Phillip van den Bossche talks to Ger van Elk about old and new work, the flatscreens, and the way Van Elk uses his own oeuvre and art history as material.

Edited by Andrea Wiarda

PvdB: Ger, when did you make the first flatscreens? Where and how did you become interested in these so-called new media?

GvE: Actually, I have no desire to attribute any intrinsic value to the technique of the flat screen in itself, but what I had been looking for for years was a way to make my old films more accessible. Very few people knew of these works-they were stored somewhere in collectors' archives-and even younger artists who purportedly worked in my tradition had never seen these works. I want to define these old works more precisely, to develop those ideas further.
The new digital technique turned out to be a good method of re-presenting those art works as a moving canvas. Moreover, I liked the idea of placing these new old works in a well-established tradition. By showing them on flat screens, but framing them in a passe-partout I can also display them in a very traditional manner. This breathes new life into the old idiom of the drawing. I started by making a series of flatscreens in 2000. However, it was never my intention to copy those old works, I prefer to look to the future, but it gives me a feeling of satisfaction to use those things. Especially important to me is the poetry of the thought process. In these works I am more concerned with the esthetic quality, the poetry of the work, the intensity, rather than the sketchy visualization of an idea.

PvdB: Some of those flatscreens are in fact reinterpretations, or reworked versions of old films, and then I am thinking above all of the work The Flattening of the Brooke's Surface (1972/1999). Can you tell me anything more about the way you now see that old material? You make use of playfulness and frivolity in revising and reinterpreting earlier work and sometimes you pick out one aspect in particular.

GvE: Originally there was a pragmatic reason for making the flatscreens. But at the same time I found it exciting to paint and to draw, to use computer software to rework an existing picture or a film-despite the fact that I have often spoken out against moving pictures-to reframe my oeuvre as a construct, as an attitude. On the computer you can manipulate movement in such a way that it comes to serve the final intimacy, the silence and the contemplation of the work.
The movement that I use is in fact movement made by hand. Those old works still have a real story and development; the flatscreens also have a story but they move very slowly and at precisely the right moment. If you look, for example, at a Holbein, a Memling, or a Jan van Eyck there is a beautiful glowing silence that now I can now also achieve with movement. I'm now making a voyage along my oeuvre with my camera and by processing it on the computer. This also creates a framework for the old works, so that I want to consider each of them carefully, although of course there are objects that don't lend themselves to this effort. The result is an oeuvre in stereo, a renewed interpretation of your own conceptual ideas-at the end you do run into difficulties.

PvdB: Is it important to know that in the first series of flatscreens you refer to Georges Seurat, to The Shore at Bas-Butin, Honfleur of 1886? Actually, for you it's not about Post-Impressionism and certainly not about replacing dots of paint with pixels, although perhaps you are playing with that idea?

