THE CRYING GAME Marcelle Hanselaar
O
tto Dix’s series of 51 prints, ‘Der Krieg’ (1923–24), modelled on Goya’s 82 print series ‘Los Desastres de la Guerra’ (1810–20), is not only an account of his own horrific experiences, but is also a masterclass in etching.
I always wanted to test myself like that. When I see and hear the ongoing reports of wars, of the harsh things we do to each other, I feel I have to do something in order not to be complicit. Being an artist, all I can do is draw and, in doing so, draw attention to what matters. These last few years we have been surrounded by conflict in the Middle East and it is impossible not to be deeply affected by the rampant destruction and continuing displacement of so many people like you and I. Although, like most people in the West, I have no direct experience of war, I feel compelled to ask myself how would I behave in such a brutalized society. Each plate in ‘The Crying Game’ combines different etching techniques and each image confronts the viewer with a different kind of violence. From drug addiction to knife fights, from throwing acid to sex slavery, this default for violence angers and baffles me and I need to give it a voice. Etching, with its harsh bitten lines offset by the poetry of aquatint, is the perfect medium in which to do so. Marcelle Hanselaar
(Un)Civilized
Abrupt, blunt, brusque, cheeky, crude, curt, direct, forthright, frank, graceless, gruff, honest, impolite, inconsiderate, insulting, intrusive, matter-of-fact, open, outspoken, plain, point-blank, raw, refreshing, rude, sincere, straightforward, surprising, uncouth or unmannerly; the Dutch speak their minds. Marcelle Hanselaar has been resident in Britain for many years, but is intrinsically Dutch and directs her thoughts and feelings into her favourite forms of communication: drawing, prints and painting. She has led a peripatetic life of journeying adventure and (self) discovery prior to settling down to an unorthodox artist career that has moved from abstraction to unsettling figuration. Primarily self-taught, her work does not sit easily within current art movements or trends; nor does it ask politely to be viewed. It is made using oil on canvas or etching on paper and, most recently, oil and pencil on board. Notwithstanding the differences inherent in these mediums, her artworks have much in common. They relate to the world that she lives in and reflect her responses to stories read and heard. The works, in spite of their outspoken creator, do not proffer easy answers or solutions; instead they prompt questions. Whilst they may start from a certain story, image or thought, her creations favour the universal over the specific, wary of simple explanation or narrow chronology. ‘The Crying Game’s main subject matter concerns what lies beneath the shiny veneer of civilization that allows people to live their lives without thinking about or questioning the horrors that lie a step or two away from the lives that most of us live. For Marcelle, an artist’s responsibility is to make people think and reflect. More selfishly, depicting uncomfortable aspects of the world that we live in also acts as a safety valve – “self reflection or you burst.”
Increasingly uncompromising images of societal breakdown and degradation appear on TV and in newspapers. Yet there is always the danger that these images translate as ephemeral spectacles, their power diluted by information overload. Artworks are more stubborn. They persist. They endure. A print can multiply and immortalize or memorialize a moment in time that one might wish to forget. It can also provoke a viewer to choose – look away or keep looking. The process of etching has changed very little since the 1500s. Contemporary artists working in this medium employ the same tools and techniques as their predecessors. As she has often expressed herself, Francisco Goya and Otto Dix are Marcelle’s greatest print influences, for their mastery of their medium, fearless experimentation and shared subject matter. Following Dix’s ‘Der Krieg’ and Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’, ‘The Crying Game’ builds up intensity through the accumulation of disparate images, focusing on anonymous individuals and eschewing overt political messages in favour of depicting the horrors. Looking back on these series, Marcelle has borrowed where it suits: devastating titles and seductive use of aquatint from Goya; corrosive acid bite and a commanding array of etching techniques from Dix. Her nearest contemporary in form and content is William Kentridge, a master of many print techniques, a similarly fearless experimenter in the print studio and a fellow traveller in pinpointing injustice through his artwork. Marcelle and I met at the launch of my first published book. Collaboration ensued soon after and I have been fortunate to work with her on a number of print series, her first foray into drawings and this, our first book. Working together is never boring, frequently combative and always great fun.
