Is it possible to reconcile the transient with the permanent? Can a
series of weather-beaten chalk lines be preserved as part of an art
collection?

In response to this challenge, posed to me by Philippe van Cauteren,
artistic director of Ghent’s Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art
(S.M.A.K.), I wrote the following letter. It’s about landslides, smoke
signals, time frames, three framed queens – and an old railway
house.


Ghent, August and September 2008

Dear Philippe,

I wanted to wait until the project was finished before writing to you.
Did I have a good reason for waiting? Not really. At best, I was
waiting for my ideas, intentions, actions and results to fall into place
as rolling stones do after a landslide. However, the productive
standstill I’d hoped for didn’t happen.
It’s not easy to find a clear answer to your question. What is it like to
spend four months drawing chalk lines on the walls of a
neighbourhood like Moscou? All I can say is that the project was
extended by four months; as you know, after eight months it was
decided that it would be a good idea to add a third term to the
project, so that it would last for a year. And for me, who knows,
these three episodes could be the prelude to a lifelong stay in Ghent.
In the course of this trilogy, my relationship with the place changed
from that of a visiting artist to that of a citizen. This change had a
significant effect on the project. In this letter, I want to tell you I got
acceptance for the project from the neighbourhood residents, and
about some of the changes that are to be observed in a place like
Moscou.
*
On the wall of your apartment, there’s a letter from Queen Elizabeth,
the British head of state. It’s the queen’s answer to a letter in which
you asked her if you could become king. She writes that there are no
vacancies at the moment. You’ve ‘crowned’ the letter by framing it.
You once told me about your first visit to a museum, as a child. You
noticed a painting hanging on the wall. It was large, as a painting,
but still tiny in relation to the building it was in. You understood that
the museum served as an enormous frame that ensured that no one
could ever underestimate the painting’s value. How captivating it
was, you thought, that people could demonstrate the importance of
a thing or a person by building something around them. A castle, for
example. Hence your interest in the British monarchy. It makes
sense to hang important paintings on large museum walls, and for
your royal letter to be framed and exhibited in your house.
*
You asked me to create drawings that can’t be framed. Actually, the
drawings I have made defy the very idea of preservation itself. The
Moscou drawings are ephemeral. They are made of chalk, on
outside surfaces. Some of them start on the outer walls of
neighbouring houses only to disappear into living rooms and family
kitchens and then reappear outside to cover the rest of the street.
The chalk lines are washed away by the rain or sometimes by the
occupants of the houses. The drawings are preserved only in
documentary pictures, meant for publication.
I don’t mind that these murals, if I can call them that, fade away.
Without this opportunity they never would have existed at all; and I
would have been barred from doing them in most places if they had
been made of some permanent material. People allow me to draw
on their houses because they know that the chalk will gradually
disappear anyway. Chalk is a brittle, innocent material. Although I
used chalk, a material usually used by children, my drawings aren’t
innocent in the same way as the chalk drawings done by children on
the pavement. But they do expand in an almost childlike way: having
finished one house, I would I ask the neighbours if they would allow
me to continue the drawing on the front of their house. Sometimes
the residents themselves would ask their neighbours. The
dimensions of the drawings and the readiness of the neighbourhood
residents to participate kept growing and growing.
*
Toward the end of the second period you paid a working visit to
Moscou. I saw the chalk lines on the front sides and side walls of
houses, or what was left of them, through your eyes: my work in
progress. We visited a house where a drawing on the front had
found its way inside and proceeded onto the walls in the living room.
We also stopped to look at some of the houses that I hadn’t
touched. Your visit revealed a world that revolved around houses,
residents and chalk. I realized that the drawings had become less
and less traceable, almost like grains of sand working their way into
the cracks between walls and windows.
Then you asked me if you could buy one of the drawings, to include
it in the museum’s collection. My initial objection was practical. It
would be impossible, I said. ‘It would be too expensive. You could
only buy the drawing if you bought the whole house.’ For a moment,
I wondered if that was why my work had never found its way into a
gallery, but then I remembered that there are other ways to do this. I
recalled your letter to Queen Elizabeth, or rather her answer to it. If a
letter is framed and hung on a wall, its message has to be important,
just like that of the relatively small painting in the relatively large
museum. But then, what good would frames do in Moscou? People
would use them as firewood, to heat their houses.
My first chalk drawing was for Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, the
Queen of Orange. When I was a student at the art academy in
Breda, our new building was to be inaugurated by the queen. A few
days before her visit, I drew a carpet of orange chalk leading to the
entrance of the academy. As the queen approached the tape to cut
it, striding over the orange chalk carpet that I’d drawn, I exclaimed:
‘Your Majesty, you’ve chalked up a debt with us!’ During the course
of the day, the carpet gradually disappeared under the soles of the
visitors, leaving tracks of chalk on the floors throughout the building.
The front page of the next morning’s newspaper featured a picture
of the queen, looking down at her own shoes in shock. I’ve framed
the article and hung it on my wall.
After your visit, you started calling me the ‘mayor of Moscou’. It
would be a real challenge to write a letter applying for that job. And I
would hope to find an appropriate way to post the answer publicly
on the streets of Moscou. If I were Moscou’s mayor, what would I
do? Like the chalk-line man, I wouldn’t try to act as a director; I’d try
to be a fellow occupant of the public space: like the chalk lines, I’d
want to cross the boundaries between the private, the communal
and the public. Still, like most of the neighbourhood residents, I
wouldn’t want to change anything permanently.
Though they seem to fit in hand-in-glove with Moscou, the drawings
could have been made anywhere. I left them there as signs of a
gentle kind of anarchism that questions property, permission,
authority. As a mayor, I’d give anything to have Moscou stay exactly
as it is. Recently, it was announced that the city of Ghent is to invest
25 million euros in Ledenberg, the area that includes the Moscou
neighbourhood. I tend to agree with the prince in Giuseppe Tomasi
di Lampedusa’s book Il Gattopardo, when he says that to stay the
same everything has to change. As regards the chalk drawings, a lot
needs to be done to preserve something so transitory.
My work is always about exploring a place, about trespassing on or
claiming a small piece of the world, about being a guest or a host
somewhere. When the queen strutted over my orange chalk carpet,
for example, the new academy building presented itself as an
appropriate frame for the future artists. It was like a fortress,
including moats and fences. While I waited outside as the other
people entered the building, I realized that I’d drawn the carpet in the
opposite direction: from inside to outside.
Something similar happened in 2005, when I had finished my
drawing for an exhibition in the S.M.A.K. a day early. I started inside
and concluded the drawing in the street. You must have thought:
he’s not interested in the museum, he can’t wait to get out. That
must be the reason why you suggested the Moscou project to me
two years later – and why, now, you are sending up smoke signals
to call my attention to the museum again.
In Moscou, I’ve spent a lot of time standing in front of a house in the
Eugeen Zetternamstraat, near the Moscou viaduct, embraced by the
switchyard of railway company NMBS. The house at number 11
used to be a rail guard’s house. It is the only freestanding house in
the street – a survivor of another era. From my first visit to Moscou I
regarded the railway house as the axis of the project. It was once
built at a focal point of the Moscou neighbourhood, in the way
Catholic churches used to be built centuries ago. A rail worker
moved into the house while Moscou was still in an early stage of its
development. Now, years later, he is retired and almost deaf, and
spends his time rooting in the soil of his garden with a shovel, or
burning leaves and clouding the neighbourhood in smoke.
Stubbornly, he lives on, ignoring the trains that roar by within a few
meters. The racket, which has grown louder over the years, has only
hardened his silence.
As winter set in, and then spring and summer, I hung around the
railway house like some kind of Johnny-come lately waiting for a
train. The building was really authentic, and it had a fixed and dutiful
air that I was eager to draw on. And yet for a while it presented an
unassailable problem. How could I make a drawing on this house
that would be worthwhile?
The other drawings I was doing in the neighbourhood suffered from
the hesitation that I experienced around the railway house. It was like
a virus that got me wavering on other sites too. There were days I
stayed home to seek reassurance in doing my administration. There
were days when I was relieved to see that rain would prevent me
from going out. When I finally got over my hesitation, I found
brambles growing around the railway house.
Blinking against the sun, the pensioner who lived there could hardly
hear a word I said. I found myself shouting as I tried to tell him why I
was there. He nodded. I could draw whatever I wanted on his walls –
as long as I didn’t use any paint.
While I was working on the drawing on his house, the old man was
taken ill and had to go to hospital. His shovel and spade remained
untouched. Meanwhile, I saw how the diagonal chalk lines across
the front and side walls appeared to assimilate the house in the
electric cables of the adjacent rail tracks. The chalk seemed to set
the house in motion. It gained momentum, like the passing railcars.

