“SMIT’S DIPTYCHS FEEL A BIT LIKE SOMEWHERE YOU COULD BE DRAWN IN FOR HOURS MUSING ON THE SYMBOLISM OF EACH OPPOSITIONAL OBJECT.”
ISBN: 978-946-0225147
9 789460 225147 >
Cover_GRID_WORK_HT_erik.indd Alle pagina's
ROBERT SMIT
ROB LA FRENAIS INDEPENDENT CURATOR AND WRITER
GRID
CHASING DOGS AND A DEFENSELESS INFANT OPPOSITE AN INJURED DOG WITH CARING OWNERS; LAUGHING SS OFFICERS IN BATHING SUITS ON HOLIDAY FROM AUSCHWITZ OPPOSITE AN ARTIST’S FAMILY GROUP PHOTO ON THE ISLAND OF CORSICA: THE RICH, COLOSSAL AND DIALECTICAL IMAGES OF ROBERT SMIT NEVER CEASE TO MAKE YOU THINK.
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GRID ROBERT SMIT GRID_WORK_p001_224_HT_DEF.indd 1
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For Marcella and Dillen
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5 FOREWORD 8 DIFFERENT GRAYS. DECODING THE GRID OF ROBERT SMIT 14 WINDOW & MIRROR 18 ALL IS IN ONE AND ONE IS IN ALL 25 GRID 27 RESTART 33 FAMILIAR 39 COOKIES 45 THE BALCONY 51 BRAIN SEARCH 57 UNDER THE TABLE 63 DOUBLE 69 PLAYGROUND 75 DEATH AND THE TRAMP 81 MIDGET GOLF 87 HARD HEAD-ART AD 93 FLIPPING IN THE BETUWE 99 CARE 105 OFF WE WENT 111 THE NATURISTS 117 CLEAR CASE 123 A DAY OFF IN THE COUNTRY 129 GOD DOG 135 TO BE FRANK 141 THE DEPARTURE 147 MILKY WAY 153 LUCKY LOTTO 159 NEIGHBORS 165 HUNTED 171 NOW OR NEVER 177 GAME OVER 183 IN GOD WE TRUST 189 THE SMOKE CURTAIN 195 AUTOMATIC 201 CAMPGROUND B 207 RESEARCH 213 BACK TO THE FUTURE 220 AFTERWORD GRID 224 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 224 COLOPHON
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GRID, 16 x 16 meter, 1997-2012
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FOREWORD Robert makes you think. He made his father think, back in 1979, when he ignored his wish to study Medicine or Law, and showed him that studying Visual Arts instead can indeed be much more than ‘going on holiday and driving a car.’ And he feels completely comfortable with opposites and contrasts. In the 1980s, at the academy, he met his partner Marcella van Zanten. For Robert, she was a clear example of ‘opposites attract’, and she laid the foundation for his work. Their respective backgrounds couldn’t be more different. Her grandfather dealt in Van Gogh paintings across the globe, like a godfather, and his grandfather worked at a local bank, being happy with a pair of shoelaces. The two remained inseparable, especially after Marcella followed Robert all the way to America, where he studied for two years at the University of Massachusetts. Being Robert Smit, he wanted to find out what it is like to build up a different life. Robert likes a good laugh, but never laughs at people, nor does he impose any values. When he started teaching at the Amsterdam University of the Arts, he decided to like everything. As he drew inspiration from his students’ inexhaustible flow of stories, he also did not withhold anything from them. He developed a great wit and talent to add the greatest possible diversity to his own perception of the environment, and that of others. It lead to this spectacular exhibition of 32 thought-provoking works. And thought-provoking they are. His dialectical images fire uncomfortable ambiguity at the beholder. The idea to make diptychs -two human-sized squares, a print and a painting- arose after the birth of their son Dillen. They attempt to structure daily reality with all its apparent contracts and paradoxes. The diptychs were usually produced at night, by the way. GRID is also the result of a short collaboration between himself and his art students. It was an effort to achieve a content-driven approach of the subject Painting Techniques. Moreover though, it is a culmination of Robert’s fascination with unexpected interdependencies. GRID was finished in 2012, after a roughly sixteen-year period of completing an aesthetic masterpiece of (self-) reflection on serious past, present and future issues. Enjoy, but remember, GRID goes by a Jan Hoet phrase on a packet of West cigarettes. It caught Robert’s eye when he finished it: Art does not offer clear answers, only questions! Boris Prickarts, May 2019 Friend of Robert
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NEXT GENERATION (SELECTION), 2015
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A Door To Far, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 Bakkum, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 Holiday, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 Investigation, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015
