Erik Spinoy

‘Ask me again in twenty years’ time’
A Conversation with Tamara Van San

As a young artist, do you feel that your work stands on itself entirely or does it form part of a wider new tendency, on the local scene or internationally?

I do not feel the need to know everything & see everything, as far as art is concerned. Most things are boring, are shallow & fake, & especially too conceptual. They make me think they had better written a book instead of wasting space. Exhibitions & openings usually make me feel bored, & I do not like being there, because they are too crowded, which makes it impossible to have a good look at what is shown. & there is also the fact that there simply isn’t enough time to see everything in a lifetime. So I have no idea really what the ‘local scene’ is supposed to be. I don’t like to think in terms such as ‘local scene’. I do know everything about other things, however. I like to follow a tempest, for instance. To drive around in the mist. To take a walk when the light is beautiful. To drive to France in an hour.

The work stands on its own. A form functions perfectly without it having any direct connection to a local/international scene. But it does belong to a wider something, it belongs to the world & the globes turning around it. I used to want to become an astronaut. The wider new tendency is what most appeals to me. & also, what is international? Is not everything connected to everything? & of course certain things have already been done. We all repeat ourselves. For all I know, someone at the other side of the planet does something identical to what I am doing. Which in fact is not possible, as it will always be something different & new. Because of the time, because of the character & nature of that other person. Because of the slant of the light, which was different in 1950 from that in 2009. Maybe these so-called repetitions have to be pursued in an exaggerated way.

I understand what you are saying here. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that artists of a new generation start doing things on their own, in total independence from each other – and that you see connections, affinities between them, quite unexpectedly. You do not see that happening in your case?

There are affinities with the work of others, things I recognize. Take Leon Vranken – his balloon in this bluish green I use as well, & filled with foam. There are similarities as far as form & composition are concerned. Like me, Leon Vranken works on form, composition, colour. The result looks quite different, though. He often works with unpainted wood, in which he every now & then integrates a coloured element. I feel he uses these things in a way that is very similar to what I do. He is a furniture maker. Vranken is technically very proficient, so his forms are flawless, perfectly finished. I do not know if that is necessary. In his case, it is logical. In my case, the flaws are part of my work, they have a sort of inexplicable appeal. Furthermore, there is the bluish green balloon with the iron pole. A pole of the kind one finds at construction sites. The balloon is squeezed between the pole & the ceiling. I have a work with a bamboo branch & two balloons, which are also filled with PU foam – ‘one minute sculpture’, made in 2007. Here, the balloon rests, presses against the wall. There is a formal similarity between both works, in my view. He also has a paint roller on a small wheel. The paint roller is drenched in bluish green paint. The wheel is at the bottom of the stick. It is drenched in red paint, & leaves a red trail on the floor. The colours – when he uses colours – are very similar. & also the way he distributes things across the space. I do not know if others see that. I do.

There are also links between my work & other things, such as music. Take ‘Candyland’, for instance, the seventh track from the Cocorosie album La Maison de Mon Rêve. It is awesome. There is a connection with what iI do, although I can’t explain in what way exactly. I think the way both sisters produce sounds is identical to the way I produce forms. Sounds are forms. They are mathematically exact proportions. They can make you experience something grand, without necessarily meaning something. The song reminds me of the road from Jerusalem to Eilat, of things past & never coming back, of the way things go by, of the sea, of the wind, of memories, of things you want to recall but can’t because one single head is too small for that, of how flowers smelled ten years ago, of things that are still to come, of people disappearing at the horizon, of not ever giving up, of the way soup smells, of something unpleasant & also of nothing at all, whatever that may be.

I never listen to the words of a song. The text blurs into sound, the words are deformed to melodies. This is the way I listen to Imogen Heap, Ane Brun, Bon Iver & others as well. I don’t focus on the text. I hardly ever have an idea of what it says exactly. Although you don’t need to understand a text to grasp or, rather, to feel what it says. I always work with music in the background, some of the other sounds are unpleasant,...

