lecture PhDArts

Last Saturday the 6th of February I had the opportunity to give a lecture at the symposium "the artist as researcher". It was a two-day international conference on artistic research and PhD in visual art and design at the Royal Academy of the Arts (KABK) in The Hague. It was a well visited conference and a lot of discussion was going on the subject how to do a PhD in visual art and what the institution could necessarily ask, a written thesis and an artwork?
Herewith I would like to let see and read my lecture on "surface research". A point of view on the subject is to read in the text, enjoy it...



I am Henri Jacobs, Dutch artist living and working in Brussels, and I was invited to start the first Rietveld Research Residency.
In september 2009 the Gerrit Rietveld Academie initiated a Research Residency. The Rietveld Research Residency (RRR) is a cooperation of the Rietveld Academie and Fonds BKVB to create a research site for mid career artists. They are enabled for a period of 1 to 3 years to do a clearly defined artistic research project, within the framework of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. The artist will work in the Pavilion of the Academy and will report twice a year on the research project. There are also an agreed number of educational projects foreseen.
This Rietveld Research Residency doesn’t foresee in a route during years to study and doing research for a PhD in Art. It is a residency for concentration on a specific aspect of the existing work by the invited artist. It is a possibility to create time to go deeper into theoretical and material details of the oeuvre. In the lee of the art market...




My research project is titled “Surface Research” and the studio is the Rietveld Pavilion. It’s a fish bowl, everybody can watch and observe the Research Resident and that’s why he is more or less an “example artist”. The visibility in the transparent cube shows the process, shows the kitchen and the cooking of the research artist. Not always tasty or nice, but cooking is what happens, under all circumstances. Perhaps it can help seeking and helpless students by showing them it is necessary to sit down and to start. Even “sans idées”, without any concept, theme or subject it can be interesting to take a sheet of paper and a pencil and simply start drawing. That’s already enough.



In this lecture I would like to tell something about my Surface Research project.
The awareness of the specific properties of surfaces made of paper or canvas are already there in an early stage of my work. A surface is two dimensional and has two sides. Surfaces in art mostly have a front side that is visible and a back that is hidden. The front side is sublimated by cosmetics of oil colour which suggests a frozen or petrified world, very different from our dynamic and ever changing world. This idea of the surface is very well understood and visualised by Diego Velasquez in this painting “Las Meninas”. The painting is showing different stories, and the painted gesture by the hand of Velasquez has an almost indifferent kind of arrogance. It is so very well kept in hand and he is exactly knowing how to succeed in brushing the paintmud on the canvas.
BUT, painting the other side, the BACK of the painting, of the mask, of the flat surface, the décor or façade ON the front side, that is done by a genius.



“Las Meninas” is the reason why I started to perforate the linen surface. I would like to show a work that deals with the two sides of a flat surface. In “l’or et l’argent”, shown in De Pont Museum Tilburg in 1996, it is possible to physically enter the painting by opening one of the two doors in the canvas.
When you pass the surface, when you go through the façade or décor, like Alice did by going through the mirror, and close the door in the painting, the spectator would see this image.



The image of a square, of a field of flax. The daylight enters through the two doors and because the canvas stands 20 centimetres from the wall the openings in the surface of plaited strokes of canvas are lit from behind. The doors are painted in silver oil colour and the field is of natural canvas with its specific beautiful colour of flax.



Cultivation and fabrication of flax to linen brings us to agriculture, to farming and gardening, seeding, pruning, weeding, digging, planting, constantly conducting and organising, to cleaning and maintaining the surface of the earth. In a way all these concepts play a role in drawing. To be more specific : in drawing and constructing a palimpsest.
This nice small painting of Abel Grimmer shows how a garden should be maintained.

“The present order is the disorder of the future”
is a citation from Ian Hamilton Finlay, who was also a gardener. He had a garden named Little Sparta which was dedicated to the concept WAR.



A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book that has been scraped off and used again. The word “palimpsest” comes through Latin from Greek, palin means “again” and psao means “I scrape”. Palimpsest means therefore scraped clean and used again.

Because parchment, prepared from animal hides, is far more durable than paper or papyrus, most palimpsests known to modern scholars are parchment, which rose in popularity in western Europe after the sixth century. The writing was washed from parchment or vellum using milk and oat bran. With the passing of time, the faint remains of the former writing would reappear enough so that scholars can discern the “underwriting” (called the scriptio inferior) and decipher it.
This is the Archimedes Palimpsest, bought by an anonymous private collector in 1998, at Christie’s in New York. This collector deposited the manuscript at
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in order to conserve it, image it, and study it. The book is special because it contains seven texts by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Those texts and diagrams of Archimedes were discovered under layers of text and painted miniatures in a prayer book.



