Philippe Vandenberg Berlinde De Bruyckere Innocence is precisely: never to avoid the worst. 001
Philippe Vandenberg Berlinde De Bruyckere Innocence is precisely: never to avoid the worst. 001
002
In the book I let the drawings speak. Between the lines and folds of the book, the story is told. I caught myself constantly licking wounds shut. In this way I made a scar, like a visible memory. L’image a tout pouvoir. Berlinde De Bruyckere
003
Philippe Vandenberg
004
Innocence is precisely: never to avoid the worst.
005
006
Philippe Vandenberg
007
008
010 027 037 061 072
009
After the Entombment of Christ – Caravaggio, 1996 La Dame aux lions, 1996 Erotic Drawings / Indonesia, 1996 After The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus – Nicolas Poussin, 1996 After The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian – Antonio Pollaiuolo, 1996
010
011
012
013
014
015
016
017
018
019
020
021
022
023
024
025
026
027
028
029
030
031
032
033
034
035
036
037
038
039
040
041
042
043
044
045
046
047
048
049
050
051
052
053
054
055
056
057
058
059
060
061
062
063
064
065
066
067
068
069
070
071
072
073
074
075
076
077
078
079
080
081
082
Innocence is precisely: never to avoid the worst.
083
084
Berlinde De Bruyckere
085
086
089 092 095 121
087
The Wound, 2011 Untitled, 2010–2011 Romeu ‹my deer,› 2010–2011 Parasiet, 1997
088
089
090
091
092
093
094
095
096
097
098
099
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
130 134
129
Berlinde De Bruyckere Brett Littman: Philippe Vandenberg and Berlinde De Bruyckere
Throughout one long year I went to the studio of Philippe Vandenberg at regular intervals. My task was to make a selection from his drawings and place my own drawings next to them. The result would become a book. Between the closing of my own door and my arrival at Philippe’s studio lay time and distance I needed to prepare myself for the task. Slow progress, made on foot, by tram, by train, by taxi and all the waiting in between. All that time was necessary to empty myself, to open myself to what I was looking for. I remember every single visit to the studio. Especially the apprehension at «being allowed to see,» at «having to see» everything in the workshop of another artist. What would I think if, after my death, another artist was allowed to sit around browsing through my books? Am I really the right person for this? These questions haunted me as I set to work, viewing all of 30,000 drawings, chronologically, most of them in sketchbooks or large folders. During the process, as time and again I met a kindred spirit, all my questions and doubts were put to rest.
roof and bars of human legs. I lay the drawing in the middle of the cage. I crawl around it in circles. From now on I will do this my entire life: try to capture the image and its motif or the motif of the image from another angle. … I push the drawing to the outside through the bars of the cage, where it disappears under father’s sole. I sit in the trap and now I know: the drawing—the image—will be language. I must never stop drawing. The drawing will carry the inexpressible and will protect me … L’image a tout pouvoir.» Next to this I can place a childhood memory of my own. The wet sheets over the edge of my sleeping cubicle. This image is indelible. Even though I couldn’t see it on the outside, I knew what the image looked like. On display for all the other children to see. And when I hadn’t urinated in bed at night, then I dreamed I had. I too began to draw as a 5 year old, to escape. To escape a cruel reality. In the drawing everything was possible. My imagination was my salvation, in this I was successful, but also very lonely.
I have made an intuitive choice. The sequence of the series works like a «large» narrative, in which it becomes clear that there is little difference in the cruelties people perpetrate. Our deepest and oldest fears hardly anyone dares to think of, or that we simply reject with a shudder, he entrusts to paper.
As a 5-year-old girl I went to boarding school, born left-handed, which at the time was considered as something that had to be corrected. I began to stutter. According to the nuns a temporary symptom of unlearning my left-hand writing. But next I began wetting my bed. An even greater shame and humiliation. All this led to great loneliness, irreparable, but probably my drive to create.
I often encounter myself; Philippe Vandenberg is a soul mate. Like Gustave Flaubert, he accepts no distinction between head and heart, between form and content. With people everything is related. In addition there is our shared love for the old masters. What makes figures from antiquity so beautiful? Their originality. How much study and effort does it take to get free of them, to create something entirely your own?
I sit, leafing through the sketchbooks. I never looked for what I thought was the best drawing, rather I read them as I would a diary. In every drawing I sense how he is searching only to come to the same conclusion. «We are unable to change, we are doomed to be prisoners of evil.» 2 Every series is witness to intimate and internal conflicts. Only by drawing does he seem to control them.
Philippe Vandenberg left us an enormous quantity of drawings. They emanate a compelling force; he had no choice but to draw.
