The wind blows over the grey lands between the villages of eastern Turkey, spreading both sand and stories throughout. Time and time again, the tale of the boy is told – his name changes with each rendition – blinded by his love for the woman with the black pearly eyes and hair black as soot and his journey to try and find her.

He's doomed to travel the endless barren planes as a blind man. In some versions of the story they’re reunited but their fiery love is set ablaze and their burning passion leads to their demise. The Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman has collected these stories of old and translated them into images, into black and white photos.

Recent times have ushered in new stories. Between around 1960 and 1980, there was no television or radio in the villages of eastern Turkey. Via visitors stopping in for a cup of tea they heard of the American and Russian plans to travel to the moon.

The younger inhabitants of the villages who believed in the technical possibilities of the new era were fascinated by this unheard of notion. To the moon... that sounded like a great adventure. Wanting to head to the moon themselves, they used the mosque tower – that way they’d be sure of God’s assistance – and built it into a rocket. They left on this mosque rocket but never returned from their journey. According to some villagers, this means they truly made it to the moon, but the last word on the matter still hasn’t been spoken.

My favourite light is that of big fat fluorescent tubes on the wall or above the table. In fact, my house is hung full of these tubes alternated by a naked bulb here and there. Fluorescent light is great for reading, and it’s magnificent for seeing what’s on your plate while you're eating. I’m not very fond of ambient lighting. However, I’ve noticed that my guests don’t always seem to agree with me, as they often bring me tea lights and candles as gifts. “That cold light, it’s so harsh and uninviting.”

Funnily enough, Dan Flavin’s work never interested me despite our common preference. From the start of his career in 1963 he chose to work with fluorescent light, making compositions using both straight and round tube lighting until his death in 1996. Maybe his work hit too close to home, mine being filled with those very same tubes. I was more impressed by Bruce Nauman’s neons, writing his own name in glowing letters: BBBBRRRRUUUUCCCCEEEE.

In museums I encountered Flavin’s tubes among the other minimalists: a row of Carl Andre’s bricks or leaden plates laid on the floor, or otherwise Donald Judd’s boxes. I found Flavin’s fluorescents to be rather boring.

During Flavin’s retrospective in Paris in 2006, I experienced what you could call the “epiphany" of the magic of his work. The white rooms in the museum had been transformed into coloured spaces, and in no way did it seem like a cheap Disneyland trick. No, if anything, it reminded me of a holy place, a church, a place of retreat. It was almost as though the rooms had ceased to exist and all that remained was colour and light. As though the walls had fallen away and now served merely as stoppers for the expanding light. I sat silently on a bench, made content and at ease by the display of colour. And like in meditation, my mind began to empty and I did nothing but take in the colour of the dissolved space. Who was this Dan Flavin? I became curious about this man in the same way I would about a suddenly resurfaced long lost relative.

"My name is Dan Flavin. I am thirty-two years old, overweight and underprivileged, a Caucasian in a negro year." This is how he introduces himself in the text in Daylight and Cool White from 1965. He writes of a nasty childhood growing up with two fanatically religious parents. “Before becoming seven, I attempted to run away from home but was apprehended by the fear of the unknown in sunlight just two blocks from our house.” As I read on, I got to know him better.

Although fear was at his heels (revealed in sunlight), these biographical facts are of no importance in understanding his work. Flavin’s work is an endless variation on stuff that can simply be bought in the store. There is no hand of the artist giving form, like in the case of clay or bronze. He chooses, arranges, and makes. As time progresses, his fame grows and he has assistants assemble the works.

His first light works were met with scrutiny, prompting his friends to respond with “you have lost your little magic.” They felt his work was without meaning, a fate that Flavin’s lamps shared with many other Minimal works. How could a collection of stuff, bought from the store, mean anything at all? A row of bricks laid out over the floor seemed too simple to contain any content. Light is full of mysticism and symbolism. For centuries, light suggested holiness, painted in dots and strokes of pigment. In Flavin’s work it simply IS. Light itself is exposed: “blunt in bright repose”, as Flavin himself describes. In presence of light, space is thus transformed into a floating box of colour.