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Mirror Windows, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 Nice Lamp, By The Way, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 No Go Area, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 Planet Birthday, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015
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Putter, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 Right Fight, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 Screening, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 South Of Eden, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015
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Talking About The Weather, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 To Be Continued, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 Visit, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015 Wall Movie, acrylic/print/paper, 20 x 40 cm, 2015
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DIFFERENT GRAYS. DECODING THE GRID OF ROBERT SMIT
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Liebesakt (Sessel) NOCH, Anlagenbau, Spur H0, Figuren
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”You need to know what rain is to enjoy a beautiful day”1 - Robert Smit on the contrast between the images in his diptychs. It must have been a beautiful day when childhood friends of Robert Smit’s wife Marcella took a group photo of themselves; the women in polka-dot bathing suits on the island of Corsica. Little did they know that their image would be replicated – doppelganger-like – and melded with the famous historical picture of SS officers on holiday from Auschwitz, doubled up with laughter on a wooden bridge over the River Sola. This image almost seems to sum up what Hannah Arendt famously called the ‘banality of evil’ and seems to be a key to Smit’s dialectical, almost obsessive imagery in the diptychs that make up his enormous public artwork, Grid. I’m interested to know what his wife Marcella thought of his appropriation of her childhood holiday in A Day Off in The Country, 2010. Looking at one of Smits diptych’s trying to decode the multiple layers of significance, reminds me of an art history lecture I once attended, when the speaker showed a single slide of Caravaggio for two hours without changing the image, seemingly endlessly pointing out the social, sexual, psycho-geographical, political and symbolic meanings of every single detail. It’s is also a bit like decoding the famous cover album of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where Paul McCartney is wearing a badge on his colorful jacket with the initials OPD – ‘Officially Pronounced Dead’ according to the conspiracy theory, or ‘Ontario Police Department’ according to producer George Martin. When I first looked at Grid, I could not quite see how to approach it or decode it, but beginning to understand each diptych is like descending into a tunnel of contradictory meanings and bizarre facts about Holland, Germany and the rest of Europe. Who knew for example that German model railway manufacturers Noch2, founded in 1911, once produced figures from a nudist camp for use with Märklin train set layouts? These are used in The Naturists, 2006 in which nude women are used as security guards and which references Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. They also seem to reflect the seemingly endless Dutch passion for camping - Smit, describing Campground B, 2009: “Dutch family camp installations often become a copy of their situation at home. Campgrounds occupied by typical Dutch families are not only a physical copy of home but a mental one as well. Today’s Germany is one of Holland’s most favorite holiday destinations”3. Many of Smit’s recurring images seem to contrast eroticism with heavy-handed authority. They also revolve around hidden histories and conspiracy theories, such as who betrayed Anne Frank, referred to in To Be Frank, 2011. (Smit lives close to the house where Anne Frank lived before she went into hiding at the Wester Church on Prinsengracht.) Or how Belgian rapist, torturer and mass murderer Marc Dutroux was allowed to continue to operate so long by the seemingly complicit establishment of politicians and police, as referenced in Neighbors, 1997. (This case traumatized Belgian society so much that one third of Belgian males named Dutroux applied to change their names).