The landscape, the surface of our earth and world is also a palimpsest.
This wall, with a door and window perforation, build in museum Jan Cunen in Oss is decorated with a satellite photo of Oss and surroundings. The curling of the river Maas is a clear black line and an amazing graphic sign. Even from a distance it’s possible to reconstruct the old bedding of the river. In earlier days the river curled much more. But end 19th century shorter tracks were digged so the river could stream much faster to the Northsea and didn’t flood the low lands nearby.



After two months I painted a short text of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the satellite photo. It is a clear text about our longing for knowledge by making theories but finally it is impossible to understand the world in its essence.

“Imagine the world as a white surface with black dots here and there... One can put a net with square meshes over the surface. The net makes it possible to describe the dots. It’s a grid within the dots are related to one another. Only in the net the relations exist, not in the white surface. You can put different nets over the surface, with a coarse-mesh, a fine-mesh, triangular-mesh or circular mesh-work. Those nets are our theories of the world. They arrange the world so we can describe it. But they reveal nothing.”



Another two months later I painted a quotation of Lieven de Cauter on Wittgenstein’s text. This text is an excerpt from his essay “the permanent disaster”, and it reads like a poem.

“The ongoing explosion of world population, technological acceleration, global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, the melting ice cap, rising sea levels, the depletion of non-renewable resources, deforestation, the accelerated decline of biodiversity, the humanitarian disaster scenarios such as drinking water shortages in many places, the growing
inequality, the polarization of society under the pressures of neoliberal globalization, the growth of the fourth world, the continuing proliferation of AIDS, the uncontrollable growth of mega cities in the poorest regions of the world, the breakthrough of the criminal economy and organized crime, the powerlessness of the state, the disintegration of the welfare state, migration, xenophobia and fundamentalism, terrorism, protracted wars - all these themes can be difficult understood otherwise than as a catastrophic scenario”.



Another example of a palimpsest in a landscape is illustrated by these photos of Fort Douaumont near Verdun in France.
The two photos on top show the Fortification when it was first finished in January 1916.
The photo on the bottom left is taken in October 1916 after the first battle of Verdun. And on the bottom right in the summer of 1917, after the second battle of Verdun. There are still some very slight traces visible of the original pentagon.
It is maybe a different way of looking at the topic of the palimpsest. But I would like to compare the making of palimpsests with the human writing in the ever changing landscapes. Specifically with landscapes that changed due to enormous violence. Passchendale and Ypres in Belgium, Verdun and Douaumont in the north - east of France during the First World War. Villages, houses, farms, churches, buildings, roads, railways were totally destroyed, as in entropy, done in a short time and with tons of explosives, the surface of the earth was rewritten. What remained were traces, holes and craters of what once were three dimensional buildings.



The previous item was about First World War palimpsesting.
Next slides are about the Second World War, in fact the short time after the Second World War when Germany was a NO GO area, where American and British secret services where hunting after the technological secrets of the German rockets V1 to V4 and the super secret V0000.
It is a long excerpt of text from the book Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. He describes the surface of a desk of secret agent Tyrone Slothrop.



But first I have to tell you what you see :
In late summer of 2002 the old farm Speelhoven near Aarschot in the region of Leuven, Belgium, held it’s annual September exhibition, for which I made 9 drawings, 5 drawings with patterns and 4 palimpsest drawings. Next to a small path the 9 drawings were laid on the ground and covered with a plate of glass. For six weeks the drawings defied sun and rain, day and night, dew, insects and small animals. And men...



This slide shows the text, designed with ink on 300 grams of watercolourpaper after 6 weeks lying on the soil. Slowly the paper was getting absorbed by the soil.
When I read this text of Thomas Pynchon for the first time, about things lying on top of and through one another, I was surprised by the beauty of the list of different sort of things. It is a miniature märklin - landscape after bombing. It’s quite a long text but a citation of a few sentences will give an idea of the beauty of the text describing the demolished and destroyed soil of a landscape :

“Tantivy’s desk is neat, Slothrop’s is a godaweful mess. It hasn’t been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Than comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop’s mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk... Above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen of songs including “Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland” ...