Whilst I buy and sell artworks by many different artists, I work directly with very few. Marcelle, as well as being a great artist, is a great friend. I am delighted to be publishing ‘The Crying Game’ and I look forward to many more fruitful collaborations with the indomitable, inimitable, indefatigable Marcelle Hanselaar! Julian Page
Trouble in Mind
Like other works by Marcelle Hanselaar, this print cycle takes its name from a song: a 1960s torch song covered by Boy George and featured on the soundtrack of Neil Jordan’s film of the same name, set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Those Troubles seemed a thing of the past – a rare example of a conflict resolved – until the shadow of Brexit fell across the Good Friday Agreement, joining the geopolitical storm clouds presently gathering over even the planet’s few privileged havens of peace. There has always been a carnivalesque side to Hanselaar’s vision rooted in her Netherlandish heritage, but the world upside-down pictured in earlier works was a private one of personal reverie, seemingly cushioned against external impact. The title of her 2003 series ‘Sometimes I Dream about Reality’, taken from a Manu Chao song, suggested that reality was the stuff of dreams. Now it’s all too real, spit-bitten into artistic consciousness by the acid drip of 24-hour global news. The public sphere has invaded the private one. Woken from her solipsistic reverie to a living nightmare, Hanselaar is shaking the rest of us awake. ‘I saw this’ is the title of one of Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ etchings; ‘I saw this on the news’ would be the contemporary equivalent. The prints in Hanselaar’s ‘The Crying Game’ trigger flashes of recognition sometimes even premonition, of media images. The small limp body of the dead child in ‘Remnants of civilization’ recalls the now famous 2015 news photograph of drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, while the self-absorbed child ballerina in ‘Stalemate’ seems weirdly to anticipate the video footage of nine-year-old Manchester bombing victim Saffie Roussos shown dancing blithely on the television news. The common theme of ‘The Crying Game’ is war, but not conventional, ‘civilized’ warfare: this is a war without battlefields, lawful combatants or rules of engagement, where normal human relations are suspended and everything becomes a means of
exchange. In ‘She collects limbs like firewood’ a “How would I behave if I found myself in a situation full of fear?” is the question she poses. “I think of woman carries a tray of arms and legs on her head towards an amputee on crutches; in the world of the myself as civilized but I’m not sure. Could I maintain it? It’s a question we should be asking.” landmine victim, prosthetic limbs are currency. Amid the mayhem, there is pity even for the male The savage shouting match between her ‘Warring couple’, Hanselaar explains, is “the way it all starts”, aggressor – for the inadequacy of the short man in the Cuban heels treating a woman as a human but her own artistic engagement with the theme of war began with a series of paintings of African child skittle in ‘The stoning’, or the shame of the naked soldiers shown in her Kings Place exhibition ‘Walking speculator in ‘His calculations were all wrong’, the Line’ in 2013. Now the soldiers have been joined cowering beside his broken abacus while a woman shields a child’s eyes from his disgrace. by child prostitutes and child brides, precocious casualties of an age-old battle of the sexes further “Drawing is the integrity of art,” said Ingres; in explored in ‘Broken promises, trafficked women’, Hanselaar’s latest prints it is art’s conscience. with its helpless female victims trussed and dumped There is nothing black and white about the issues at a bus shelter in the middle of nowhere; in ‘The addressed, and their grey areas have prompted cutting’, with its Struwelpeter-like vision of genital a move away from the clear chiaroscuro of earlier mutilation by Scissorman shears; and in ‘Strung aquatints towards the blurred lines and fuzzy up for lying with another man’, with its reference distinctions of