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Smit, who lives in Amsterdam, is affected daily by these ambiguities: “We live in de Rivierenbuurt, the former Jewish neighborhood in Amsterdam. Our son Dillen went to Anne Frank Elementary school, so it happens to be part of our daily environment. At the same time there are a lot of fundamental themes that come with war in general and the Second World War in particular”4. As well as looking back to the Second World War, Smit’s work is also relevant to the current era where political and scientific reporting is superseded by ’fake news’. Some of the images in Grid require lengthy interpretation – others do not. For example, a bookcase in Anne Frank’s house is juxtaposed against a silhouette of a gun pointing at a lampshade in To Be Frank. It is a singular image and almost symbolically points to the methodology of Smit’s work. He is literally firing inanimate objects against dreamscapes. Of course, in the context of Nazi-occupied Holland the lampshade has other meanings. Those almost banal facts/mythologies we were fed as schoolchildren as the horrors of the Holocaust began to come out among the post-war public: that of lampshades made from the skin of exterminated Jews. One of the difficult things to face in Smit’s work is that he celebrates, dances with and plays on these banalities. However it should be said that he deliberately adopts these strategies to concentrate our minds on these very serious issues. Closer to the present, he refers to many of the ambiguities of liberal Holland, from the assassination of the populist but openly gay Pim Fortuyn (also in The Naturists) to the somewhat creepy touristic normalization of prostitution in Amsterdam’s Red Light district. The Museum of Prostitution even allows the voyeuristic public to experience standing behind a window like the prostitute for him or herself. The open window – or the window in which a naked woman sits on display for sale - is another motif that reappears in Smit’s work, reflected in Research, 2006. In our discussion I recall that in conservative Calvinistic communities in the ‘bible belt’ in Southern Holland curtains are banned so God can see everything that happens in the house. Others point to a consumeristic notion to display to your neighbors what you possess. This idea of venturing inside forbidden territory in Smit’s images is reflected on an early artwork both of us experienced as young people (Smit as an Amsterdammer, me as an early visitor from London), namely the famous Beanery by Kienholz in the Stedelijk Museum5. It is a two thirds size copy of the Beanery in Los Angeles, where the viewer can actually enter and can experience “the switch from real time (symbolized by a newspaper) to the surrealist time inside the bar where people waste time, kill time, forget time, and ignore time” (Kienholz)6. Smits diptychs feel a bit like this installation, where you could be drawn in for hours musing on the symbolism of each oppositional object. It’s also difficult not to compare Smit’s work with historical montagists like John Heartfield and in particular the work Hurrah There’s No Butter Left, a complex anti-Nazi work based on Göring’s speech “Iron has always made an empire strong, butter and lard have made a people fat at most”. Heartfield, a vigorous anti-Nazi, escaped arrest in 1933 by jumping out of his apartment window, hiding in a trash can and walking to Czechoslovakia. From there he went to England where, ironically, he was interned as an enemy alien. His elaborate politically-inspired collages were continued in the Seventies by the anti-nuclear works of UK artist Peter Kennard, with whose work I also identify Smit’s imagery. And in particular his later collaboration with the younger
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Kienholz, the Beanery, collectie SM
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Photo-op, kennardphillipps, 2007
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Jake and Dinos Chapman, Great Deeds Against the Dead, 1994
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Marianna Simnett, Worst Gift, 2017 (still). Single-channel HD video and light installation, 5.1 sound, color, LEDs; 18 min
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artist Cat Phillipps in kennardphillipps7 whose famous work Photo-Op - depicting Tony Blair apparently in ecstasy brandishing his mobile phone in front of the fiery destruction of Iraq - has to be one of the most shared images at the dawn of the Internet age. Smit’s work is less obvious than this but shares the jouissance of Photo-Op in its celebration of the almost faked image and charged juxtaposition of joy, violence and banality of evil. You might also compare his work to some of the exhibits in Banksy’s ‘Bemusement Park’ Dismaland, including works like Banksy’s Peeping Boys - a stencil of two young kids peeping through the shower curtain to catch a glimpse of naked, female flesh as well as the now notorious auto-shredding of Girl With Balloon. Banksy could almost be describing one of Smit’s juxtapositions here: “A dead princess is only complete when surrounded by gawping crowds with their cameras out, or the opportunity to photograph yourself pulling an amazed expression when a killer whale leaps from a toilet” (interview with the