In September 2003 I teached drawing here in this academy for several months.
To be honest, it is a difficult job to get the students inspired and to get them acting instead of sitting down in despair. One of the tasks I tried to sell was : try to be a camera and sketch it down on paper. At least once a day try to capture something that amazed you, that you’ve seen or thought and try to draw it. In a quick drawing, and not to big.
In December 2003 I decided to do this myself, after being locked up for quite some time in complex and time-consuming big watercolours, I really needed to liberate myself. So I started to draw Journal Drawings, drawings on a sheet of paper with dimensions 24 by 32 centimetres, and to draw in at most one day something seen, thought or heard. And it could be any- and everything, without tracking an archive of images I wanted to explore myself as a bank or database of images.
In this Journal drawing number 208, December 19th, 2005, I started to draw the first layer of text by asking myself, after having made 207 Journal drawings already, why I wanted to draw Journal drawings as often as possible.
Putting the question on paper delivers quite a lot of cursing and evokes despair. A conclusion at the end is more or less that it is the TUNE that counts the most. The TUNE and the SOUND in which Journal drawings are drawn...



On top of that first “WHY DRAWING JOURNAL DRAWINGS” text, I constructed a text in a grid of wave-lines. This drawing is titled : “palimpsest number two”. But when two texts are written on each other it doesn’t mean it is a real palimpsest. It is a multi layered text drawing but without any scratching or damaging of the first text. The same with the satellite photo of Oss and the two painted quotations of Wittgenstein and De Cauter. It wasn’t a palimpsest at all, it was a multi layered painting of texts on a blown up satellite photo.
One aspect of a palimpsest is clearly there, after the second layer of text it is quite difficult to read the one or the other text. If you want to read the texts instead of looking at the drawing you have to decipher it.



This lecture is about the Surface.
Research of, in, on and about the Surface. By making palimpsests as a leading principle.
As said before : in the dark middle ages parchment or papyrus was that rare that writers had to reuse the surfaces that had already been written upon. So the original text was carefully scratched away and a new text was written on it while turning the page 90°. The traces left behind makes it possible to reconstruct those earlier texts.
So making or constructing a palimpsest, which has to be done on a flat two dimensional surface, means that destruction is an important part of the research project.
To recapitulate :
to draw and to erase the drawing.
to draw is to create, is construction.
to erase is demolition, is destruction.
To erase is to scratch away, wipe out, is different ways of making the constructed drawing less visible and more invisible.
Creation and demolition on a two dimensional surface.
Often I am lost in contrasts and even more often in opposites...



This is the first Surface Research drawing made last September as a Rietveld Research Resident. It is a drawing on an A4 format sheet of Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper and it’s drawn with black ink. Using a ruler, a Rotring technical drawing pen and compasses as tools.
It is a constructed drawing, drawn with straight efficient lines. Rather drawn by a constructor or architect than an artist.



On a new sheet of A4 Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper the Surface Research title is drawn and than scraped out. It isn’t a palimpsest yet, because it is just a single layer. But a first erasing, scratching and vanishing took place.
To scratch, to erase, to delete, to wipe out, to undo, to damage, to destroy.
Construction and destruction.
Creation and demolition aren’t real opposites, in fact the one implies the other. The one exists because of its opposite.



This drawing of September 30th, 2009 is Palimpsest number one. Here are drawn two layers of words. The first layer is the title Surface Research and is scratched out. A new text is written on it, a quote of Marquis de Sade.
“In actions of mankind we recognize rather than moral or criminal acts the irresistible natural laws of creation and destruction.”



The quote of marquis De Sade is scratched away. Two layers of text and construction grids are scratched away but are still visible by the traces left behind.

What you need to start drawing :
a table & chair
a sheet of paper
pen or pencil
ruler, to be sure of yourself
a pair of compasses, to be unsure of yourself
a notebook, to make notes, or to write words, texts, or to draw droedels
some heating in the winter and some food and water in the summer
longing for simplicity to find the way to simplicity.



Architects consider palimpsests as a ghost, an image of what once was. Whenever spaces are shuffled, rebuilt, or remodelled, shadows remain. Tarred roof-lines remain on the sides of a building long after the neighbouring structure has been demolished; removed stairs leave a mark where the painted wall surface stopped. Dust lines remain from a relocated appliance. Palimpsests can inform us of the realities of the built past. It is like in archaeology, the educated reader can decipher the remains or traces and make a reconstruction.



