The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

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As Mysterious as Running Water
The Work of Marijke van Warmerdam

Not all her sculptures move. Some of them remain an immobile focus for the circling spectator, just as sculpture should be. There are also sculptures that only seem to be so. A pouffe, or a life-size doll wrapped in a long dress, may suddenly walk off. At moments when the spectator had just assured himself of their thing-ness, these works come up with surprising signs of life.

Marijke van Warmerdam (1959-) is a sculptor with fairly flexible views about sculpture. About the immobile ones too. Some years ago she made a series of ‘real’ sculptures with the proportions of an inflated crispbread or, some might say, a single mattress. They stand, rather ill at ease, on their long, narrow edges. And while they are not models of voluminosity to start with, their limited mass is largely lost as a result of an organised form of hollowing out. The surface is occupied by an abundance of deep-set halfspheres.

In hindsight, now she has made an international name for herself with several unforgettable film loops (lengths of film in the form of a closed

Marijke van Warmerdam, Handstand (1992) (Photo Galerie Van Gelder, Amsterdam).

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Marijke van Warmerdam, Football (1995) (Photo Galeric Van Gelder, Amsterdam).

loop), you get the idea that things must already have been fermenting and bubbling behind those cool spheres. This is because, since Handstand in 1992, we know how fascinated this artist is by physical actions. Simple, measured actions that you watch in admiration. Sometimes just a trick. A thing a child on the street has learnt to do and wants to show off. She once designed a choreography for skateboards. That was in 1992, when Queen Beatrix came to open the new building for the State Academy. Marijke van Warmerdam had been invited to make something for the occasion. It turned out to be a dazzling spectacle on the ‘half pipe’, the familiar horseshoeshaped run. Sneaking the acrobatics of the street into the art context was an important statement: art based on the high art of the street. The Academy had until only twenty years previously still been a bastion of conventional education, with teachers making their pupils draw poses frozen in plaster and, at an advanced level, in the life class, until they had tears in their eyes, and in this context this choreography functioned above all as a feast of movement.

Some time passed before Van Warmerdam entrusted such things to a recording medium. It was a far-reaching decision when it came. After all, the vitality of the real world is necessarily transformed into filmic illusion. And then again, to be able to show a physical action separately from the person who carries it out, it has to be ‘canned’. And in so doing it is almost inevitable that the literal spatiality will have to be surrendered. But also recalled, by way of the projected illusion.

The funny thing is that we easily see these film images as real. We look at them and immediately believe we are witnessing something happening at that moment. Take for instance the schoolboy who has learnt the art of keeping the ball aloft, bouncing it on his head, by means of controlled movements (Football, 1995). Can he do it a hundred times, two hundred times, five min-

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utes, ten minutes, half an hour? We share the experience, just as one does with a football match broadcast live on tv, and are catapulted out of our fascination when the ball falls to the ground. No one will lament that one cannot circle round the film image as one can around a sculpture. Because the fact that the viewpoint, due to the set angle of the camera, is immovably fixed also has its advantages. The recording is natural, calm and direct. It is actually matter-of-fact, and leaves sufficient space for the expansion the body needs to carry out the movements.

The action is so clearly taken from life that it forms a coherent event. The nice thing is that the form chosen to present it - the loop - only reinforces this orderliness. You unconsciously look for a beginning and an end; you intentionally allow yourself to be fascinated by this ever-repeated sequence. The changes of position needed to look at a stable sculpture are here replaced by the anticipation of successive fragments. We follow the movement from beginning to end and then again and again. This repetition naturally has a brilliant rhythmic effect (didn't Duchamp once say that repetition automatically produces beauty?).

This works to greatest effect in Handstand. We see a girl doing a handstand against a wall. She is wearing a skirt, which falls downward during the short time she is upside down, covering her head rather than her legs. Immediately afterwards the girl is back on the ground again and the skirt is hanging normally. In terms of movement, there is the splendid spectacle of two movements in opposite directions: the challenge to gravity (the girl's action) which unintentionally causes an effect of gravity (the skirt). But the psychological effect is even more interesting, with two attitudes fighting for supremacy: empathy and voyeurism. I recognise the childlike dilemma: you want to show off your daring by doing the handstand, but at the same time not let your knickers be seen. So you quickly let your legs drop to the ground again. And you make another attempt, in the vain hope that this time the skirt will stay wrapped around your legs. The voyeur is faced with the vain

Marijke van Warmerdam, Blonde (1995) (Photo Galerie Van Gelder, Amsterdam).

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Marijke van Warmerdam, Shower (1995) (Photo Galerie Van Gelder, Amsterdam).

hope of the opposite kind: he wants to look longer at the moment when the skirt drops down. But then it's hanging normally again and all he can do is look more carefully next time. But the girl is back in her starting position just as quickly as the first time, is getting in position to do her handstand and whoops, it's gone again.