It is like studying: a page with text on it, which is arranged in columns or text blocks. You can remember the text because of the form of the text blocks, in my case especially because I highlight the words or mostly even entire text blocks in colour, often even with circles & stripes. The layout of a text page helps one memorize what is on the page. The pink, blue,... stripes help you remember a word, then a sentence, then ten sentences, & finally the whole text. Content proceeds from form. The way a certain word can have a particular appeal. Not because of its meaning, but because of its form, its sound. The word Annapurna, for instance. 55 km long & 8091 m high. Samarra. 33 m wide & 52 m high. & then it turns out to be beautiful as well.

Which artists do you see as your models? What makes them so important to you?

I have no models. Not in the way others would hang an Elvis poster on the wall. I can only say what I like in other artists. What I feel to be good/beautiful/funny/interesting. I like the lines & the little animals by Jim Lambie, for instance. Yves Klein’s blue that gives you a headache. The blue on the little sticks. Not the paintings. Peter Rogiers, if he doesn't forget to glue things to the ceiling. Mark Manders, because I think his work is good & funny, to a certain extent. It is best when it is not too centred, not when everything is on the floor. But also because, as I noticed today, he is the first artist without pretensions I have met & find interesting. Jessica Stockholder, but that is still too unstructured. Eva Hesse. Louise Bourgeois. Anish Kapoor, the large hemisphere with sparkle on the wall, the pigment shapes & the horn-like structures that take up space – they are beautiful. Franz West. Tracy Emin. Picasso, a plaster cast of a paper ball. Martin Creed. Matisse. Bernd Lohaus. Sarah Lucas. Honoré d'O, Anton Cotteleer, although not everything – some of his things. The flower box sculpture. Red bucket with squirrel. Beuys. Broodthaers. Brancusi, the tower block. Coloured light by I do not know who. Gormley. Paul McCarthy, not the inflatable things, not the films. The pieces carved out of the wall. A cube with small glass panes & ketchup. A cube with small glass panes by Ann Veronica Janssens. & so on.

You once said that powerful influences also came from outside art – from childhood impressions, for instance. Could you say something more about that?

I am not sure it has to do with my childhood. I do not like psychological, therapeutic explanations of my work. What matters is the form. The material. The colour. I also hate it when they say: ‘there is that girl with all her colours’. That is why, in one of the recent exhibitions (Margalef & Gipponi Gallery, Antwerp), I decided to align them on a wall &, so to speak, push the forms into the visitor’s face instead of scattering them throughout the room. There were twelve sculptures of different sizes, in various materials & with different shapes, all aligned on a wall, at what optically seemed to be equal distances from each other. A line seems classical, because it is ‘just’ a line. But in my case it is not classical at all. Moreover, I have never shown work in this way, on a line. I do not want to do what people expect me to do.

My work reminds one of an ant heap, Frank Maes told me.

In their book The Swarm, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt talk about the huge potential of ‘swarm intelligence’. In doing so, they refer to Arthur Rimbaud’s odes on the 1871 Paris Commune, in which he described the communards as insects. In Rimbaud’s poetry, they swarm like ants through downtown Paris, and the barricades bristle and buzz with activity, like ant heaps. Previously, the insect metaphor was only used for denigrating enemy troops. However, Rimbaud turned this war cliché upside down. He converted a fearful image into an honorary title. Some have called his poetry ‘music of the swarm’.

Tamara Van San’s sculptures remind me of a swarm in various ways. First, because they are ‘coagulations/clottings’, sometimes of many similar things, sometimes of utterly heterogeneous things, materials, textures. At a deeper, more structural level, the sculptures and spatial installations constitute an ode to multiplicity. They are never conceived from a ‘centre’, a plan or idea that imposes order. Instead, they assume certain shapes during the creative process itself, in which sometimes the artist, sometimes the material is the driving force.

Commenting on the wonderful exhibition ‘Azetta. Carpets by Berber women’, which was shown a few years ago at the Brussels Palais des Beaux Arts, Paul Vandenbroeck claimed that women are by nature much more open or more inclined to multiplicity than men, and that this manifests itself in a closed culture such as the culture of these Berber women more strongly than anywhere else. The myths of the Gorgones and of Medusa show how deeply archaic male fears of an unbridled female multiplicity are entrenched. Although the Berber carpets show striking formal resemblances with well-known abstract paintings from modern western art, Vandenbroeck pointed out that the origin of both visual traditions is entirely different. Western modernity took as its point of departure the sensory perception of objects, which were abstracted in a process of generally geometrical reductions. The Berber women, on the contrary, start weaving without preconceived image or plan, they start from the material itself. The image takes shape, emerges as the carpet is being knotted.