By scratching the texts from the surface the sheet of paper becomes a little field, a small vegetable garden where the soil has been dug. Anyway it isn’t a battlefield, it’s too neatly arranged. These palimpsests are like small vegetable gardens in between the seasons with some force fields of text citations.

Do you need an idea to start drawing or painting? Nice question without satisfactory answer. Therefore... Perhaps the answer can be: “no, you don’t need an idea to start drawing or painting”. For sure you don’t need a big or huge idea, already a small, tiny, little and simple idea can be enough. For instance about the materials so close to the draughtsman, like the sheet of white paper. The difficult part is not to get an idea but to continue with a simple idea into the depths of the unknown, in opposite of getting bored already after ten minutes. To continue with a simple idea means you have to explore it by making variations and fail as much as possible.



After showing the slide of the scratched drawing in perspective, which looks like a landscape in bird-eye view, I would like to compare and visualise the palimpsest with the development of a city through time. To show the impact of men and time.
This is a map of Brussels in 1740. Almost two-hundred and seventy years ago Brussels was well surrounded by defensive walls and moats.



Through time mankind used and reused his surroundings by constant change and transformation.
Jumping between the two maps it is possible to discover more leftovers and residues of time, but it also shows the enormous transformation of the city over time. The two maps are showing that under the city there is still a clear trace of the original footprint. By building and demolishing roads, railways, houses, churches, offices and so on, in fact we are drawing and scratching on the surface of our grounds.
In a constant and everlasting transformation, we have to, we can’t do anything else.
Without change there is no life.
Life is change and transformation, death is standstill.



A palimpsest with three layers of text. The upper layer is a citation from Emile Cioran.

“Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later he will regret not having left it intact”

Cioran’s quote is written on the erased quote, the scriptio inferior, of De Sade:

“In actions of mankind we recognize rather than moral or criminal acts the irresistible natural laws of creation and destruction”.

Written on the scratched title of this research project “Surface Research”.



After showing the maps of Brussels the quote of Emile Cioran is quite special.
Here his short text is already scratched out, but nevertheless it sounds like a severe warning :

“Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later he will regret not having left it intact”

I don’t know how the text continuous, but we will regret not having left intact that “universe created for indifference and stagnation”. Is that why the environmental problems of our time listed in the poem by Lieven de Cauter quoted before have an almost apocalyptic dimension?
Each time needs its own apocalyptic vision?



Surface means it’s flat, it’s 2 dimensional. It hasn’t any depth. A sheet of paper has no depth. An illusion of depth on a sheet of paper has no real depth, no surface to dig in. Same with a canvas, a stretched canvas has no depth, it is a two dimensional surface and has two sides. It is a façade, like walls in buildings.
A film projection on a screen is 2 dimensional. A light-source projects the depth, the illusion, the narrative, which opens possible wide horizons but stays flat.
Do we want to get beyond the surface? Beyond the boundary of the 2 dimensional? Do we want to get beyond the veil?
Like in Plato’s cave we want to escape from the boring and already too long known reality with its same old wisdoms. And like Alice we want to enter a world which is strange, unknown and spooky, almost a nightmare, and that is even better than boring daily life.

But Fine Arts are the extra, the surplus, the useless and the unnecessary. They don’t force, impose, ask and will not necessarily convince you for a message. At least, good art has no message. That is why it is interesting. Because it is open, empty and free. As a viewer you can bring it to life with your own intellectual power.



A new layer of text, a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche is drawn on the scratched texts of Emile Cioran and Marquis De Sade. Would they agree on being in good company? The force field in the A4 sheet of Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper through the 3 different texts is becoming more interesting. Nietzsche’s text is a quotation from his book Ecce Homo :

(...) “to be far beyond terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of becoming itself - that lust which also involves the lust of destruction.”

It is written on the scratched text of Cioran :

“Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later he will regret not having left it intact”.

Written on the scratched-out quote of De Sade :

“In actions of mankind we recognize rather than moral or criminal acts the irresistible natural laws of creation and destruction”.

Written on the erased title of this research project “Surface Research”.

I have a great desire to be free, so that means that I am captured and imprisoned.
I have a great desire to comprehend, so that means I do not understand the least of it.
I have a great desire for simplicity and clarity, so that means that I am suffering from complexity and chaos.



