The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

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The Pain Catcher
Thierry de Cordier, Thinker, Artist and Humble Earthworm

Backs are threatening. But they also protect. This duality is a leitmotiv in the work of the Flemish artist Thierry de Cordier (1954-). At the Documenta in Kassel in 1992 he exhibited three such monumental, threatening backs, gleaming black backs of bulls. From one of the three it appeared that wine or blood was flowing. For backs are also vulnerable.

A back is a place of refuge. A shield, the carapace of a tortoise. The Flemish Ardennes, where De Cordier lives, is a hilly area. A whole landscape of backs. It is the tormented artist's protective sheath, a spot where he can seek safety far from the hurly-burly.

From the back garden

In his back garden in Schorisse, an unsightly village nine kilometres from Oudenaarde, De Cordier built a hut: a refuge to write in. He also designed a portable écritoire with a sunshade, to let him work at his kitchen writings in his vegetable garden, and some thinking-furniture, his jardinière, un abri pour fond de jardin, in which he can work in total peace and isolation.

The garden, De Cordier says, is your own soul. In the catalogue of his exhibition in the Belgian pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale he tells of his neuroses and his craving for quiet and isolation. In his youth he always wanted to be absent, to go away, in any event not to belong anywhere. As a child he would wander round his parents'. garden with an overfilled rucksack. He just wanted to be elsewhere, ‘simply, without knowing why, or where, to walk around, to turn round and go away, disappear’. Nothing has changed. In Schorisse he has again more or less shut himself up in a garden and he makes his home there as an invalid keeps his bed. He doesn't move far from it. He disappears, he says, in his ailing head.

The only place where you can do anything is inside your own head: that is his artistic creed. De Cordier wants to lead a cerebral, vegetative existence, with his feet planted in the earth like a tree or a bush, or a scarecrow with flapping rags. To be at ease with himself is in his eyes only possible by emigrating into himself. ‘There was a time when I gave everything,’ he says.

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Thierry de Cordier, Jardinière (cross-section), 1990. Crayon on paper, 39 × 27.5 cm.

‘Now I begin to hold back. For where did it get me? I'm extremely disillusioned.’

De Cordier doesn't readily give interviews. He prefers isolation, or rather peace and quiet. ‘That tongue of mine, long as an alpenhorn - I want to cut it off,’ he once said. ‘To keep silent. I am embittered.’ He wants to think the world from his back garden, from among the luxuriant growth. Probably that is why he doesn't exhibit much. De Cordier regards his rare smaller presentations as stages, exercises, preparations for a larger exhibition. For everything he makes is an element of a whole, in his words a whole composed of ‘concentric cycles orbiting about a fixed point.’ Everything he makes, from egg, earth and rust, is transitory. It is all tied to the earth; his landscapes are mixed with ink, with dark shadows.

‘Je suis un grand penseur’

De Cordier is doubly talented: he also writes, sometimes in Dutch but mostly in an archaic French, the language of Montaigne, in a monkish hand. French is the language of his mother, to whom he writes posthumous letters. His book Mes Écrits de Cuisine, ou: qqs. écrits ‘en philosophique’. du dimanche et autres poèteries (1995), his ‘kitchen writings’, is the second of a series, part of ‘a book to live in as in my mother's belly and never have to leave again’. In Notices to Myself (Verwittigingen aan mezelf), written with enormous care and monkish patience, he talks about thinking. It sounds a bit corny: ‘Thou shalt regularly spend a day doing nothing but think (deeply),

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so that it may allow thee always to question in time those things thou shouldst not wonder about again... In contrast, regularly (but more sparingly) spend a day in which thou dost not ponder (or think), not of anything. This will allow thee better to comprehend the Other.’

De Cordier is a romantic. He has retreated with his wife and children to a little farm, which he has converted into a place of refuge. He tucks himself away in his writing-hut in the garden. Cordier is at once gardener, philosopher, world-improver, monk, misanthropist and Sunday thinker. ‘Je suis un grand penseur’. As he says himself, he lives apart from people in unspoilt Schorisse precisely so as to better maintain contact with them. As a Sunday thinker he can furnish spiritual food, the only problem - he says - is that there isn't any spiritual hunger around me.

