Introductions by Mark Pimlott, assistant professor Chair of Architectural Design/ Interior, TU Delft

Transcription

1 Introduction The lecture series entitled Others about us is organised by students of Explore Lab here in the faculty of architecture at TU Delft. The title would suggest that the guests might be talking about those of us sat here, but the subtlety of its phrasing brings out something more profound: that there are others about us, all around us, who are creating things, or, doing that things that human beings do, which is making the World. This is not the making of the World as described in the rapturous tones of the National Geographic channel, but making in the form of interpretation, reflection, invention and renewal. In making the World, these individuals re-make the World; their creation is recreation. The organisers of this series have invited a small and very select group of artists from different fields who will offer insights into their ideas and processes, their work and their worlds. They all come from different artistic disciplines that over the past twenty years or so have come to share and exchange thoughts, material and methods more than ever before. This series will introduce us to four individuals and their practices. And it will expose that on-going exchange between the visual arts, graphic arts, photography and fashion and architecture. All of our invited guests are significant artists in their respective fields. Each of them speaks to the public through both the nature of their work, which resonates with viewers, readers and wearers; and through their understanding and consequent address of the sites, outlets, worlds, of their work s exposure. Their work speaks to us, as architects through what perceive to be a privileged conversation in ways that we find particularly engaging and enriching for our own everdeveloping practices. We hope that you are able to come to all of these special conversations, with Karel Martens, Bas Princen, Marga Weimans and today s guest, Jan Rothuizen, to appreciate the very many worlds they explore and create. Introductions by Mark Pimlott, assistant professor Chair of Architectural Design/ Interior, TU Delft

2 Jan Rothuizen Jan Rothuizen is an artist who describes the world and people he encounters. You may know, probably, Jan Rothuizen s work already through his project, The Soft Atlas of Amsterdam ( De zachte Atlas van Amsterdam ) which has appeared in the pages of De Volkskrant since The Atlas takes the form of drawings that can be read as diagrams, maps, notes, or even novellas that describe the city as he knows it or as he discovers it, full of comments that range from the quantitative to the qualitative, altogether a kind of concrete poetry of the real. The drawings themselves are in forms understandable to everyone who has ever read a comic: they are pictures that one can read. Indeed, reading is absolutely necessary, for it is the words, the descriptions that accompany each detail of the drawings that tell us what we are looking at, and ask us to dwell on it for a few moments in order to understand it. What first appears to be a banal detail becomes significant in itself or as part of a whole; and from these drawings whose characteristic method is deployed in other projects one begins to appreciate that our environments are reflections of our true attitudes and values. Of course, the drawings are attractive to architects because they resemble the drawings we make, or used to make all the time (maybe we are not as inquiring), the fascination we have for mapping, the love we have of traces and residues of the immediate and distant past, and our search for meaning in the material of our urban environment. There is also a resemblance to photography of a certain kind, which casts its gaze over the places we make as opposed to the individuals, communities and societies that make them. The Soft Atlas is but a fragment of Jan Rothuizen s œuvre. This has been made over a decade, beginning with work that considered the self and identity, including his own (how is one, who is one in the world?) Somewhere over the rainbow ( ); Self Collector (2005); and then turning outside that self, toward the place of others, in the form of maps: first, in Cairo and Guangzhou, The Last Tourist ( ) and then in Beirut, Beyroutes, A guide to Beirut (2009); and to graphic works and installations, notably in Cairo Cairo (Seven questions) (2008) and This is not a church, written over the Stedelijk Museum (2010). With growing attention to his work, opportunities have grown for Jan Rothuizen to work with different formats and approaches to its being in the world. Two great films, one a re-enactment of the 1983 film My Amsterdam (2011) that rides at speed through the streets of the city, and Waarom is het heir zo stil? made in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum (2012) add to the tradition that he has established for the fusion of description and enquiry. Finally, is current installation for the province of Utrecht, which moves from note to picture and adds more dimensions of viewer consciousness, seems to open a door to an ever-expanding field of possibilities. His achievements to date are beautifully packaged in the publication On a clear day you see forever (very nicely the title of one of my own works from 1991), which,

3 characteristically of an artist whose work is so resolutely about a shared world of experience and making, is available for the online viewing of everyone.

4 Bas Princen Bas Princen is a photographer whose work speaks to architects, as his work directly concerns a world that is made. Princen trained as an architect, studying at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, the Berlage Institute and the Laboratory for Architecture Rotterdam. And although he is best known for his pictures, he has also maintained a voice perhaps soto voce as a designer, and has been involved in a number of projects, exhibitions and installations, notably in collaboration with Milica Topalovic; and his collaborations with architects, the most striking being those undertaken with Office (Kersten Geers/David van Severen), with whom he was awarded the Silver Lion at the 12. Biennale di architettura di Venezia. In that last instance, the forms of Office s architecture and Princen s pictures were presented simultaneously, and merged. All of these works seem related to a conceptualisation of our transformations of the natural world, realised in abstract, monumental and provocative forms. Foremost, however, Bas Princen makes pictures. These begin with the photography of places; of the world as it is made. That world is a constructed world; a destroyed world; an artificial world. This world half-made up is not new territory for photographers, for whom the subject has been central since the nineteenth century. Territories awaiting or undergoing profound transformation have been the subject of the work of photographers of the nineteenth-century American West, such as Timothy O Sullivan, Carleton Watkins and Azahel Curtis; of continuing centrality to the work of New Topographic photographers such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz; and innate to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and the Dusseldorf School, best represented by their students Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. Bas Princen s early pictures, such as his series and book Artificial Arcadias (2004) seem to be straightforward documents of particular and peculiar aspects of human activity, such as recreation. Looking at these landscapes, one would think that people were simply using what was there, and taking advantage of, using its forms for sport. Yet there was an almost fictional aspect to these pictures, akin, in my opinion, to the peopled landscapes of eighteenth-century painting, for example those of Watteau, Fragonard and Tiepolo (more so than the Breugel landscapes they might easily be connected with). More recently, we as viewers are uncertain before the pictures that Princen presents. They are, forcefully, monumentally, pictures. Regardless of their appearances as landscapes or cities in transformation profound and violent in order to fix human activity and presence, they are inevitably abstract, and paradoxically beautiful.