BBC). Dismaland opened on 2016, forebodingly anticipating the election of Trump and Brexit, heralding the dawn of new far-right populism that is now threatening to engulf Europe once more. The elegantly dressed lady in Midget Golf, 1997-2004 playing next to the 1936 Berlin Olympic Stadium would not look out of place in Dismaland. Smit’s work also recalls Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Disasters of War8. Another contemporary artist whose work I might compare Smit’s juxtapositions with is Marianna Simnett. She works mainly in video. Her work Worst Gift was shown at Matt’s gallery in London9 recently. Her work, although moving image, containing bizarre scientific experiments, corrupted children and unnecessarily obscure gynecological exams recalls Smit’s diptychs such as Brain Search, 2003-2004 and Neighbors. Returning to Arendt’s famous work Eichmann in Jerusalem – A Report on the Banality of Evil, Smit deliberately chooses to look at the gray areas, controversially pointed out in that book. Referring to the ‘banal’ bureaucratization of their monstrous genocide, Arendt notes provocatively that the Nazis were even able to subsume the Jews in their obsessive administrative methodologies: “In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination. And to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains until, as a final gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation. They distributed the Yellow Star badges and sometimes, as in Warsaw, the sale of the armbands became a regular business: there were ordinary armbands made of cloth and fancy plastic armbands which were washable (Raul Hilberg)10”. While even these shocking details fade in the face of the main horror of the Holocaust, Arendt was much criticized for pointing them out. In his other life as a specialist tour guide to the Jewish quarter where he lives, Smit is often in close dialogue with the many Jewish visitors to Amsterdam and the house of Anne Frank. However, does Robert Smit have any ethical or moral limits in his imagery, such as in A Day Off in The Country? “If I use a (personal) family snapshot and put it next to Auschwitz guards in bathing suits, I would say there’s very little limits left, morally or ethically. On the other hand you compare/confront the two sides of course, but for me it does not have to do with a comparison of good and bad only. In my opinion that is too simple, considering
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all the different grays you would find during the Second World War (especially). I was wondering whether you can/could tell the difference, apart from the uniforms11”. The whole grid seems to reflect on many themes springing from the complex emotional memories connecting Holland and Germany. Smit: “My father has only just started talking about certain experiences he had during the war. He told me he was around the corner of the Royal Palace on the 7th of May when the Canadians had arrived late to liberate Amsterdam. Everybody was dancing at Dam Square when a few remaining Nazi soldiers started shooting people at random and killed around 30 people12.” I myself recall a Dutch friend telling me as recently as the 80s that a common insult thrown at Germans is the question “Waar is Mijn Fiets?” – “Where is My Bicycle?” - referring to the fact that the Germans crushed bicycles with their tanks to quell the resistance. This symbolism is not lost on contemporary Holland where the bicycle is an enormous symbol of liberal and middle class life. Smit: “I was born on the 5th of May, liberation day in Holland, and I grew up with WOII Documentaries around my birthday, so I knew of the war and Nazis before knowing what it was about. (I remember that I was always so surprised that there were German Jews, I could not figure out why any Jew would be living in Germany13.)” From his description of the diptychs: “The Netherlands, neutral in the First World War, experienced the difference of involvement after being overrun during the first days of May 1940 and living under Nazi occupation for 5 years. The ‘baby boomers’, roughly born from 1945 to 1960, rebuilt a liberal country and are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values. Privileged, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in housing and education, they were the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. The increased consumerism for this generation has been regularly criticized as excessive14”. How does Smit feel about the world today, when the winds of populism, fear of immigration and the far right seem to be blowing over Europe again? “From when I was young I always realized that freedom isn’t for free, you have to take very good care of it, maintain and nourish it! In the last diptych Back To The Future 2010, where printed, individually cut out and carefully placed gray and red leaves move from the left to the right panel, you can discover – with some difficulty - a Japanese Life sign to the left and a Swastika to the right of the ‘animal’ in the red panel just above the threshold where all the leaves are red. In other words, yes, I do think there’s an undertone in the work dealing with the political spectrum in Europe (and the world) turning to the right… I’m very worried about the situation in the world, and not only politically15”.
