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Introduction to DISTANT SUFFERING XIV | the ‘book‘
Related work: DISTANT SUFFERING VII - VIII - IX
The ‘book‘ | performance at Sea foundation | Tilburg – October 11 & 12, 2018
The ‘book‘ | performance at Kunsthal 45 | Den Helder – June 15 & 16, 2023
Temporal Disruption and Anti-Efficiency:
Hans Overvliet’s critical media practice | Dr. Dani Ploeger
Justification
DISTANT SUFFERING XIV | i.d. of a shared cloud #2 | the ‘book’
i.d. of a shared cloud | the book
This proposal is the object of the text Temporal Disruption and Anti-Efficiency: Hans Overvliet's critical media practice by Dr. Dani Ploeger at the beginning of this portfolio. It concerns a different elaboration of i.d. or a shared cloud, namely in the form of a 'book' on the boundary of artist's book, performance and multiple.
I want to include the person who purchases the 'book' into this process of concentration, linearity and repetition. The content of i.d. of a shared cloud is by means of the seemingly endless repetition of what is happening around us - now by means of actions - experienced by the person making ‘the book’.
The configuration is a so called clamshell box, provided with a dust jacket with a ton sur ton print of the title and the name of the author on the front. On 100 pages, a grid is printed. Separately supplied are 1,000 stickers with the 1.000 explosions / clouds, super imposed with their unique military location codes.
The strategy is that in a number of art/book related spaces across Europe, in each place I, together with 4 other persons, as a kind of performance, assemble the 1.000 stickers into our own 'books', thus cocreating 5 new pieces of art. This might take 2 or 3 days to complete the ‘book’. So, participants purchase their own ‘book’ on site and he / she composes there and then her / his own unique 'book'. Performance and book are therefore essentially interconnected: the visitor is given the opportunity to be the co-creator of a new piece of art.
At this point it is in order to raise two issues: one of the characteristics of my work concerns working itself (labor | laborans = working / giving birth). My productions are always extremely labor intensive, concern large series over long periods of time with many repetitive actions.
A process that ultimately, by the choice of the person who compiles the 'book', based on that repetition, ends in a unique result. The possessor of her / his 'book' ultimately gathers a greater knowledge of his / her book than the artist.
In addition, a discussion about 'the object' in art has long dominated my thinking: is it possible to make art without an object as the end result of a chain of attitudes, ideas and actions / decisions, but in which and at which the whole creating process in the work is anchored and solidified at the same time?
This 'book' aims to contribute to this discourse.
In each art site I also investigate whether other works within the art series DISTANT SUFFERING can accompany the performances.
2018 - 2023 | Hans Overvliet
Filled with
1,000 images of explosions and ‘holiday clouds’ on 50 sheets codes super imposed on the images: unique location positioning from a military open source website;
1,000 images of waves | codes super imposed on the images: statistics Global Warming on 50 sheets;
1,000 images of destroyed houses | codes super imposed on the images: ground plans in the images: send to me - in 1996 on my request – by 72 national libraries for The World Library Art Project [ 1996 ] on 50 sheets
DISTANT SUFFERING XIV | i.d. of a shared cloud #2
performance on June 15 & 16, 2019 at Kunsthal 45 | Den Helder | artist books exhibition
DISTANT SUFFERING XIV | i.d. of a shared cloud #2 | THE ‘BOOK’
co creation
June 15 & 16, 2019 at Kunsthal 45 | Den Helder
exhibition
June 1 - August 18, 2019
thanks to Margo van der Pool [ curator ] & the team of Kunsthal 45
background support
Rinus Roepman [ snowball ] | Leni van den Berge | Jasper Steutel [ ZagaZ belettering ]
special support
Willy van Houtum | Giel Louws | Dani Ploeger
Co creators
Hans Overvliet Margo van der Pool | Jan Nijhof
Jack Beneker | Elly Mooij | Joya Nelissen
Corrie van Eeten | Bob Austmann | Marja Lely edition
Temporal Disruption and Anti-Efficiency: Hans Overvliet’s critical media practice
Temporal Disruption and Anti-Efficiency: Hans Overvliet’s critical media practice
Dr. Dani PloegerThe proliferation of digital news media over the past two decades has led to the distribution of increasing numbers of news events at ever higher speeds. Through news feeds and live alerts, updates on the latest incidents all over the world are disseminated almost instantly and continuously. In The Administration of Fear (2012), Paul Virilio discusses the paradoxical consequences of this development. Instead of facilitating a more detailed assessment of events and thus trigger empathetic action on the side of the recipient, the fast sequence of detailed mediatizations of catastrophes and threats promotes a permanent state of fear. Whereas, in previous media eras, fear used to be ‘related to localized, identifiable events that were limited to a certain timeframe’, it has now increasingly become an environment that determines every-day life in the Global North.
It is this paradigm of speed and fear that has formed the starting point for Hans Overvliet’s work since the mid2000s. In Cross #2 (2007) press photos of violent events during the Second Gulf War are cut into strips and woven into fragments of fashion and architecture photography. At first sight, it is not quite clear what the image fragments in the resulting Dura-trans print represent. Unlike the original war photographs, the often-graphic
the original war photographs, the often-graphic nature of which instantly fills you with horror, you need to take some time to decipher their grue-some contents. In addition to the collision of the slick realm of consumer culture with the destruction of warfare, consumer culture with the destruction of warfare, two processes are at work here: On one hand, the cutting up and weaving of the image strips foregrounds that the photos also exist as aesthetic objects in themselves, rather than merely a means of representation that gives access to a reality elsewhere. Thus, the process of mediation and the distantiation between the viewer and the events represented are fore-grounded. On the other hand, by making the contents less readily accessible to the beholder, the images are removed from the rapid stream of catastrophic representations Virilio describes. You are compelled to pause and reflect.
