Titillating constellations
Frank Maes
While I’m sitting here, close to the sea, and leafing through a digital copy of Hilde Overbergh’s titillating artist’s book, I involuntarily think of a beachcomber. Overbergh’s domain is, in addition to the beach, also the city. She collects what happens to come her way — washed up from god knows where — and has caught her attention for a sometimes identifiable, sometimes inscrutable reason. Her catch is then taken to the studio, where it may remain for a while, seemingly meaningless and purposeless. Out of nothing it may become something, and, who knows, later again nothing, or something else. In the specific biotope of the studio, the object ends up in a corner, on a board or a shelf, or on the wall. Either way, as long as it can escape the bin bag and oblivion, it ends up, inevitably, every time in different, more or less accidental, intentional or unintentional relationships with other objects. We could call those relationships constellations.
There is a hypothesis about a possible origin of sculpture within the context of nomadic communities. A tribe puts up their tents somewhere, the shaman spots some remarkable stones, and piles them on top of each other. For the duration of their stay, this construction will act as a substitute for a god, a deceased leader, or a desired prey. This projection stems from the inherent desire to make the absent present, or to give shape and meaning to the unknown. I dare speculate, however, that those stones also remain stones at the same time for the members of the tribe. In other words, that this is a serious game. As soon as the tribe moves on, the construction loses its projected function and meaning, and the stones, again, become nothing but stones.
The attention for the everyday, the unsightly, or seemingly meaningless is an innovation within the history of European painting that has been settled in German regions. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, landscapes, interiors, still lifes, and genre paintings became increasingly detached from the bigger picture. This resulted in a meticulous attention to aspects — like representations of simple things, everyday actions, accidental or fleeting situations; colors and tones, light and shadow, touches, textures — that previously dissolved seamlessly and automatically in the virtual image, the broader story. A few centuries later, in the 1910s, Kurt Schwitters began to gather things from sidewalks, and brought them together in collages or assemblages. That which usually resides under our feet as residual waste now got presented on a vertical plane, directed towards the eye. Schwitters also dared to present silly looking (fragments of) things, held together by blobs of plaster, as art works. Lots of artists from the 1950s and 60s — whether they were called Rauschenberg, Spoerri, Rotella, or Broodthaers – are indebted to him. This kind of work derives a contagious tension from the fact that its components haven’t completely lost the original and literal status they had on the ground as soon as they were hung on a wall. And just like that, the work keeps commuting back and forth between different realities. As far as painting is concerned, the American art historian David Joselit coined the term transitive painting for it.
Hilde Overbergh’s work is in line with this rich tradition, in which there remains a strong, literal bond between the everyday and concrete reality outside of the artwork, and the virtual reality that takes place within the image. It’s not just that she collects things or images that happen to catch her eye on the street, and that she creates collages and assemblies. Even when her work takes place in a clearly demarcated, two-dimensional surface on a wall, the literal components from which they consists — the material — and the way they are constructed — like the literal, painterly layers of the work — play their role in the spectator’s experience and perception. See, for example, the series that, in the background, show a more or less recognizable representation. Wherein an amorphous-looking “splash of paint”, or an “empty” negative space, left, as it were, completely lost in the middle of the image plane, largely obscures the view of the imagery. This gives a depth evoked by the literal layering of the painting. A depth in which the work keeps a secret, and thus claims autonomy with regard to the viewer. At the same time, the literal flatness of the painting is emphasized. The literalness and ambiguity these paintings acquire simultaneously: lovely! Conversely, when her work radically seeks out the concrete space of the studio or exhibition, it always remains, in my opinion, about a kind of art that takes place on a plane: a surface that is folded, pleated, bent, sawn, covered, painted, screen-printed, sanded, glued, pierced, cut, broken. Why should a painterly image not belong as much to this concrete reality as a volume does? And at the same time possess the potential to stimulate, transport or fool our perception and imagination in many ways?
What a pleasure it is to keep recognizing the creative process in the final result (more or less), to experience the work itself by merely looking at it. Here I perceive a similarity with Russian constructivism, that precisely in and through such “insight” wanted to let the spectator participate in the construction of the image. With the intention, in this collective event, to break free from a bourgeois individualism, or of an overly highly strung cult of the artistic genius. On the other hand, Overbergh’s poetics lack the utopian aspirations of modernist constructivists such as Rodchenko or Van Doesburg, who propagated that this new, often “geometric-abstract” art would also bring forth a completely new world, a new human being. Overbergh’s art contains references to geometric shapes, but is, at the same time, sloppy, frayed, home-made. It is DIY-constructivism. Contrary to avant-garde art, it does not have universal aspirations in the least. Is this, then, nothing but a no-obligation game? That is not my impression. This game is played seriously. I have no doubts about the social value of this work, but what exactly this role or contribution could be, remains open in my opinion.