sugar lift etching or the spattered to news reports of gay lynchings in Iran on selfsurfaces and miasma-like stains of spit bite. If assembly scaffolds imported from Britain. (Who said earlier etchings recall the fluid lines of Goya, these British manufacturing was dead?). new prints emulate the rough experimental textures of Otto Dix. ‘Warring couple’ is so raw it borders The battle for economic resources and survival is on Art Brut. the subject of other images. In ‘The reluctant supplicant’, a street beggar has two faces, one Many of the images have black backgrounds, but bowed submissively, the other screaming to the sky; whether it’s the black of smoke or night it’s hard to in ‘Stuck’, a family with the wrong papers is held in tell; a biblical darkness has come over the earth. an aquarium-like tank at a Russian airport. The “This is how I perhaps would be,” says Hanselaar of dilemma of migration is writ large in ‘Between a rock the abject figure in ‘Our last resort’ crouched behind and a hard place’, with its close focus on a woman a defensive barrier with a pet cat as a black mortar caught between fire and water in her search for a blast swoops over like an exterminating angel. place to settle on earth. She watches the departure “This whole series is about intolerance, difference, of an overloaded boat as a big black rat behind her injustices that happen. I cannot change them, but sniffs the breeze; even the rats are tempted to join I feel if I don’t do anything I’m complicit.” In the the sinking ship. shocking imagery of ‘The Crying Game’, Hanselaar The rhetorical title of this image, ‘Where to?’ echoes drags herself out from behind the barrier, and us Goya, but other titles are bald statements of fact, with her. shorn of the meretricious drama of the news headline: ‘Strung up for lying with another man’; Laura Gascoigne ‘They threw acid in her face’; ‘They used poison gas didn’t they?’ The artist assumes a position of detachment, too self-aware to be judgmental.
His calculations were all wrong. The Crying Game 1
Stalemate. The Crying Game 2
He had nothing more to say. The Crying Game 3
Remnants of civilization I. The Crying Game 4
The stoning. The Crying Game 5
They threw acid in her face. The Crying Game 6
Addict. The Crying Game 7
She collects limbs like firewood. The Crying Game 8
Our last resort. The Crying Game 9
Left behind like a bit of rubbish. The Crying Game 10
Remnants of civilization II. The Crying Game 11
Knife fight on the estate. The Crying Game 12
Strung up for lying with another man. The Crying Game 13
Round up. The Crying Game 14
Broken promises, trafficked women. The Crying Game 15
Inner city junkie. The Crying Game 16
Scarred lands. The Crying Game 17
Strange fruit. The Crying Game 18
Stuck. The Crying Game 19
Warring couple. The Crying Game 20
Between a rock and a hard place. The Crying Game 21
The promised land. The Crying Game 22
The cutting. The Crying Game 23
Where to? The Crying Game 24
The reluctant supplicant. The Crying Game 25
Barcoded woman. The Crying Game 26
They used poison gas, didn’t they? The Crying Game 27
Child bride. The Crying Game 28
Child prostitutes. The Crying Game 29
Child soldiers. The Crying Game 30
This publication would not have been possible without the much appreciated ongoing support of Eunice Martin and Paul Mitchell and the Print Departments of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester. The Crying Game is a portfolio of 30 prints: Prints 1-20 were executed in 2015. Prints 21-30 were executed in 2017. The Crying Game 1: etching. The Crying Game 2-16, 18-19, 21-30: etching/aquatint. The Crying Game 17 & 20: sugar lift/aquatint. Plate size 20 x 25 cm. Sheet size 38 x 43cm. Printed by the artist on 300gsm Somerset paper. Edition of 30 plus 5 APs. Published by Marcelle Hanselaar and Julian Page. Text by Laura Gascoigne and Julian Page. Graphic Design by Jane PlĂźer. Photography by Irene Rhoden. Printed in 2017 by Gomer Press Ltd. Edition of 1000. Julian Page would like to thank Leonie Page, Felicity Page & Jenny Page. ISBN 978-0-9570124-2-4 For all enquiries, please contact Julian Page: julianpage.co.uk
PUBLISHED BY JULIAN PAGE