To Draw is to leave traces on the surface of the paper. No necessity of having an idea. To Draw and To Erase. To erase the yet drawn also leaves traces. To Draw and To Erase. To succeed and to fail. Failure is more important, or better: is more interesting, when you fail there is more to do. You can go on. You don’t know yet. You’re trying to figure out, searching, thinking, wondering. Drawing and failing is like thinking. While drawing concentration works best.

This slide with a detail of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Palimpsest seen just before, shows the damaged flat surface of the paper, which in certain light looks like porcelain.

Often making or creating things, objects, goods, articles of art or design is to add material. Creating is adding stuff on and to itself, on surfaces or mixing it into sculptures, so it’s possible to assemble it and to build or construct pieces to a whole. The opposite, which is destruction and finally “death”, is so very interesting eventhough we don’t like it, we ignore it, we don’t want to deal with it,we try to forget it.



De Cauter depicts a catastrophic scenario, Wittgenstein lets us know that we can’t understand the whole. Sade is telling that natural laws reign over cultural laws. Cioran is warning for the pay - back time soon. Nietzsche talks of our animal behaviour of lust to create and lust to destruct.
Yes, the opposite of creation is an important part of creating itself.
So that is why in the Surface Research project the scratching is the main subject of research. Which is a destructive and violent act. Well steered and kept in hand, but the surface is damaged. It is necessary to become clear about the fascination for those concepts as “destruction”, “damaging”, “tearing down”, “catastrophe”, “violence” & “death”.
These irresistible natural laws of destruction and creation. To create something new is to kill all earlier darlings which delivered satisfactory results. It is more than forgetting or getting over those earlier results, they really have to be totally torn down.
Transformation could be the word for this process.

To create is an urge, a bit different from defecation because it is more intelectual instead of animal, but with almost the same urge.
To create is a kind of instinct, a necessity that happens in the whole body and not only in the brain.
Perhaps creation happens after years of Pavlov Conditioning, or it happens because I am addicted to it, but it is happening in a foggy urge. In a certain mood where unknown and unforeseen things can happen. Curiosity for the unknown is an important motivation.



To create from ideas is quite evident, but an idea is in fact a prison, a superficial prison. To have an idea is already too articulated, it’s working with something which already is known.
If you want to go deeper, lower, more profoundly into the unknown it’s better to be empty, to be blank, to be without any idea.
Inventions happen in unknown areas or soil. So get rid of ideas, look into the gaping maw of emptiness, where some despair reigns. Then it’s going to become interesting, desperation with concentration are the state of being in which an idea-less invention can happen.
After having drawn several palimpsests, which is done according to a written plan, it is necessary to reach the border of the principal idea. It’s necessary that irrationality can take over the rational idea, to make it absurd for instance, or to make the idea irrelevant. So playing with it can begin, in an ironical or perhaps cynical way. You can laugh with it, destroy the original plan, quit the principal concept. And perhaps it’s possible to colonise unknown grounds.

This slide and the one before are showing two drawings in a small series with the word “catastrophe” in the title. The titles are telling you that these are studies after details of small or big catastrophes. For instance this drawing’s title is “Etudes de détails de catastrophes”. It is Journaldrawing number 287 from 10 November 2006, drawn with watercolour and ink on heavy cotton paper.



It is quite important that several quotes are about catastrophic or apocalyptic subjects.
The final reason we live is because we die... I am sorry for the simplistic evidence.
Palimpsest drawing number 8 is a plan I wanted to execute. The decision was to keep the parts of the letters which consists of parts of a circle. The result in fact doesn’t matter, if the drawing is beautiful or ugly, good or bad or boring instead of interesting doesn’t mean that much. The illusion of space by the rewritten black lines with white ink, the remains of words, sentences, texts with ominous content that is now forming it’s own composition by accident...
This drawing shows the residues after erasing the texts of Sade, Cioran and Nietzsche.



Starting with a plan, with a decision such as wanting to draw a grid. Longing to draw a grid which is already the thousandth grid drawn by me. Choosing a text which has to fit in the grid, and afterwards wanting to erase the texts by scratching it. It is part of an overall plan, of an intention, of decisions made beforehand. It are premises and by working with those premises I can leave them, I can free myself from the boundaries created by myself because I don’t have any idea nor theme to work with.
Empty as a bottle can be. Creating conditions that can deliver unforeseen results.

Here you see a detail from the drawing where the Nietzsche citation has been white-out with white ink. At the end this palimpsest is no more than the residues of circle parts from the different layers with texts.



Palimpsest number 9 :

“Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny - very tiny, content”.