[...]

If one thinks in classical patterns, the swarm – especially a swarm of insects – will seem nothing but chaos, something entirely alien, ungraspable, inhuman. Knowing that Tamara Van San has, from childhood on, liked to leaf through books about foreign cultures, art, architecture, geology, geography, astronomy or fauna and flora, I watch the quaint creatures she has pinned up in a neat row at the Margalef & Gipponi Gallery, and pursue the analogy with entomology. If, against one’s better judgement, one would try to order or catalogue this varied collection of objects, the best way to go about it would be to base oneself upon the well-known classification of animals that Jorge Luis Borges borrowed, through all sorts of intermediaries, from an old Chinese encyclopaedia: ‘On these pages from a distant past, it is written that animals are to be distinguished into: a) property of the Emperor, b) embalmed animals, c) domesticated animals, d) sucking pigs, e) mermaids, f) fabulous animals, g) stray dogs, h) those that are included in this classification, i) those that rage like fools, j) countless animals, k) those that are drawn with a very thin camel-hair brush, l) etcetera, m) those that have just broken a vase, n) those that from afar resemble flies.’ There is no reducing a plural universe.

[March 2009]

& maybe I will in the near future use nothing but black, so that only the form remains. Or maybe not black, but a beautiful blue, & afterwards return to more colour. Or stuff a corner with one hundred sculptures, so that it is really full. Or just one instead of fifty. Or maybe fill the entire space with coloured confetti dots instead of putting everything in a row, & show just one work. Because as soon as you have done something, you know that it can be done, as painter Damien De Lepeleire once told me. So you should, sooner better than later, try something new. Because of the bright colours, people do not notice that the work evolves. I am deviating, drifting off. I do not know exactly where things are coming from exactly. From things you have seen during the day. The previous day. The day that is still to come. From a yellow letterbox, a dotted sock, wind-mills. From the wall. One thing leads to another. Sometimes my sculptures are small, sometimes they are large. Sometimes they have little colour, sometimes they have lots of colour. Maybe they will have no colour at all in the near future, & will have colour again afterwards. It is a sort of ongoing process, in the context of which each individual work has its function, although people who have seen just one work will probably not see that. I do not know, & why on earth should we understand everything...

Can you say something more about this evolution in your work? Are there things you used to do that you now reject? Do you feel that there are things you have learned on the basis of your earlier work?

Well, first of all there is what I said above. About the colour & the dark blue. Maybe I will skip colour for some time, or the many different colours, because they make people tend to ignore the forms. Or the other way round: no longer make forms, but use the room as a whole as the form & splash it with confetti, balls, polysterene foam, oranges... I do not know.

I used to incorporate objects into the composition: clocks, statues of the Virgin Mary, rocks, which I then simply painted. I do not do that often anymore. Now I use different forms, ‘self-made forms’. I am working with furniture again, however: parts of a table, legs of a chair, all sorts of things. Vases, too. Sometimes I also copy furniture, in a different material. Table legs in PU foam or plaster. I still have to experiment with that.

I also refrain from using woollen threads. I gradually eliminate them. The woollen threads I used in lokaal01breda in 2007 are now in the green work I used in the Margalef & Gipponi Gallery. A round tabletop (without legs) covered with wool & sprayed in green & then some yellow confetti on the wall. It looks like a heap of green dinosaur vomit, or a pile of spaghetti, worms, the sun, a heap of cut grass, a pile of writings, hair, & so on.

The form is what counts. I have often been told that I should give a deeper, more conceptual meaning to my work. I do not feel that is necessary. Not in the way that is expected from me. I could very well make something up. I could lie. My feeling is that the vast majority of the artists are liars, making up some idiotic story. I feel sorry for them. Imagine working your whole life on ‘the human body’, or ‘the animal environment’. I am not going to make something up about animals / penguins / my grandmother’s death / ... The deeper content will grow out of itself. That is how one should appreciate things. I do not like the narrow-mindedness of the conceptual people who believe they know better. They will fail, of course. They will always be unhappy because they do not know everything or because they know everything all too well, because they have the perfect explanation, which cancels the form, which makes the image disappear.