The attitude in which the artist partially relinquishes the initiative, and is open to contributions from the outside, manifests itself in a different way here too. As soon as components of a work of art refuse to be completely dissolved in a virtual image, and thus continue to be (partly) part of the concrete “here-and-now”, then gravity starts to play an active role in the design of the work. After minimal art took the step towards a form of “literal art” in the early 1960s you could see this happening frequently: in the programmatic firmness of Richard Serra and Robert Morris; in the masterful and blissful silliness of Eva Hesse; in the subtle connection between the literal heaviness and poetic lightness of Giovanni Anselmo. Hilde Overbergh also, in many different ways, lets gravity take the lead. She creates her works on a wide variety of carriers, with varying properties in terms of density, elasticity, flexibility, etc. The pictures in this book show how the artworks are sometimes lying on the floor while she paints or otherwise shapes them. Gravity gives the work its final form as soon as it is subsequently hung on the wall. After which the artist, in turn, sometimes sets this “fall” into a solidified image.
In the revolutionary era between the nineteenth and twentieth century there has probably been nothing that opened the entrenched division between the virtual space of the artwork and the concrete “here-and-now” more radically, and, at the same time, more subtly than Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (“A roll of the dice will never abolish chance”). It was published posthumously in 1897. The verses are “free”, for the first time, seemingly haphazardly, “scattered” across the pages. Mallarmé uses various font sizes, alternates lower case and capitals, and scatters the verses across the pages in seemingly accidental constellations (towards the end, the poem itself contains this exact word, in large capitals: “CONSTELLATIONS”). As a result, it is not always clear in which order the verses should be read, and the eye skips like when reading a newspaper. As a result, remarkably, the blank areas between the verses come under pressure. It is hard to overestimate the consequences. Rather than being a vehicle that guides the reader fluently and fully automatically towards a world created by the artist, the text, which nevertheless retains its referring function, acts as an image, and, literally, like ink on paper. Thus a multi-dimensional space opens up — a transitive space, to paraphrase Joselit. The most basic characteristic of a space you’re in, is that you can never totally oversee it. This also applies to the artist here. The final work of art only emerges, and is created over and over again, in the personal reading or gaze of each individual reader/viewer. The artist takes a step back. Artist, artwork, and spectator fall within in the same, multi-dimensional space.
This pressuring of in-between spaces, and approval of the role of blind spots and remnants — not only in the viewer’s perception, but also in the artist’s conception — is what I recognize as a central aspect of Hilde Overbergh’s poetics. For example, in the many ways in which she activates negative space. When Marcel Broodthaers first visited René Magritte’s home in 1946 in his early twenties, the master gifted him Un coup de dés. Many years later, in 1969, he made his own version of this poem, covering all verses with black ink strokes. You can either mourn the loss of referrals, or dance to the beat of what’s left. This work was not only realized on paper, but also with aluminum plates. This is M.B.’s most minimalist and literal work. Through Magritte and Mallarmé he discovered that every approach to the world can show us something of that world, but in one and the same movement obscures much more.
Magritte knew, Picasso and Duchamp did too, so Schwitters probably knew as well: how much they owed to Mallarmé and his constellations. As a young poet, Mallarmé aimed, possibly influenced by Hegel’s Phenomenologie des Geistes, for nothing less than the “absolute”, the complete abstraction, beyond and above and apart from all imperfections and specifics of this sublunary existence. When it dawned on him that this would never work, he entered an existential crisis. René Descartes (ironically often branded as an “absolutist” today) wrote in Discours de la méthode (1637) that any approach to the world — every mold we pour the world into — is a projection, is fiction. A “throw with the dice”. Mallarmé made clear that we, as the concrete, limited beings we are, have no other option but to, again and again, fall back on the “en-deça” — the concrete, literal, messy, amorphous, everyday matter, and, in his case, that of the letters, of ink on paper — to over and over again, in new “constellations” without any eternal value, reach for the “au-delà”, the virtual, the possible.
A crucial point in the creation of most works of art is the magical moment when the work is finished. Then the reality of the art work connects together once and for all into an inalienable whole, a quasi-organic unit. In most artworks it is also abundantly clear, unquestionably, when this moment concludes the creation process. However, there is also art in which this completion or conclusion is not at all that clear, self-evident, or final. For example, when the work develops gradually, as a constellation that keeps developing under the gaze of every spectator. Or when it maintains a bond with the outside world. Then the provocative question may arise: is this an art work or not? Within the dynamics of Hilde Overbergh’s oeuvre it may happen that the artist more or less changes a constellation that at some point had become a “work of art”, whereby parts are removed or added. Or whereby components migrate from one work to another. For quite a few art lovers, especially those who are attached to the eternal value of a work of art (not infrequently stemming from a desire to capitalize this value), this is almost blasphemy. Because when the work of art obtains such a temporary and somewhat uncertain status, both the artist and the spectator have to be able to deal with this temporary, interchangeable nature.
Hilde Overbergh’s concrete constellations delight the senses at a time when our relationship with the world is increasingly one-sided through screens, at which we stare like rabbits at a light box. These titillating qualities may help us to dispel a misunderstanding, a ghost that has haunted Western art for over a century: abstract art does not exist.
Koksijde, February 2021