An old evergreen quote by Willem de Kooning. This drawing isn’t a palimpsest but a drawing with five layers of text. De Koonings text contribution to the drawing, which covers the other 3 texts about the exhausting existence of mankind, perhaps neutralises the heavy weight of them.
The captured texts may seem quite negative or depressive, violent and aggressive, cruel or without any hope. But I don’t agree with that, the texts of Sade, Cioran and Nietzsche are trying to look beyond individuality and ego. The texts are written by them after long observation of mankind and the own ego as a human being. So I think the texts are quite realistic about the human behaviour. The three philosophers are trying to deal with destruction, demolition, transformation, aggression, violence, dying and death.

Almost all art is trying to freeze fluid moments into static or repetitive media, which is in a way freezing or petrifying the dynamics of life and time, so all art is dealing with death.



As I am nearing the end of this lecture I would like to pose a question :
“what makes somebody start drawing?”.
Is it because there is a slide, a dia-positive of an image, in the head? And the drawer projects it with an inner light through the lenses of the eyes on paper? So the hand can follow the projected lines, the contours of the enclosed areas, that remain the necessary white reservoirs of clean paper? Is drawing giving birth to an idea, is it executing a plan?



The first drawing ever could it have been a single line drawn with charcoal? Or was it the print of a hand covered with mud? Or the negative of that hand by using a spray of mud over the hand on a stone surface.

So, was it a single line of charcoal, the print of a hand, the left over of a hand?

Or could the first drawing be made by five fingertips dipped in mud to draw five short lines...
I suppose there wasn’t any idea or plan. The acting person didn’t foresee what she was doing, perhaps she was surprised or even enchanted.
As in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001 a space odyssey” monkeys where surprised while playing to discover that a bone could be a weapon to hit with and from then civilisation was born.



The Surface Research project, which is till sofar working systematically on palimpsest drawings, started as a plan to execute. A plan, an idea, a concept or a theme are starting points on the path of creating a work of art.
Artistic Research can help with learning and knowing more about that first plan or idea. Can help to know better what it is about or what already has been done. Because you have to start working on that first idea, plan, theme or concept to which the knowledge built up by Artistic Research is added, it is a risk that the first tiny glimpse of a work dries up.
In fact the artist locks him- or herself up in too much knowledge.

Some stupidity and naivety is necessary.

Ideas, plans, concepts, themes and research are locking up, but starting to work with them has to make it possible to go beyond them. Because the artist has to reach into unknown soil of pure intuition, the artist has to colonise areas and grounds not yet visited. The artist must want to show the unseen and unknown.
That is why creation is such an animal like urge, and drawing is such direct, impulsive and quick medium. The most excellent medium because it is so simple.
Artistic Research is all right for concentration and contemplation on the work already there. In that way it is more a kind of archaeology, of looking back and trying to make a reconstruction.
But pure creation is different and doesn’t necessarily need Artistic Research.

When is there the need to create, the need to draw, intuition rings a bell and the best thing to do is to pick up a pencil and put the point of it on paper. Artistic Research is like the academic way of drawing after nature where the artist is totally locked up, imprisoned in techniques and educated laws of how to look and how to draw. Captured in KNOWLEDGE.
But creation is like the intuitive way of how William Blake drew. The real artist has to go beyond all existing borders put up by plans, ideas, concepts, themes, research and knowledge.



She or he has to try to pass them by and leave them behind. To be able to colonise future soil, not seen and not known before. To arrive beyond the veil of the ideas. Creation is happening in the colony known as “l’au delà”. Artistic Research doesn’t play a role over there.

Every construction tends to chaos.
Every order tends to disorder.
Without maintenance entropy is doing it’s work. All our constructions of necessities and redundancies are trying to find their most comfortable position which is lying on the ground as horizontal as possible. All the materials used don’t want to try to continue standing right up, they are looking forward to lie down and to be as horizontal as possible. They want to find the way to the least resistance, by lying as flat as can be. Entropy is the lust of losing content.

Enfin we all will be freed from our suffering, even the hedonists.



Artist at work.
Artist at research work.
Artist at work research.
Artist work at research.
Artist research at work.
Research artist at work.
Research work at artist.
Research at work artist.
Research at artist work.
Work research at artist.
Work artist at research.
Work at research artist.
Work at artist research.
At research artist work.
At artist research work.
At work research artist.
At work, artist !



Thank you for your attention.