In the abovementioned works the actions are playful ones that demand a certain amount of physical exercise. In more recent films Van Warmerdam limits herself to a more reduced type of motif. In 1995, at the Kwangju Biennale in South Korea, she showed nothing more than a head of wavy blond hair on a giant screen. At this first major international exhibition of contemporary art in the Far East, and what is more, in a country where every inhabitant, without exception, is characterised by their coal-black hair, with the luxuriant Blonde she brought a markedly ethnic accent to the theme of Beyond the Borders. The hair was not shown as a ‘hairstyle’, but in that private phase prior to public presentability - blow-drying. In this way, here too watching takes on a voyeuristic aspect. Caring for the hair sets it in motion and draws the viewer into all its exuberant shades of blond. Blond, an exotic gift to the eye of the world.

Finally, even more simple and ordinary is the work called Shower. This short film was first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1995. The image is totally neutral, the composition obvious. We see the head and shoulders of a man against a blue-tiled wall. The water patters down unceasingly on and over him and he quietly lets it do so. Shower is exactly what its title says, an everyday washing of the body, just that, unencumbered by incidental emotional or psychological considerations. And yet it is an image with the power of an icon. Why does it hold our imagination?

In this work the element of movement has shifted from the person to the water. And that makes something mysterious happen. This pattering water is endlessly fascinating and it unwittingly begins to lead a life of its own, the more so because the beginning and end of the film dissolve seamlessly into

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Marijke van Warmerdam, Rice (1995) (Photo Galerie Van Gelder, Amsterdam).

each other. In this way vague memories are set loose, of fountains, of spouting statues by famous sculptors, of grand squares in old cities. In all its flowing innocence, the water reveals an art history subtext that links the work to classical sculpture. Even to sculptures that show only the frozen traces of flowing water. To Auguste Rodin's L'âge d'Airain, for example. A version of this sculpture was exhibited in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and its patina bore the permanent traces of exposure to rain. According to the explanation, Rodin wanted the bronze man's skin to be marked by his time in the open air, by the pouring rain. It is as if the downward flow emphasises the man's erectness, both in Shower and in L'âge d'Airain. There is the suggestion of a mutual counter-movement, which was so striking in the falling skirt. One nice similarity is that, since January 1996, Shower has also been on show in a public place. Not on a square or in a park, certainly not in daylight. Shower can be seen on one of the platforms of the underground station at Schiphol. It is shown for several hours a day, from two hours before till two hours after the rush hour; on a screen of considerable size and using a real projector. Film is an unusual technique for a public sculpture (and for that matter proved to be surprisingly durable, the first loop still not needing replacement after a year). Anyone who holds his case in front of the projector removes the picture. It is after all nothing more than a bundle of light and, as far as physical mass is concerned, is the opposite of bronze. It is precisely this ephemerality that makes this work of art fit so well into our viewing habits, concentrated as they are on news and fiction. Both young and old waiting in the train soon become absorbed by it. What is intriguing about Shower, which is taken from our everyday lives and not immediately identified as art, is the fact that the picture moves. Until it also

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turns out to persist in this unchanging movement. When there proves to be no next shot the subject condenses, with the result that it gradually becomes open to musings and associations. In all its simplicity Shower remains mysterious, unfathomable as the paths of running water.

During Documenta X (1997) a host of visitors were able to see for themselves Van Warmerdam's fondness for an everyday, routine activity with spectacular charm. Rice (1995), undoubtedly - and most appropriately - the smallest cinematic installation ever (a projector with a minuscule transparent screen attached and a loop), shows a girl with a shallow bowl throwing rice into the air to rid it of chaff. Her face vanishes behind a fountain of rice. Anyone who has travelled in a country such as Indonesia can recognise the image. Rice is a sober, documentary clip with great expressive power. While these days artists swathe their imagination more and more in everyday reality, stressing its oppressive aspects, Van Warmerdam selects fragments which - fortuitously and incidentally - celebrate the beauty of life. As if on the shoulders of the commonplace there has innocently alighted the bird called ‘escape’, ‘liberation’, or simply ‘pleasure’.

tineke reijnders

Translated by Gregory Ball.

Further reading

Dumas, Roosen, Van Warmerdam. Exhibition catalogue, Venice Biennale, 1995.

koplos, janet, ‘Marijke van Warmerdam at Van Gelder’, Art in America, March 1996.

stegeman, elly, ‘Marijke van Warmerdam’. In: stegeman, elly and marc ruyters (ed. Jozef Deleu et al.), Contemnporary Sculptors of the Low Countries. Rekkem, 1998, pp. 46-49.

Marijke van Warmerdam, Bear (1997, edition of three) (Photo Galerie Van Gelder, Amsterdam).