Bastiaan van de Velden

The Dutch tradition of collective automatism in modifications

The history foreigners identify the inhabitants of a country with often deviates from the stories and history constructed in that country. No one in Amsterdam knows Hansje Brinker who saved the country by putting his finger in a dike. There are no wooden shoes or windmills, except in tourist stores. Both the view of foreigners on a country and the national history are fabricated to fulfill certain expectations. Foreigners associate the creation of The Netherlands with a war against water – and the myth that everything in The Netherlands takes place 50 years later. For the Dutch, the founding of their country was longtime associated with the collective act of vandalizing modification. When throwing off the jug of the Spanish Empire and Habsburg Emperor at the end of the 16th century, modification was the key tool. The Dutch historians in the 19th century cherished the beheading and scarification of statutes, modification of paintings, and burning of books as the cradle of national identity. During this Beeldenstorm, the Dutch sackaged religious institutions all over the country: statues lost their heads, painted words had to replace landscapes, murals were scrubbed away

Registro fotográfico

1. Fotografía “la Revolte a besoin de Fantaisie” créditos forográficos: Bastaan van de Velden. Esta foto fue tomada en Bruselas durante una visita que Bastiaan realizó a varios museos en Bruselas. Lo interesante es que fue tomada en 1992, mismo año en que CAPA comenzó sus actividades en la Galerie de Hannover, dando un guiño a la idea de la revuelta Situacionista.

CAPA. Modificaciones en C. C. Espacio Matta, Stgo de Chile 20 de enero - 26 de marzo de 2023 or modified with white chalk. When 19th century historians had to create a national identity, a nationalistic history was shaped, commemorating collective heroic acts, starting with the uproar of the Beeldenstorm. This became the touchstone addressed by every historian, adopted to their catholic, protestant or communist perspectives. Even today, on the state-supported Dutch history website, the modifications and vandalism during the Beeldenstorm is framed as one of the key events in world history: ‘The Revolt has been an inspiring example internationally for centuries, for example in the American struggle for independence.’ (www.canonvannederland.nl).

The story is simple. In 1566 there was a famine. Harvests failed due to the harsh winter. As a result, the starving population looked with increasing annoyance at the wealth of the churches. In August 1566, in Steenvoorde, a village in Flanders, the statues in the local Catholic church were smashed. During this the autumn iconoclasm spread like an oil slick from the Southern parts to the Northern Netherlands. In dozens of churches and monasteries superstition of the middle ages was erased. Partly out of hatred of the Catholic clergy, but also out of despair over hunger and poverty. The nobility and city councils often played an active and directive role in these events. The most important aspect is that the revolt needed to say goodbye to the old style, saying goodbye to outdated manners, parting with the old stuff, a new area had to be created on top of the past by scratching it out and painting it over.

In a country where modification of art was for centuries the foundation of national identity, Amsterdam, together with Brussels – the cradle of the Beeldenstorm - became in the post second world war years the center of a new forms of collective painting. First COBRA emerged here, uniting painters from France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. Then half a century later CAPA continued collectivism in paining.

A sort of theory of modification can be traced back to Asger Jorn, one of the members of COBRA, desperately interested in giving the amateur paintings a new face, a new grammar with his modifications. From the flea market to the art gallery, Jorn hunted for those paintings described by Rimbaud in his Illuminations: ‘I loved idiotic pictures, painted panels, stage sets, backdrops, hotel signs, popular prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, erotic books with poor spelling, bygone novels, fairy tales, little books for children, old operas, inane refrains, syncopated rhythms.’ It is not about destroying the past by modification, the gesture is exactly the contrary. In “Detourned Painting”, a text by Asger Jorn for his exhibition Catalogue in May 1959 in the Parisian Galerie Rive Gauche, he wrote: ‘If you have old paintings, do not despair. Retain your memories but detourn them so that they correspond with your era.’ Those images of Hansje Brinker, wooden shoes and windmills from tourist stores can be modernized with a few strokes of the brush. But is the modification only an instrument in the toolbox of Situationist technique’s, a next level of détournement? What is the exact nature of the derelict paining; it is not a tabula rasa – it ought to be a dialogue. André Breton, in L’amour Fou stated:

‘Leonardo, inviting his students to copy their paintings from what they would see (remarkably arranged and appropriate for each one of them) when they stared at an old wall for a period of time, is still far from being understood. The whole problem of the passage from subjectivity to objectivity is implicitly resolved there, and the implications of this resolution are fuller of human interest than those of a simple technique, even if the technique were that of inspiration itself.’

CAPA Amsterdam started as a Collective for Automatic PAinting, then shifted to collective modification, automatism entered in a dialogue with old paintings. The practice of collective automatic painting may result in abstract forms, it is not about the détournement but it is foremost the poetic experience of collective automatic painting that counts, in Amsterdam, where everybody is aware of the need for a Beeldenstorm as a key element of the revolution.

CAPA. Modificaciones es C.C. Espacio Matta, Stgo de Chile 20 de enero - 26 de marzo de 2023