In distant suffering I: Syrian Skies | 1,000 days (2015), this strategy of foregrounding the process of mediation, while establishing an initial ambiguity of the material’s representative contents is developed further. Magnifications of clouds scanned from printed newspapers draw attention to their composition of different patterns of dotted ink. At the same time, the absence of the
dotted ink. At the same time, the absence of the landscapes that were below the clouds in the original images invites you to enjoy the scene like you might contemplate the sky in a 17th century Dutch painting.
This beauty and apparent peacefulness of the isolated clouds and the accompanying process of mediation are juxtaposed with the eerie reference to the war in Syria that is provided by the title of the work. Slowed down by the work’s seductive visual appeal, the confrontation with the painful implications of the source of the clouds unfolds itself in the foreground of your mind.
These disruptions of the high-speed digital media landscape that occur during encounters with the finished work are not the only locus of Overvliet’s interventions though. A possibly even more radical interruption of what Virilio calls ‘the cult of speed’ takes place during the creation process. Instead of ta-king advantage of the latest software solutions to make image processing, graphic design, data collection and categorization faster and easier, Overvliet spends hundreds of hours conducting individual Google searches, cutting and gluing prints of digital images with scissors and a glue stick, and
prints of digital images with scissors and a glue stick, and fiddling with the space bar and the return key of his old laptop to position images in a Word document. Although to an outsider this may appear like a ‘waste of time’ or a sign of incompetence, the inefficiency of Overvliet’s engagement with digital technologies is a significant component of his desire to undermine the ideological framework that surrounds digital media. Overvliet’s work process rejects the logic of process optimization and efficiency that usually accompanies every-day consumer technologies. Thus, the temporally disruptive quality of his work is also established by the often makeshift digital (and nondigital) processing of its materials.
In distant suffering IVX, i.d. of a shared cloud, the ‘book’ (2017-18), Overvliet includes us in his laborious creation process. Instead of a finished book, we are offered a box filled with a pile of paper sheets with a grid outline, accompanied by 1,000 stickers. Each sticker shows a downloaded image of a cloud on which a set of geographical coordinates – sourced from a publicly ac-cesssible online military database – are superimposed. Here, Overvliet revisits the theme of the seemingly in-nocent cloud, this time connected to mapping techno-logies, a decisive facilitator of imperialist expansion since
litator of imperialist expansion since colonial times; ‘to conquer […] global life, one must be able to map it’ (Patel and Moore, 2017). These two components, the clouds and the mapping coordinates, are both sourced from the virtually endless public informationpool available through the internet. This makes both the images’ individual contents and the inter-relationships between coordinates and clouds appear arbitrary at first. However, Overvliet gives us an assignment: We can only obtain the work if we commit to sticking all 1,000 images to the pages, one by one. Over the duration of multiple hours, we are required to make decisions on the order of the images, as well as concentrate on placing each sticker carefully onto the page, an activity reminiscent of the now archaic practice of the picture card album. What seemed like an arbitrary mess of data at first, is turned into puzzle of sorts, where we are invested in giving each piece its proper place. The true relationship between the clouds and the coordinates is never disclosed, but our repetitive, concentrated engagement with each individual instance confronts us with the uncanniness of quantified space in combination with the clouds as ambiguous double references to the forces of nature and human violence.
Instead of providing us with a slick and streamlined finished art object, Overvliet’s ‘book’ challenges us to join him in a slow, detailed – and potentially frustrating –engagement with contemporary media. Thus, the work doesn’t provide us with an endpoint, but instead creates a breathing space. A moment to step outside the numbing, high-speed stream of fear-inducing media spectacles, and ask ourselves the question: “What must we do?”
References
Paul Virilio (2012). The Administration of Fear. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (2017).
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
justification
Hans Overvliet | DISTANT SUFFERING
W.F.T. van HoutumSince 2013, by means of the ongoing art-series DISTANT SUFFERING, the Dutch artist Hans Overvliet (Leiden, 1952) investigates the role of the media in their representation of (military) violence. This, in the context of themes as perception, memory and identity formation. Overvliet uses a various range of media, symbols and codes, bringing together dichotomies like beauty and violence, refinement and brutality, the sublime and the vulgar.
As a reporter, Overvliet was an eyewitness to the events in the Middle East during the 1980s. Of course these experiences resonate in DISTANT SUFFERING. So aspects of power, politics, exclusion, censorship and the connection between artist, artwork and viewer infiltrate his multifaceted conceptual oeuvre.
Martha Jager, curator Vleeshal in Middelburg about the oeuvre: The dedication to art as a relational verb is central to Overvliet's work. On the one hand, the balance between poetry and criticism is special, so that the work never becomes bitter or pedantic, while at the same time the dialogue with the viewer is actively maintained. It is a tender form of activism that moves and urges action and also continuously questions the role of art.
Elements of DISTANT SUFFERING were exhibited in the Netherlands, Belgium, Pakistan, England, Italy, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Lebanon, Germany, the U.S.A. , France and Sweden.
Denmark, Lebanon, Germany, the U.S.A. , France and Sweden. Hans Overvliet was born in Leiden in 1952; he lives in Middelburg and works in Vlissingen, both in the province of Zeeland in the South-West of the Netherlands.
Next to his art-work he is, together with his wife Willy van Houtum, the founder and every day guardian of the 27-year old space for contemporary art: ruimteCAESUUR.