In the catalogue, there is a photo of Flavin’s first pure fluorescent work: a tube curves at a 45 degree angle along the floor and exudes yellow light. A golden aura glitters over the tube and its armature. In a sketch, Flavin titles it The diagonal of personal ecstasy (1963) and dedicates the work to Constantin Brancusi’s infinite column. It’s a strange title. It’s remarkable that Flavin uses the world “ecstasy.” After all, ecstasy or exaltation are not the first words to spring to mind when thinking of minimal art. Minimal art rarely allows itself to be framed within a spiritual context. The objects used by Minimal artists are industrially produced, the core of the work lies in its simplicity, in repetition and objectivity. Simply put: ordinary objects are ordered by placing one after the other, or one next to the other. As a way to discover what the world is like, according to Donald. Judd. For him, it seemed impossible that an expression of feelings could ever be understood by another. After all, could you ever know what my headache feels like? If I look at the colour green, you might just see a completely different colour than I do. Looking at Minimal art tells you nothing of the artist. Instead, its content lies in the viewer’s experience of the work. And that changes with each viewer. Just like each person lives in his own world and experiences everything differently. This could be the message of Minimal art, if it had a meaning at all. “But who could be sure how it would be understood?” Flavin writes.

Minimal art is about repetition, the industrial, the objective. There’s nothing holy or spiritual about stuff from the store. Yet the yellow light is warm and divine.. Like a modern fetish, the ordinary modern tube light casts a golden aura of shimmering, radiating light. And that is precisely what attracted Flavin. His interest was in the effect of the light, at times cold and white, other times an alien green or god-like gold. “Directly, dynamically, dramatically”, is Flavin’s description of the presence of light. An image that, through its brilliance and radiance, betrays its physical presence and flows into the immaterial.

Jan des Bouvries in his monochrome home.

When I return home from Paris, I switch on the television and find myself at a party at the house of the Dutch designer, Jan des Bouvrie. Him and his wife have just remodelled the entire house where everything to the most minute detail is coloured white. The lighting offers the sole ambience. Rooms are lit to green, blue, or white. One of the many examples of how art, falling into the wrong hands, can easily switch to kitsch. “Of course, at night we turn everything red!” his wife Moniek jokes.

A Great Love

Nobody controls the intoxication of love that catches you off-guard like a terrorist, to tie you up and take you to sweet places. In this immersion, the ache of desire and total pleasure alternate. A great love might function as a tipping point, an experience that transforms the world for good. Across me sits Femmy Otten, in a conversation that is prompted by her recent installation (New Myth for New Family, 2011) at the Rijksacademie, in which love vibrated and triumphed, and the viewer was left feeling timid by the gazes surrounding him. Between us on the table lies the book by Pierre Klossowski, which is full of erotica and voyeurism. In Klossowski’s crayon drawings the classical merges with the temporary, and also the violent side of love can be recognized in the work; sometimes even literally, as in the photos in which he ties up his wife Denise.

Otten relates the moment on which she first made, or could make, her first relief after a very intense experience of love. ‘After a stable and pleasant seven-year relationship, I got into an unprecedentedly intense romance. Something has since stuck with me and not gone away, whilst there was also something that had been destroyed. Not before did I know that one could desire so extremely. That surrender, real letting go, is what accompanied this love. To be able to free myself from it I have inscribed his story, as if he were the one writing it, I am him, and I made a sculptural relief about it. This allowed me to give the experience a place and move on. I have continued to use that switch of perspective: every time I make a work I write from the perspective of the person that the work is a reaction to. It gives me a strange kind of freedom.’

Femmy Otten - New Myth for New Family

Somewhere in the book by Klossowski I encounter the line: ‘Then I married Denise very quickly. Denise represented reality while I was metaphysical.’ The reality of the body embraced his mind and took him along. That is what love does.

In the installation, a woman in low relief on the wall wears a medallion with the portrait of her beloved close to her. It is a realistic portrait, he even wears glasses. Above her head floats a halo in various light colours. Her cheek has been slightly grazed. Her body is squashed like in some strange flowered corset and her hands dangle clumsily downwards. Opposite the relief, the two lovers stand on a peak with earthly attributes such as a bag, blue trousers and a beer bottle. Two As.

Femmy Otten - New Myth for New Family

‘I was so obsessed by love that I couldn’t not make a work a about it. But who possesses who, does he possess her amulet or the other way around? With the arrows and the halo, it is almost a sanctification of love. I have made his portrait, but I feel it is about all loves that I had to part from. While I am in the middle of love’s ecstasy, strangely enough it foreshadows the end.’

Klossowski speaks somewhere of a faltering moment, a wavering moment in which the jolting gestures give the impression of being possessed by unknown forces. The strange hands in Otten’s installation seem to contradict the directness of the facial expression, to push something away, a helplessness. Or the facial expression confirms that which the hands reject, renounce or deny.

A former writer, Klossowksi spoke of his drawings as ‘the art of the deaf and dumb who are painters’. Standing in Otten’s installation, this silence breezes around you. It is mainly the silence of her experiences that is present in this installation, which, as a viewer, you can touch with your fingers in the air. A condensed moment that gathers everything that leads up to it and prefigures the gaze of the viewer. The viewer is caught between the gazes, locked in and locked out.

