of which we should by now have learned to appreciate all the ‘inhumanly’ destructive and even sinister overtones, so radically incompatible with first-glance characterizations of Van San’s work as cheerful, child-like and spontaneous.

Exposing oneself to Tamara Van San’s objects is, therefore, not only a moving but also a highly instructive experience for all of us immersed in an ongoing reflection about what important contemporary art and poetry can be about and bring about. This essay, therefore, is an attempt to formulate the conclusions this experience forces upon us. In the process, it provides the reader with one possible way of relating to Tamara Van San’s intriguing oeuvre – of bestowing meaning upon it. Of course, as this work will grow in volume and complexity, so will the wealth of meaning and emotional depth it gives rise to. And so will the ways of talking and thinking about it.