During some of that time I had the company of members of the old
man’s family, who were worried that the house would be knocked
down if he passed away. However, he returned from the hospital
and started immediately to weed his potato patch. One day, leaning
on his spade, he gave me permission to finish the drawing I had
started on the exterior of the house into his living room. And once
again, a queen appeared. I noticed a charcoal portrait of Queen
Astrid of Belgium in a gilt frame hanging above the old man’s kitchen
table. Without batting an eyelid, he introduced her as his wife.
I consulted some history books, and discovered that Queen Astrid
had been a woman who had a lot of sympathy for her people; she
was in the habit of following up personally on petitions that moved
her. Well, my exploration of Moscou hadn’t been initiated by a
moving petition of any kind. True, you wrote a letter to the residents
of the neighbourhood at the beginning of the project. I think very few
of them even opened it. In the same way, most of them were
indifferent when I started making my first chalk drawings on some
low walls in a no man’s land that belonged to everyone. It was only
when I started talking to them that new windows of opportunities
opened up.
It was August again. Harvest month. A year had passed since I first
met the old rail worker. His house was now covered with chalk lines,
outside as well as inside. The old man was chopping up wood while
railcars went back and forth. The lines on the wallpaper in the living
room stopped where they reached the interior: the armchair, the
portrait of Queen Astrid, and a framed jigsaw puzzle of a Swiss
landscape. The old man shuffled through his house and said: ‘You’re
free as a bird.’

The drawing encompasses the house in a kind of time frame, which
is bound up with his life. While drawing, I imagined the chalk lines
protecting the house from the immanent demolition. I thought of
them as cables tying its walls to the ground. The mayor of Moscou
would have the power to protect such an extraordinary house. The
house is really a decree, written in chalk.

What would happen if the value of the chalk drawing was tied to the
house it is drawn on? Together, the railway company and the
museum could surely come up with a constructive solution to this
question.

Bart Lodewijks