Otten tells how in summer she made a bike trip with her boyfriend across Italy, as a religious pilgrimage past the murals of the Early Renaissance. How her loved one grew in beauty with the exercise, tanner, more muscular, and how she would find herself red and sweating, trying to follow him. Love survived. The frescos of Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca were a honeysweet catalyst.

Otten: ‘The Madonna del Parto of Piero della Francesca, in the church in which his mother is buried, is free of sentiment, pure painting. So moving. When I saw a fresco of Fra Angelico I was reminded of Henry Darger. I recognized that level of detail very much, he works per square millimetre; a peculiar devotion speaks from it, an almost autistic passion. I relate to that, it is what I am always searching for, short moments in which you are sure it is just right, that things will work out in your work. A destined feeling. During the realisation of the work I am very slowly looking for that precise form. Total devotion, that is what it is about too. It has to do with oblivion, that enchantment that leaves you in a sort of hypnotised state. A frenzy in utter silence and concentration.’

The same sometimes occurs to me when I am listening to a concert. Once, during a Schubert piece, my body seemed to grow, my body members felt very long with large warm feet and hands on the far ends. When your body relates to you differently, it is intoxication too. You can also get that when you receive a very pleasant massage from someone, but it is much more intense when it surges up from within yourself, much grander.’

Femmy Otten - New Myth for New Family

At the exhibition at Art Association Diepenheim I saw her adding the final touches to a relief; she put on headphones for isolation and in uttermost concentration she finished the painting with a few strokes of the brush. ‘Working is a great ecstasy. Unfortunately I cannot reach it every time; sometimes I idle all day in my studio in order to work for a mere twenty minutes around eleven. I then need the whole day to do that. That makes it very frustrating sometimes, and it makes art a time-consuming affair. I can speed up the process just by drawing or making something, which will set things going, and yes, it then becomes meditative.’

‘Francis Alÿs finds this rush in hiking, in its repetitiveness. The rhythm of the footsteps makes you part of a larger whole. Everyone has his own rituals to reach a state of ecstasy.’

‘It is a specific beauty that has its hold on me. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it makes me very happy. It might happen just on the train, when a young girl obsesses me with her beauty; I enjoy that, it is most exciting, the adventure of looking. I want to hold onto that so badly. The feeling that something can disappear so easily is hard for me to bear.’

Femmy Otten - New Myth for New Family

‘My work is always about the ones close to me, but also there do I have that very specific feeling of beauty. I often use the face of my youngest sister because she has that specific, magical beauty that I’m looking for. It has always been very clear what I found beautiful, the archaic, the simple, powerful shapes, free from emotion. But it is more than that, it is also something primordial, something ancient, that tells no story but is visual, a sublimation.’

As a 13-year old, Femmy and her mother walked into the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. She saw the charioteer of Delphi and started to weep. A museum guard took her by the hand and she was allowed to climb the partition and stroke his foot. ‘To touch that statue seemed an almost sexual experience, so strong and all-encompassing.’ The charioteer, originating from the sanctuary of Apollo in Delphi (470 BC) is a stately bronze sculpture of 1 metre 80 tall. A tall man whose heavy tunic falls down in folds. An open glance, set in coloured eyes, a slightly open mouth. An experience that already started to tilt the world.

Charioteer of Delphi

Wikipedia

‘The Way We Wore’ is one of my favourite fashion books. It’s about ‘black style then’, about the clothing of black people in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and it’s groovy. All these photos show radiant, self-conscious people in a certain look. Subjects range from a coloured head cloth to a series of passport photos of a boy as he grows up, in which a little collar, a golden chain, a turtle neck or a radical change of hairdo betray a careful choice of fashion. A designer piece turns up now and then. Compiler Michael McCollom asked a hundred friends and acquaintances to send their personal photos. The pictures are from family albums or fashion magazines, everything is mixed together as they are at pains to show that fashion is not about clothes but about style and attitude. Style is much more democratic than fashion, because you make it yourself and, if necessary, with a minimum of means. These people eagerly go through their wardrobes every morning: what to wear? The joy emanates strongly from these pages. In the preface, the compiler writes about the love of clothes within the black middle class he grew up in: We had outfits for school, we had outfits for picnics, we had outfits for church, we had outfits for holidays. Both his mother and his grandmother were an inspiring example. Generally, everyone was very concerned with their image, and knowing what to wear when was the key to success.