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Conversation between Rob La Frenais and Robert Smit, November 2018
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Noch company website. https://www.noch. com/en/product-categories/figures-anddecoration/figures/sexy-scenes.html
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Robert Smit, description of Grid.
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Conversation between Rob La Frenais and Robert Smit, November 2018
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https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/collection/ 1019-edward-kienholz-the-beanery
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Cultuurwijs - Een nagemaakte kroeg
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https://www.kennardphillipps.com/
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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ chapman-disasters-of-war-t07454
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https://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/ simnett/home.php
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Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. The Viking Press 1963
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Conversation between Rob La Frenais and Robert Smit, November 2018
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Ibid
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Ibid
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Robert Smit, description of Grid.
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Conversation between Rob la Frenais and Robert Smit. November 2018
Rob La Frenais Independent curator and writer
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JUST ANOTHER PL AN AND NOT (SELECTION), 2015-2016
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Christmas 2015, What Else!, photograph, 100 x 86 cm Class Room, photograph, 100 x 67 cm Planter, photograph, 100 x 67 cm
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Joint Venture, photograph, 100 x 75 cm Meeting, photograph, 114,5 x 86 cm Shining Horse, photograph, 100 x 76,5 cm
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RESTART 2008-2012
The narrative of this first diptych uses imagery that addresses issues concerning the Eighty Years’ War, also known as the Dutch War of Independence. In essence it was a religious war against the Spaniards which lasted from 1568 to 1648. Led by William of Orange, quite a few cities and states started a revolt against Philip II. As a result many Dutch cities not only converted to Protestantism almost overnight, but they also allowed freedom of religion and thought within their city walls. The Dutch Republic soon became a refuge for immigrants from all over Europe, marking the beginning of an era known as the ‘Golden Age.’ The image on the left panel derives from a series of etchings by Jacques Callot, Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre, illustrating looting, arson and executions during the Thirty Years’ War that was simultaneously
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taking place in the first half of the 17th century. A man, assisted by a priest, is being broken on the wheel as many local people gather in the town square to observe this brutal execution as if at the theatre. The right hand panel presents a cutout silhouette of a leafless tree placed over an image showing a couple engaged in a sexual act, taken from a porn movie distributed over the Internet. The scene is set in an ordinary room with closed blinds and no further decorations. A transparent bubble fills the space above them. Today the Internet is an important public domain where people are seemingly privately confronted with a wide range of affairs, often with obscure and opposite moral distinctions; a potential matrix of indifference toward any particular set of principles.
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1970 Model, unknown 1970 Backside Babe, 2010 1970 Nude Model, unknow Yellow Lady, 2010 Window Dressing, 2010, Maison van den Hoogen, Amsterdam Ambulance, 2008, Kyoto, Japan, Photograph, 30 x 40 cm Bird in a Cage, ceramic tiles, early 19th Century, Kitchen of the Willet Holthuysen Museum, Amsterdam Don’t go Zombie, London Tube, photograph, 30 x 40 cm, 2010 Earlier stage of The Wheel, 200 x 200 cm Execution at the Dam, 17th century, Amsterdam Glass Wagon, Murano, Venice, Italy Lippi Theater, 1996-1998, Print on Durabanner, 100 x 80 cm Ring, page side Sketches, 2012 The Breaking Wheel, detail, 14th plate of the series The great Miseries of War, Jacques Callot, 1633, etching, 8,2 cm x 18,5 cm The Seventeenth Century, collage, 2001, 20 x 30 cm Possibilities, 2012 The falling man, 09-11-2001, WTC, NY Matthew Barney, CREMASTER 1, 1995 Production still ©Matthew Barney Photo: Michael James O’Brien, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels Tree, 2008, Louisiana, USA, Photograph, 33,5 x 50 cm, RS Tree, 2012, Westpoort, Amsterdam, RS
