Page 40 - Studio International - June 1972
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underpinning the harmony of the whole Provos—who once scandalized the bourgeoisie will be considered in American-speaking
universe by people as diverse as Euclid, with an actual inundation of free white art-criticism as provincial derivations of
Kepler, and Buckminster Fuller. And in terms bicycles in Amsterdam and with threats of `minimalism' if they are considered at all; and
of the visual arts, there is that on-going tension gassing the National Assembly with LSD—are that the important physical-conceptual-
between 'reality' of the planar surface and elected Town Councillors. If being 'Dutch' is ephemeral works of Boezem, Van Elk,
`illusion' of depth assumed as primary to the a geographical condition, it is a state of land Brouwn, and Dibbets will be under-rated (or
success of any 'picture'—as well as those which is flat, flat, flat: with a countryside which ignored) in the quickie-histories of the
compositions of self-centering units of three is not just conserved into a rolling garden like International Conceptual-Art Bandwagon.
(triptychs), bilateral (centralizing) divisions England, but virtually man-made from the sea I think Dibbets is very Dutch. Even in his
into two, and frieze-like panoramas to be into a productive greenhouse; with cities defensiveness of being considered so. His best
experienced laterally over time. perched on communication routes, built to a work has that sense of material conservation,
But if we leave the Mediterranean and look rambling scale crowded never more than is meticulous attention to detail and craftsmanship,
north, 'Classicism' takes on a slightly different neighbourly. If being 'Dutch' is sociologically pragmatic and international thought, and
hue. The 'classic' periods of Dutch art are cultural, it embraces a people imbued with especially that many-levelled self-directed wit
indubitably two : those realistic landscape, centuries of (Reformation) individualism, which is part of Dutch excellence. And much
still-life, and bourgeois interior scenes so bourgeois capitalism, security in commercial of his better work deals with specific aspects of
accurately crafted in the energetic Reformation trading on an international basis, and wit about Dutch culture. The television-as-fireplace film
of the seventeenth century; and twentieth- their non-involvement with those exports plays not only on contemporary bourgeois
century purely 'abstract' relational reality of which give Holland its touristic image : tulips, fixations on materialistic technology as
geometrics in two and three dimensions on the butter and cheese, and Hans Brinker and the domestic possessions, but also on a Dutch
part of Mondrian and Rietveld, internationalized Silver Skates. It all seems small-scaled, bourgeois nostalgia for the domestic pleasures
as De Stijl Constructivism. Dibbets's work picturesque rather than sublime in its ironies, of 'an evening before the fire' : a nostalgia
obviously relates to both. And it is not and neat, tidy, and scrubbed with which hardly pervades middle-class America.
irrelevant to this that he knows the industrious craft. It would be the Dutch to laugh first at the
Rijksmuseum's bulging collection of those What of Dutch art today, and what does it conceit of Dibbets's recent series of Dutch
Dutch 'realist' masters as well as and with more mean to be a 'Dutch Artist' ? It means having Mountains; knowing that such things do not
pleasure than most specialist art-historians : access to more transatlantically travelling exist in reality, they would be most quickly
nor that, when asked with other Dutch artists exhibitions than anyplace else (the national air curious about what artifice) was used to make
to speak on Van Gogh for a national art and shipping lines transport art to its museums twelve juxtaposed un-cropped photographs
celebration, he replied to the effect that he'd free); it means potential individual subsidy by panoramically circling a flat horizon appear to
give up all the Van Goghs in the world to save the government almost automatically on present the illusion of mountains whose
one Mondrian or Malevich. application; it means living in a society where silhouetted forms are those of 'real'
museums provide their own lists of 'good Dutch geometrical ellipses themselves representing
7(Dutch) artists' to interested visiting curators and critics, immaterial concepts (cf note 5); they might
Is Malevich 'Dutch' if the biggest body of his but whose personnel tends to prefer French recognize the artist's manipulation of regularly
work is owned by a Dutch museum ? Is it any and American art; it means almost equal shifting angle of camera lens and tripod as a
more absurd to speak of what is 'Dutch' than potential involvement with old-fashioned mind-boggling technologically accentuated
what is 'realistic', or 'Jan Dibbets' ? What is art-schools, city-planning commissions, and distance from Nature (cf note 4); and—like
`Dutch' ? If it is a language (as it is), it is also computerized industries; and it means working me at this point—then appreciate the multi-
multi-lingual—for, as an Amsterdam fruit- within standards and 'visual literacy' layered complexity of conceptual and
vendor told me, 'nobody speaks Dutch so we established by the National Art Heroes of the perceptual 'reality' and 'illusion' in these simply
speak a bit of everything'; as such, 'Dutch' past leavened by recent memories of Manzoni visually beautiful works, as well as their
implies access to information on an and Klein in exhibitions of 'Group Zero' and cultural puns.
international scale right-there-at-home. If some of the most vivid visual sophistication
being 'Dutch' is a political state of national on television anywhere. It also means that while 8(Tradition)
sovereignty, it is even more marvellously having the cultural respect and amused tolerance Dibbets's own tradition is not all Dutch at all.
paradoxical: an oil-rich Calvinist monarchy of their interested country-men, 'local' Dutch The most seminal year in his artistic career was
figure-heading one of the most pervasively artists of international quality-stature like 1967, and that took place in England and
socialistic systems in the world, where Carel Visser, Ad Dekkers, and Peter Struycken Germany as much as in Holland. At that time,