What catches the eye is that both the cliché and the experiment are celebrated. Pink is clearly a privileged colour and fur and gold are not shied away from either. A woman poses with a leopard tied to a bracelet. A black woman with her brown legs in nylons, that seems a little redundant, for weren’t nylons once invented to lend some tan to pale legs? But that is not the issue here. It is mainly the attention to detail and the overall meticulousness that stand out. A orange suit is matched with ditto shoes and to top it off, a shawl around the neck makes a bowtie. No black shoes are seen here because they would fit anything, no, every part complements the rest to arrive at that unique, own style. With an enormous turban around the head, sixteen year-old Karonda looks you in the eyes. The courage to be noticed, to live colourfully, that is what this book is about.

One should not enter a room and expect ambiance; one should enter and become it.

At nineteen years of age, Raymond Roussel worked feverishly at his first grand novel, La Doublure. With great care, he shut the curtains of his study to prevent the light of his genius from escaping through the windows. Above all, Roussel refused to be distracted by the banality of the everyday world. His books were fuelled by nothing more than his endless imagination.

Many contemporary artists are just as fond of hermetically shutting their studio off from the rest of the world. There’s one artist I know who meticulously keeps the sliding doors to his studio, directly annexing his living room, firmly shut. Sometimes, when he leaves the room to fetch a book, I try to peek inside, but it’s absolutely impossible to catch even a glimpse. His scanner is in The Studio. but there’s not a chance in the world that I might make a scan myself, or even to accompany him to the other side of that door while he does it for me.

Having become slightly apprehensive at so much secrecy, I sometimes fantasize about an illegal photographer hiding in there, making all his work. Or that my friend copies all his work from old encyclopaedias or from smutty porn. That’s the great thing about art today, everything can be used as a source, which means that everything is possible.

The studio is traditionally seen as the place from which work originates while at the same time, it’s the prison in which the artist must endure hour upon hour of lonely isolation. Doubt seeps through the walls of the workplace like damp, and the artist asthmatically gasps for air. Every artist in the studio is a lonely hero.

Pollock's studio

Replica by Joe Fig

Artist Jackson Pollock needed the loneliness of the studio to come to his unique expressive drip paintings. “I am nature” was his response to the artist’s endless attempts at replicating nature. Like a gladiator, he stands in the middle of his canvases, allowing the paint to drip from the stick in his hand. The artist and his work are one. It’s precisely this location, laden with expression and drama, which is seen in replica form in a photo by Joe Fig.

Within the miniature sculpture, the studio is recreated in minute detail (based on Hans Namuth’s photos) and shows the master in the midst of his canvases on the ground, surrounded by paint in shades exactly corresponding the photo. Each detail is correct. The sculptures demand knowledge of the perspective, of the colour, and insight of the artist. Joe Fig’s craftsmanship is praised, and so it seems that a genius is needed to make a perfect copy, However fascinating the work may be, it never quite extends past the original, nor does it exalt kitsch nor the Gepetto-syndrome.

Charles Matton, too, makes replicas of studios and presents them as photographs within a catalogue. His studios are equally miniature and precisely fabricated as Joe Fig’s.

Rhinoceros: Homage to Eugene Ionesco​​

Diorama by Charles Matton, mixed media

Matton wanted to find a modern way to create realistic interiors like the painters of the 17^th century, without having to rely on their level of craftsmanship. Initially, he wanted to photograph his friends in their studios and paint over these images. Not too difficult. In the end, he made dioramas in which he carefully made an exact replica of the studio that he photographed. These works were incredibly time consuming and ultimately, the complete opposite of the quick method he initially aspired to. The dioramas were a success (because secretly, everyone loves a doll’s house.)

The dioramas take things a step further because by portraying some sort of primal idea of the sculptor or painter. The spherical sculptures of the modern sculptor fill the space, while in Francis Bacon’s studio chaos prevails. A hippopotamus models in the middle of a studio. These strange boxes, with all their fantasy and precision, explore a world that exists out of our line of perception, even out of our presence.

Tisch

Replica of Fischli und Weiss' own studio by themselves

Fischli and Weiss also made a copy of a studio, their own studio, in full scale. Everything, even the juice packages have been precisely replicated. Just as painfully exact as Joe Fig. But instead of peering through a keyhole into the artist’s sanctuary, you walk through their reality, their reality which is just as banal as our own daily existence. And it’s exactly this deconstruction of the world and it’s enormous ability to place things into perspective that makes this copy genius.

Instead of locking their doors, Fischli and Weiss invite all to enter their holy land. But there’s nothing left to steal here, they’ve already stolen it themselves.

Warhol's studio

Replica by Joe Fig

Boites Comme Fins en Soi

by Charles Matton