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FAMILIAR 1997
An average family of four is still considered the cornerstone of Dutch society. Illustrated on the left are two 17th century parents who have placed their prodigal son in a wicker basket to sift through his possessions and who discover what kind of frivolous paraphernalia he has spent their hard-earned money on. They appear behind a fence where two children and the caretaker of a zoo are viewing the scene. These three characters are taken from a children’s book called Feed the Animals by H.A. Rey, which was first published in 1942. Remarkably enough the two children are visiting the zoo by themselves without their parents. Their position emphasizes a different attitude towards raising and educating children in the 20th century. The canvas to the right shows a trio of characters. In the center an old man is seated on a dark couch, seem-
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ingly concentrating intensely, grasping a packet of cigarettes with his damaged and painful bandaged fingers. In front of him there is a large ashtray on a multicolored table cloth. Behind him are two children, and a wall covered with a stylized medallion motif serves as a backdrop. On the left a boy in a blue shirt petting a white rooster. The wallpaper’s motif replaces the blond tresses where the top part of his blond coiffure is rendered invisible. To his right is another youth, in a striped shirt, with what looks like a semi-transparent paper bag over his head. According to the artist this work is probably the most autobiographical of all the 32 diptychs. On the left is Michel Smit, the artist’s older brother, who was the only one in the family courageous or fearless enough to pick up the rooster. The other child is his younger brother René, represented with a bag over his head because he must have felt kind of invisible next to his older brother, even with a set of oranges under his shirt.
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Natura Artis Magistra, Building of the Monkey Rock, 18 april 1940, Polygoon, Collectie Archief van het Koninklijk Zoรถlogisch GenootschapNatura Artis Magistra Bolinder-Munktell, BM 55, 1953-1959 Dillen in a Race Car, Massachusetts, USA, 1996 Family Diner, Magazine, unknown Grandma van Mook, Michel and Robert Smit, Heiloo, 1964 Hidden, Gaya M, Amsterdam Hiding, Gaya M, Amsterdam Julian Germain, from For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness, 2005 Man at the Table, Unkown Martini Gathering, Magazine Ad, unknown Master Toaster, Magazine Ad Miranda Lijst 3, SDAP Wij Breken en Wij Bouwen, 1932 Motel Room, 2007, Inkjet print/ Hahnemuhle, 100 x 67 cm, US series Rabbit and Me, Heiloo, 1967 Shoot the Freak, Coney Island, NY, USA Still Standing, Heiloo,1965 The Prodigal Son Sifted, woodcut, c. 1700 To the Zoo, HA Rey Just Good Friends I Love Art, drawing Hans Booy
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COOKIES 2011-2012
On the South side of Amsterdam is De Oeverlanden, a landscaped park situated on the shores of Lake Nieuwe Meer. The park forms a ‘natural’ habitat for migrating birds, wild aurochs, inhabitants of the city seeking recreation and two long-standing artist communities. At night the place is usually abandoned and then nature gets time to recover from all the human activity. In Cookies the left side panel is a lighted segment of the grounds of the park. Hovering above this field of reeds is an image of a square, used for nighttime parking. There are still a few signs of activity in the oval square, two cars and a pedestrian move around a central monument representing a human figure.
boy attempts to trap a slice of gingerbread suspended before him without using his hands. This is a traditional Dutch birthday game. He is being watched by an excited friend with what looks like a deformed eye. The boys are painted in graded shades of white and gray against a background painted in muted colors that often drip down the surface of the canvas. Again a biographical scene featuring the Smit brothers. It’s the artist himself celebrating his 5th birthday. The boy who lives next door is completely focused and physically trying to assist his friend. He is so excited that his left eye almost drops out. Despite his instincts he manages, with difficulty, to restrain himself by keeping his hands behind his back. At this age children still consider themselves an inseparable part of the world.
Combined with the De Oeverlanden landscape is a painted scene with several children. A blindfolded
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