5 Karel Martens We have the pleasure and honour of welcoming Karel Martens here, again, to the TU s faculty of architecture. Again, because Karel has a long standing relationship with the TU: everyone here in the faculty of architecture is familiar with OASE, perhaps particularly through its feeling and appearance, the design of which for many years has been crafted by Karel Martens and the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem. Apart from regularly holding issues of OASE or his beautiful book Printed Matter in my hands and in my eyes, I have the pleasure of passing his work each day, seeing the neon identity of the Lucent Dans Theater in Den Haag appear and disappear from my passing tram. One must not take such familiarity for granted, however, for Martens is a very great graphic artist, and an artist tout court of profound importance; his practice is of international significance. Karel Martens s association with Arnhem runs deep: he was born there, and studied there; his early work with publishers was there or in its environs. And, he continues to work there, practicing and teaching. Many of the details of his great achievement are unnecessary to repeat, but his relationship with SUN, or more precisely, the Socialistische Uitgeverij Nijmegen between 1975 and 1981 is important to single out, both for the form and the idea of the use of his work. The usefulness or the work of the work of graphic art in society has been central, and has yielded the dual character that typifies so much of his work: that it is legible and useful; and that it is engaging and beautiful. Martens has produced work in the public realm for the public, notably for PTT Nederland, which I am sure you must remember, even vaguely, from a time when the idea of public was not some euphemism for inefficiency or uselessness. This work embodied Martens s commitment to social engagement and criticality. For all that, and perhaps continuous with the spirit of that, is Karel s dedication to teaching. In Arnhem, in the Werkplaats Typographie since 1997, and at Yale University School of Art, where he has been Critic just as long, Martens is a kind, generous and demanding teacher, encouraging students to find their true voice. In his work as a graphic artist, material and colour are essential. It is committed to material, pattern and colour, and seems to our eyes as architectural. Indeed, it has been said that architectural theory is a source of guidance for his work. As an artist, producing objects and designs of no immediate usefulness, one is struck by his strategies of using overlapping materials, colours and patterns to produce complex, intense structures. Robin Kinross, with whom he collaborated on Printed Matter or Drukwerk (1996) has said this of him: There is no style, only an

6 approach and an attitude: unapologetic intelligence and unbeatable moral integrity. Drive hard for content and for the real object, refuse the delusions of the image: that is the lesson that this work offers. A comment made by the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky regarding the cinematographe Robert Bresson may be added here, in which Tarkovsky described Bresson s films as art that was part of nature: you could watch them, or not; or you could think of them as art, or not. And this made them the greatest art, because it was closest to life. This seems to be a quality of the idea and work of Karel Martens. Born 1939, studied at Arnhem school of art, 1961 Van Loghem Slaterus, Arnhem (1960s) SUN PTT Nederland Taught since 1977, at Arnhem school of art until 1994, Jan van Eyck Akademie Maastricht , Yale University School of Art, New Haven, critic and teacher form 1997 Werkplaats Typographie, Arnhem, from 1997, at ArtEZ OASE H N Werkman Prize for OASE, 1993 uncut pages of OASE 34 (the interior) Dr A H Heineken Prize for Art, 1996 Printed Matter or Drukwerk (1996) (2º edition 2001; 3º edition 2010), awarded several prizes, including the gold medal at the 1998 Leipzig book fair, for the most beautiful book in the world

7 Marga Weimans Marga Weimans is a fashion designer, whose work came to public attention immediately upon her graduation from the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts in That collection, called The Power of My Dreams was about overcoming fear by dreaming about how one could be, and through dreaming, being. The collection offers a series of different beings, or identities, from the ravishing to the rugged, with references that seem to move across a series of different historical periods and societies, all rendered in black, white, silver and grey. Rather than being collages of these diverse images, the designs synthesise them. Drawing on Weimans s Surinam-Creole background, the collection offers a complex representation of a black woman, one who is in the world as a complex of personalities. Her collection Wonderland extended the programme of the first, and bound the clothes to a specific place, the Afrikaanderwijk in Rotterdam, deploying extraordinarily coloured and patterned fabrics in unexpected forms, that seemed to go far beyond the dressing of the body, and into a kind of architecture, poised against the buildings and landforms that might be its context. It would be banal to say that fashion is a kind of architecture; yet in these first works, one is reminded of the objectives of designers such as Hussain Chalayan, who have very substantial ambitions regarding the relation of the user to the environment, and of clothes to the environment, in which radical questions and re-appraisals can be undertaken. Each collection by Marga Weimans seems to develop this possibility further, while drawing upon cultural or historical signs or tropes as something that larger possibilities can be built around. Along with conventional materials, Weimans uses those that are foreign to clothes; she makes her own fabrics, with, for example, resin and fibreglass as though making a kind of building material. The objects that she uses as ornaments for her constructions are similarly inventions of dissonant materials. If it is not clear from these descriptions already, there is a political dimension to the work that Marga Weimans makes, and an ascription of power to the wearer, who does not appear merely as a difficult artefact in a world of things, but a being, bearing signs of identity, individuality and culture. Introductions by Mark Pimlott, assistant professor Chair of Architectural Design/ Interior, TU Delft