Is what you do in any way influenced by your reading? Or do you work on the basis of what you feel to be right?

My ‘reading’? I don’t read. I leaf through books with images. Sometimes, a sentence or word or text fragment leaps to the eye & then I read it & go on reading until I am no longer interested. With a few exceptions, though. One of these exceptions would be Henk Visch – his texts I do read.

Anyway, it is more what I feel to be right. Sometimes things just happen by chance, the way things do in general. You do not know what will come. You do not know why things are like this & not like that. That is the way it goes with forms as well.

Also, the word ‘reading’ should not only be taken to mean: reading books. In my case, it could also be a week’s journey on an oil tanker to Africa. Out there, there is nothing, it seems. Except for the sky & the sea, the monotonous sound of the engine & a few cables hitting something. After a while, these sounds become the music, for lack of a stereo set. The day’s activities are a trip to the bow of the ship or painting the lifeboat, which in that context become special, & the only social activity is supper. A pigeon landing on the deck – nothing extraordinary in itself, but because there is nothing else it seems for a moment that you have seen a dinosaur. You feel the temperature changing from cold to hot in a way you have never experienced before, because of the slow pace of the journey. It is like swimming among tropical fish, or like lying on your back in the grass, looking up, & seeing the sun & the trees as if in a dream...Or like talking to someone, & then there is a silence, & then you both know that you are thinking the same thing, without saying anything.

These are forms of reading that are certainly not inferior to reading as it is traditionally defined.

The only thing I can say is that my forms have to be somewhat crooked, dented, imperfect. I have never felt the need to acquire skills, although I could have done so. One could see that as a drawback, but it could also be seen as an advantage: if you are technically proficient, it must be very difficult to get rid of that proficiency again. It must be almost impossible to make ‘free’ forms, then, I think.

Maybe it is like music – forms coming out of other forms. What I said earlier. Music without words. Sometimes music reminds one of a road, of a certain feeling, of a person, of a garden, love ... Sometimes it sends shivers down your spine. It can be beautiful, gentle & moving, frightening,... without meaning anything. A few years ago, my grandmother was greatly impressed by a colander, put upside down, painted green, with a white curly branch on it. I do not understand it at all, she said, but it is good, funny, beautiful... Sometimes, something plays through your head. Sometimes, it is the other way round, you see something, a sky maybe, which is identical to a sky you saw five years ago & then the music comes. That is how it goes with forms as well.

Still, I wonder if you try to find out what is behind the work of others that you like. Take, for instance, the work you mentioned by Ann Veronica Janssens. She has, at various occasions, tried to explain what she was aiming at with her work. Are you interested in these statements, or do you feel the work has to speak for itself completely? In other words, do you feel that is pointless to try and understand / explain everything here as well?

First & foremost, a work has to move, it has to touch us. I never read the explanation that comes with a work before watching it. I never read the titles & the text panels. It is the form that should be right. It has to have an appeal. Maybe I will read a few sentences afterwards. I do not see what a text can add, mostly. More often than not it brings nothing to the form. The accompanying text can even do harm. It mostly does. I do not know what Ann Veronica intended to do with her glass panes, what they refer to, what they are supposed to tell us, or what the statement is, where it comes from, what it shows to others, what it should show, if it has to show anything. & I have never met her. I think they are beautiful, in their shape & because of the things they reflect or absorb. Of course, it does not have to be meaningless for us to try & understand it. But why do we need to understand everything? Are not the things we do not understand the most interesting ones? I want to show something new, something that eludes our grasp. It is pointless to try & understand everything. For one, it is impossible. & also, things becomes less interesting as soon as you understand them. Why should a form by all means tell us something?