GvE: I was not consciously making those references. For example, I used sparrows for one of the first: The Birds Flying the Drawing. Sparrows can fly in those special formations (perfect figure eights, beautiful clouds), which take very calculated shapes. Those birds are actually flying dots, comparable to the manner in which pixels form pictures. I bought some archival films from a television station and used them and reworked them on my computer-as if I had bought a can of paint and went to work with it: "just give me x number of minutes of those flying birds." It wasn't the formations that were important to me, they were too much of an esthetic interpretation, I wanted a sort of broad mass of birds, of various sizes and filling the picture space. I thought of those films as material, as a choice I made from many materials. I saw the swarm of flying birds as an abstraction and I used them as paint in my atelier annex film studio. The birds are thus stationary on that drawing of Signac's: the birds flying the drawing, and thus not the artist painting a painting…. To fly a drawing is almost a feat of self-activation.
I placed the birds precisely on the dots and as they began to fly, they took the drawing with them into the air. At a certain point the drawing is gone and when the birds come back into the drawing, they also bring life back into the drawing. This all happens in about twenty seconds, a very short moment that is set to loop continually, so that its structure becomes abstract. The same is true of Snow over Seurat (2002) for which I used The Shore at Bas-Butin, Honfleur (1886) and in which I, in fact, merely placed snow flurries over the painting. I enlarged the birds and made their forms more abstract, rounder, removed their wings and painted them white; then they became snowflakes. At a certain point the entire image becomes abstract, then the snowing continues and gradually the landscape again comes into view. Conceptually this emerges from a combination of the notions of how an image is constructed and the computer technique to which it is actually quite analogous.
These are new works, not revisions, but I was able to make them because of my experience with the flatscreens of a few years earlier, which are based on works from my own oeuvre. These works are going to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris for an exhibition on Neo-Impressionism. The Birds Flying a Drawing, based on a black-and-white drawing by Signac, a sort of Pointillistic etching; then Birds over Seurat; Snow over Seurat and a portrait with birds. The last work is based on a portrait of Seurat's mother and she is portrayed as if it were a drawing by Vermeer, with splendid intensity. The first prototype of these female portraits comes from Raphael; Vermeer used the same portrait head in many of his paintings. They were a kind of archetype and Seurat later depicted his mother in a black-and-white drawing, drawn with great concentration and an ethereal quality. Then I opened that same can of bird films and used that as material. The birds fly in the direction of view-which is extremely concentrated, almost material-of the sitting woman doing her needlepoint. And because I am of course somewhat of a Baroque type of a guy (bellyacher), some birds also come flying in over her shoulder.… So that's the way I interpreted two paintings and two drawings in black-and-white.

PvdB: So for you it's also a game, a play on art and reality.… Is it about a piece of reality in order to manipulate a piece of art or vice versa, a work of art to manipulate a reality?

GvE: I don't see any difference, no difference at all! I think making art is absolutely a way of life, a way of thinking and feeling. And in my view that applies to you just as well as to me, even if we don't give form to it in the same way, but you think about it, you talk about it, you participate in that same process. Making art is a way of life.

PvdB: Now that you are looking again at your own work, the snowflakes also made me think of those drippings, of a flower series (photographic paintings?) of 1982. That says something about the most important recurring themes in your oeuvre: still-lifes, portraits and landscapes. It is all photography, all painting, all new media, but that doesn't matter, it is the three great genres in art that matter, that force a careful look at reality. Although I don't want to be too reductionist.
Those are indeed classical, traditional subjects of art, but to me they are above all attitudes. Flowers are just not done, and I agree with that: pure decoration, it is a non-subject with which you can do little in terms of substance, aside from some specific iconological interpretations. What's striking about it is that it was a phenomenon in the second half of the seventeenth century, painting flowers was almost artisanal, like pottery making. I made a series of fourteen paintings, whereby the repetition accentuated the decorative element. In the seventeenth century artists were constantly manipulating those flowers and I depicted them traditionally but in brown and grey and square, geometrically and cubistically etc. I packaged them in the painting in such a way that you only discover them when you look at it for a longer period of time. They were on exhibit at Art& Project and visitors left the gallery in disgust. And, that was my intention; it is a form of communication… I am a troublemaker and knew ahead of time that this would happen. The gallery threshold was very high at that time (1985), a gallery was a holy area, you didn't just enter it lightly; it had somewhat of an aristocratic exclusivity. I wanted to say something about the artisanal side, the non-artistic side of famous flower painters. Although Vermeer is very high in the hierarchy of art history, he too painted views; he also had a very banal side despite the beauty of his work. I've always had rather a critical attitude toward modern art and the snobby circle surrounding it.

PvdB: Nevertheless, with the flatscreens we return once more to the (im)possibility of painting-painting is never far away. It's always a rather ambiguous goodbye. In the middle 1970's you made the series of Adieu works that are also about painting and you hark back to them in the flatscreens… Nothing is absolute in painting; yesterday's truth is today's lie…

GvE: I'm certainly not an intellectual artist, neither am I very analytical. Although I am interested in professional discourse, art to me is basically a matter of feeling. Making art is conversing with society, talking with yourself and with your friends. If I make something and you like it, that gives me satisfaction. What's important to me is saying something to someone who understands it. The element of speculation is one of the finest aspects; it is the vigor of philosophy, of life, of society, of thought and discussion. I consider a work of art a work of art if it is an autonomous piece of poetry.