His drawings are his account of that thinking. De Cordier reveals himself as the Man of Sorrows, the ‘pain catcher’. They are mental pictures. His

Thierry de Cordier, The Landscape Beyond (Black Landscape for a Kitchen or Dead Landscape). 1992. Oil on photograph, 25 × 18 cm.

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Thierry de Cordier, Landscape Man, 1995. Wood, rubber, iron, plaster of Paris, hair, smoked glass, 69 × 110 × 45 cm (Photo courtesy Xavier Hufkens).

sculptures, like his home in Schorisse, are protective volumes: a constant procession of rooms, cupboards, tombs, shells, like his studiolo or his chantoir, a singing-hut for a castrato, images which recall events of interest to him.

Previously he had lived on the dyke at Ostend, with his back to other people and his face to the sea. After his disappointing student career at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent he led a somewhat anonymous life. On a thick sheet of paper he wrote: ‘(ex)peintre (peintre en bâtiment), écrivain, limonadier, portier de nuit, trieur de pommes de terre’. (‘(ex)painter (painter in buildings), writer, soda jerk, nightporter, potato sorter’). Is this his autobiography? One never finds out; he keeps you guessing. There is something else on the paper: ‘détestant l'art actuel, misantrope, plongeur, sans emploi, hermite, ver-de-terre’ (‘hating contemporary art, misanthrope, dishwasher, unemployed, hermit, earthworm’). He is none of these things, and at the same time all of them. They are paradoxical self-images. In 1987 he did his Autoportrait en ver-de-terre, a portrait of a humble earthworm. After his name he puts: ‘né en Flandres le 17 juin 1954, philosophe-autodidacte’.

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A mute mendicant monk

De Cordier is a thinker-sculptor. In 1985 he painted his face blue, heavenly blue, and walked round Ghent's Museum of Contemporary Art as a Cloudman (Wolkman) looking for a spot to have a conversation. A year later, for Antichambre (part of the memorable Ghent exhibition Chambres d'Amis), he built a Flemish mountain hut on the roof of an empty factory: a whitewashed cabane flamande with a tall chimney where the pilgrims who had climbed so high were served wine and food at a long table and could talk to each other.

Mysticism attracts him. The mountain of the mystics. This is a wellknown theme in modern art. The Russian artist Kazimir Malevitch once compared the search for non-objectivity (his famous abstract Black Square)

Thierry de Cordier, The Guardian of our Vegetable Garden. 1988-1989. Mixed media. Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent.

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to climbing a mountain. As the searcher climbs higher and higher, so the world below, the world of form and cultural diversity, little by little disappears from sight. In his writings he refers more than once to the work of the mystic Juan de la Cruz. ‘Desire to be nothing so as to achieve all-being’: so wrote de la Cruz in The Ascent of Mount Carmel. ‘Desire to know nothing, so as to achieve knowledge of everything’. ‘Imaginez-vous que vous êtes un légume’ (‘imagine you are a vegetable’), says De Cordier. And he draws and makes such a vegetable.

‘Je suis un philosophe fatigué’. This is the only surviving French sentence from his Feuille d'étude pour le discours au monde. In early 1988 he gave his Discours alpin from the comfortless roof of the Centre d'Echanges de Perrache in Lyons. De Cordier, with a black hood over his head, addressed the multitude inaudibly through a megaphone. He manifested himself as the crucified one on Golgotha. The text of his address was not illegible, it was made illegible, inaudible too, because there was no audience. In Milan he appeared in front of the cathedral as a mendicant monk: ‘j'ai décidé de faire couper ma langue’ (‘I've decided to have my tongue cut’). A tragic silence. The exhausted improver of the world withdrawing from the world. He held a ‘discours muet’ in the Piazza del Duomo. A performance of utter silence.

De Cordier once made The Guardian of our Vegetable Garden, a scarecrow with its eyes averted and the megaphone reversed like a beak. But his misanthropic attitude, a mixture of intense involvement and equally pronounced aloofness, comes out most clearly in Object to Knock your Head Against. The artist bumps his head repeatedly and eventually loses consciousness. It is his salvation. ‘I have not decided to change the world but myself’.

paul depondt

Translated by Tanis Guest.

Further reading

ruyters, marc, ‘Thierry de Cordier’. In: stegeman, elly and marc ruyters (ed. Jozef Deleu et al.), Contemporary Sculptors of the Low Countries. Rekkem, 1998, pp. 104-107.