In 2008, I made a plexi mini-cube in four compartments, with pieces of coloured plasticine in it. In this way, you get a formal connection. Maybe that is what gives it an appeal. There are probably a hundred people who have made a cube or stack with glass or plexi panes or something else. Modern office buildings also consist of panes, large & concrete ones. Why can’t the form be the statement instead of the content? The content is produced by the form. Which was first? Form or content? Maybe form will generate content. & there will always be content. People always feel something or think of something when they look at an object. I never ask myself what a certain work is about. I do not understand why people would need a perfectly reasoned conceptual explanation. It is about the mortality of the ostrich & that is why I used these feathers & the black in the back of the corner refers to this & that & the element below left means that there is light in the darkness, & so on. You can of course reflect on a work, but I am against giving it a single meaning. That is why I have hardly ever given titles to my things so far. Because that would mean to fixate them. I like to leave things open. Maybe that will change in the future.

What you have said so far suggests that you are less than enthusiastic about the way art functions as an institution. Does this also mean that you aim for a wider public than the one visiting galleries and openings? And are you frustrated about the fact that ‘high art’ has become a marginal phenomenon in society, relevant only to a specialized elite? Or do you think that is inevitable?

Museums are often too empty. What they show is not interesting. It is too thin. They always show the same things. For me, personally, there is often hardly any difference between exhibitions. Everything on the wall, square, rectangular, in the middle,...

Of course I want to reach the largest audience possible. The people visiting the openings & such in a certain town – take Antwerp – are always the same. It is a closed circuit. I do not want to remain stuck in that circuit forever & ever. Moreover, most of the people attending these openings are there for the free drinks. Which are usually not very good, for that matter.

Anyway, it seems like some sort of peculiar system has been put in place, some kind of path you have to follow. First you study, then you do exhibitions here & there, & afterwards you can exhibit there, if you have gotten to know these & these people. You have to find a good gallery, you can exhibit in an environment in one gallery only, then they give you subsidies, & so on. Why not three openings at several places in the same town at the same time? Or ten simultaneous openings throughout Belgium? Why not twenty scattered all over the world?

Of course, most people are not at all aware of all these artists exhibiting their work in galleries. Nobody goes & watches all of it. It is too far away or it has not been publicised enough. Or people find it intimidating, because it is too aloof & elitist. Or nobody pays attention to it because it remains within the walls of the galleries, which are intimidating. Galleries also feel intimidated by each other. There are no collaborations. So they cannot realize something really worthwhile. They cannot stand each other. Of course there are always exceptions.

On the other hand, I do think that my own work lends itself to being displayed in these clean white spaces. I just would like the galleries to open themselves more, if possible to all people. Of course you need people who buy something. Otherwise I would not survive. & of course these people are the elite. The ones with the money. But at the same time something should be able to happen that can be seen by everybody. In a public space, for instance. Or in places that are less intimidating.

There is also very little interest in art, generally speaking. It is only a tiny minority. & nobody tries to arouse the public’s interest. That holds for a lot of things of course. There are too many things in the world, there is too much paper, & there are not enough competent people taking the right decisions at the right time. It is always the same. Which is a pity, because art can stir things up, more than other things can. Being able to create beautiful things means so much more than money, power, cars or whatever.

Art fairs are, as such, a good idea. Showing a lot of things on a large space, in a well-known place, Art Brussels, for instance. Only, the way they handle it is inadequate. The all-over formal appeal, the global image is not good. All galleries in their own little booth. Once, I looked at it from above. The space above the passages & the booths is never used. More than half of the space is simply air. Below, there are hideous, all too symmetrically ordered booths in a row, all preferably at the same distance from each other because of the fire or explosion hazard.

The security phenomenon provokes aggression. I mean the posts & ribbons they use to fence off the works, & the alarm systems, so that you cannot touch them, so that they cannot fall onto your head, so that you cannot take them away. It has a contrary effect, I think. If they would do things more openly & freely, there would be less incidents. Of course, there are always fools who want to set things on fire, but their number would diminish. Compare it with the G8 summit – one hundred demonstrators on one side, & one hundred policemen on the other, crush barriers between them, & both sides goading each other.

Anyway, I still have to figure out a solution for it. Ask me again in twenty years’ time.

Frank Maes is head curator at S.M.A.K (Ghent, Belgium).
His text is reproduced here with his kind permission.