PvdB: There is also another constant that continues the line of the Adieu works: photography. Thinking of the flatscreens, how would you characterize the relationship between painting and photography in your oeuvre from the 1960's to the present? Has that relationship changed because of the flatscreens?

GvE: Photography was primarily a tool to bring a bit of realism into the story, into the idea for a work. In a practical sense you could choose to make a drawing or a photograph of the subject matter you needed. The one-dimensionality of a photograph is surpassed by a drawing, because the drawing adds the element of time, both in its creation and in its interpretation. A photograph is a one-sided interpretation. Based on that pragmatic standpoint I regularly made use of photography-in the Missing Persons as well as the Adieux. For a long time it seemed completely right to use that technique as material to impart an idea, but during the last ten years I have had a different view of the works that I made in the past. The O.K. pieces were just photography, I did use paint in them, but that was also photographed. At that time I made very realistic trompe l'oeil-type things… (an old discussion since Malevich's black square). But if I use photography in my work, something I have done since the 1960's, the work itself is never about photography. Photography for me is just a means to an end.

PvdB: Did you talk about photography with other artists? Did you read about photography, were theoretical books important? Susan Sontag's "On Photography" (1977), for example?

GvE: I had endless discussions on photography with Jan Dibbets. But I never read theoretical works. Once again, I like to use that type of abstraction if I am talking about a can of paint or a (film) can of birds. For me it really is simply another technical option, another material. I don't believe in the hierarchy of materials, that's something I reject.

PvdB: I would still like to quote Susan Sontag. In 1977 she wrote: "Photography is reality, photography went much further than we could imagine, by providing a more accurate image of reality: photography makes a second-hand mediated experience normative, compelling, intense in a completely unique manner."*

GvE: Of course, every manner of expression and material is an autonomous reality. What matters is the intensity of an image, experiencing the story and persuasively telling the story. For example, the very convincing way the Flemish Primitives do it, or that magnificent portrait of the pregnant Madonna by Piero della Francesca: what concentration. That is almost more realistic than a photograph, it was made with intense feeling.
If you compare Della Francesca with Rineke Dijkstra, then I still prefer the poetry, the physical experience of the image. The aloofness of photography is in step with our time, but it is not my choice. The documentary aspect of photography always comes into play: the image of reality as it was. Because of the profoundly realistic side of photography, and through the experience of photography as a documentary medium, a photograph is always an event. Even if the photograph is of a landscape, it is always a snapshot in time. But there is a dangerous technical side to modern portrait photography, just as with the flatscreens: the installation. There is seduction in the (ready) competition with moving images, in all sorts of falsifying esthetic elements. And that's fine, but it is also present in photography: technically it is often good, sharply focused, brightly colored; photographs are always overwhelming in that respect.

PvdB: About esthetics, recently I read Maarten Doorman's De Romantische Orde (The Romantic Order) (2004) and in his view we have not been successful in breaking loose from the Romantic dynamic. He talks about paired opposites that determine our thinking and experience. Antitheses play an important role in your work, but for example concepts like objective-subjective are things I never think about when I am looking at your work.

GvE: Thinking in opposites is a critical posture; it is in fact the major theme in my work. As a child I always wanted a jam sandwich and a savory sandwich. In other words: if you feel the one you must also be able to know its opposite. The first half of my childhood I was raised a Lutheran, a real Dutch Protestant, and the second half, from the time I was ten, I was taught the tenets of traditional Catholicism and brought up in that religion. Thus very early on in my life I became conscious of power, in the form of parental power or the power of teachers. I was brought up on the search for antitheses. And I have always made art with this in mind, I am exceedingly aware of choices of materials and subjects. But I am also strict with my own ideas, I insist on knowing what the work is actually about.