Page 41 - Studio International - June 1972

after a respectable local success as a young
painter and disillusioned about the assumption
that making paintings was making art, he took
a British Council grant (as a foreign painter) to
study in England. He spent the first six months
of 1967 in London nominally enrolled as a
post-graduate 'student' at St Martin's School
of Art-where he mostly used the excellent
library's current periodicals, improved his
English, lost the usual provincial's awe of great
cities, and reinforced his aversion to the
multiplication of painted solid objects
masquerading as art in the Caro-style sculpture
which had become truly 'academic' there.
In his developing interests in working directly
with natural `non-art' reality, Dibbets was
Paintings, 1966, present whereabouts unknown
attracted to contemporaries who were also
stylistic outsiders within the St Martin's
framework: George (& Gilbert), John Johnson, which otherwise included Flanagan, Long, earliest Perspective Corrections perceivable as
Richard Long, and Barry Flanagan. (He still Johnson, and German artists flirting with photographic works of the artist's physical
remembers meeting Flanagan after seeing his Fluxus object-impermanence and performance applications on to a physically-spatial Nature,
1966 Rowan Gallery exhibition of a simple pile directness. One of the German artists, exhibiting seems to have been the most fruitful for
of sand simply hand-punched, and in 1967 as Konrad Lueg, became Dibbets's good friend Dibbets's long-term development; but he was
seeing some photographs by Richard Long and dealer: Konrad Fischer. Fischer's also affected by the other artists I have named,
which interested him very much.) It was during programme of exhibitions as direct installations especially during 1967-68.
and after this time that Dibbets began to work by artists enabled Dibbets to meet Americans Some intelligent eclecticism is natural
in terms of direct use of 'natural' materials, whose work and mentality he'd previously for a twenty-six year old artist changing
intrusions in nature, and photographic respected through art-magazines, especially stylistic horses in mid stream. But Dibbets was
representations of the artist's viewpoint. Sol LeWitt. But Dibbets was also part of Piero not an artistic tabula rasa when he did this. His
And his contribution to the September 1967 Gilardi's international informational circuit earlier paintings, with their shaped-canvas
one-day exhibition in Frankfurt called 'Dies about art which was non-materialist, ex-gallery, false perspectives (particularly 'academic' ones
alles Herzchen wird einmal Dir gehoren' and supposedly non-commercial : a are reproduced here) provided a personal
organized by his friend Paul Maenz consisted mammoth job of personal and informational art-history for his continued interest in
of a water-piece and an ellipse in a sawdust- pressure by Gilardi which emerged in the perspective as one approach to visual plays on
covered courtyard which appeared as a circle `Square Pegs in Round Holes' and 'When illusion and reality within individually conceived
from the exhibition entrance and whose natural Attitudes Become Form' exhibitions of 1969. works. His paintings' modular repetitions and
obliteration was sequentially photographically By now living in Amsterdam, Dibbets was close `presence' as physical entities with flat clean
documented:works influenced by both friends with Marius Boezem and Ger Van Elk surfaces are continued in Dibbets's concentration
Flanagan and Long. It is not irrelevant that who were exploring similar terrain. The on the directly phenomenological experience of
Dibbets was the only Dutchman in that show, influence of Richard Long, particularly in the his work and its flatly distinguished units.
This was already apparent in 1969 in the
audio-visual works where direct experience of
perceptual time was technologically rendered in
tape-recordings of timed-speed 'trips' on the
Afsluitaijk matched with printed maps and
photographic stills, in the consecutively
photographed shadows during a day, and in
films. And in Dibbets's current work, the
phenomenology is primarily visual : films of
essentially simple subject-matter simply
rendered through simple manipulations of the
technological intermediary into visual-spatial-
timed richness, and sequences of 'stills' printed
directly from those films for even more quiet
distinctions of visual experiences interrelated by
invisible concepts. As such, Dibbets reads
increasingly as an artist whose relationship with
the non-`art'-world is consummately visual :
beyond painting but still pictorial. And his
direction of activity now seems more clearly
aligned with the core of his personal art-
history than with wide-ranging experience
of other artists working in similar media :
more Ruisdael and Van de Velde than Long;
more Mondrian and Malevich than LeWitt;
but above all, more Dibbets than anyone
TV as a Fireplace 1968 as received over Westdeutsches Fernsehen in 24-minute transmissions without
introduction or commentary 24-31 December 1969 forms a background for his current work. q
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