La Dame aux lions, 1996
This is tangible in the childhood memory Philippe Vandenberg describes in On the way in a cage is a man, his hands red. 1 Philippe is five years old and sitting under the table, drawing. Mother is ironing on the table. Father comes and stands by the table. They start arguing. Pain seeps into the drawing. Philippe writes: «I understand the Trap for the first time, and the Trap is slammed shut. This table is the cage, I’m sitting in the cage. A cage with a red hot 130
I’m touched by the «painful» honesty with which he gives despair and doubt a face. Lions attack a woman. They tear her to pieces and take her from all sides. I identify with the woman and the cruelty that befalls her, but I also sympathize with the dual image of the lion. Symbol of power and yet victim of his desires, his fate. I cannot read this drawing as a form of bestiality, but rather I see the lion as the alpha male. I feel the pain of the body torn to pieces, I read the despair in her face. In every drawing other «wounds» arise. Wounds that transcend the physical pain. Spiritual harm,
which he can only make legible in physical pain. The lion, king of the animals, bites with teeth like a «golden crown». In one drawing he looks at us helplessly as if begging for forgiveness, slave to himself. In another he is the most powerful, rearing on his hind legs with erect member, devouring the woman. In another series of La Dame aux lions, 1996, I see the woman pressed against the ground while being raped by a lion with seven tails, like a seven-armed candelabra. Here the lion has another meaning.
The large bodies show swollen bellies, covered with small wounds from which grows a powerful parasite resembling the roots of an ivy plant. Only here the roots are red, like bloodfilled veins, covered with small barbed needles, that seem to want to attach themselves to anything, anywhere. Together the parasites are so strong they drag the entire body down, to anchor themselves in the ground, become one with the earth. They are far stronger than just one body can be. The body as a breeding ground, as food for an unstoppable parasite. In my subconscious, the child did not grow in me, but from me. Probably in order to be able to control it and prune it where necessary.
Seven means completeness, perfection, the finishing of a cycle. The number 7 in the Bible is a symbol of power. However, seven is also the number of Satan, who uses it in an effort The Wound, 2011 to copy divine perfection. In the series of drawings The Wound, 2011, I drew the wound as something formless as For me the lion here has something «Divine.» I searched to give pain a shape. The woman should consider herself blessed. I compare her to the Spanish mystic Theresa of Spiritual pain, which can never exist of itself, Avila (1515–1581), who gives a painfully but always flows outward in a form of bodily pain. The deep dark red for blood, the pencil realistic description of her visionary religious drawing on top, as if redrawing the wound ecstasies. in another place. The black parts of the drawing, «This spear, I thought, he drove into my heart worked and reworked to the point of several times, and he penetrated into my destruction, like black holes into which all entrails. When he pulled the spear out of me, he seemed to pull them out also and I remained knowledge disappears. behind, completely consumed by a burning The exaggerated scale of the wound, covering love for God. The pain was so terrible I had to groan several times. Nevertheless, the the entire sheet, shows the wound in supersweetness caused by this pain was so extreme human proportions, uncontainable within our that it is impossible anyone would wish it bodily limitations. The wound, also as to stop, nor could anyone be satisfied with something positive. The pain after giving birth anything less than God. …» purifies the wound. We allow the wound to be licked shut by those dear to us, thus forming This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, the scar, a visible memory of the wound. although the body to some extent shares in it… even to an important extent. I find it important to cite the words of the mystic because she Romeu, ‹my deer,› 2010–2011 allowed me to view the drawings in a different light. I exchange God for Satan. I compare Reading Ovid’s myth of Diana and Actaeon the penetration of the woman by the mighty inspired these drawings. lion with the arrow of the angel. No spiritual «Diana wished she had arrows at hand. Instead pain without physical pain, visible and tangible she used just what she had: she caught up a in every drawing. handful of water and drenched his face. And as she cast the water of revenge that soaked the young man’s hair, the goddess said in words Parasiet, 1997 that were harbingers of his coming ruin: ‹Now go, feel free to say that you have seen the The small wounds on the female body in the goddess without veils—if you can speak.› series La Dame aux lions, 1996, reminded me of There were no other threats. But then she set a the series I made that same period: Parasiet, mature stag’s horns firm on the head she had 1997. I was pregnant with my first son. I made drenched; she lengthened out his neck; made them then, but never understood them I now his ear-tips sharp at the top, changed his hands realize. The restlessness and doubt I experienced and feet, made his arms into long legs, and while the child was growing inside me must covered his body with a spotted hide. And then have provoked these drawings. The realization she added fear. And the hero of Thebes took something was developing in me that had no flight and he was amazed at how much speed distinct image yet. An irreversible growing that he had. Then, when he saw his head and his horns reflected in a clear stream, he tried to say: left me wondering where it would lead me. 131
‹Wretched me,› but had no voice. He could only groan. And tears ran down a face that had been transformed. Only his mind remained unchanged.» The myth ends in catastrophy. Actaeon is torn apart by his own hounds. Unable to produce human sound, his dogs no longer recognize their names. Actaeon’s roar is no different from any other hounded deer.
are soaked with the blood of wild beasts. When Aurora on her saffron chariot brings us a new day, we shall continue the hunt. Now the sun stands high, right midway along its path, and cracks the fields with its scorching heat. It is time to stop and carry back the knotted nets.›» The hunter’s ultimate sense of bliss. To have caught all that had to be caught. Victory. Followed by the need to rest, to cleanse and empty oneself. The yearning for purity stands in total contrast to the earlier urge to destroy, but it is the only answer.
The stag’s metamorphosis is a paradox: his majestic rack of antlers seduces the entire forest but also singles him out for inevitable death. Especially the enormous antlers were my Berlinde De Bruyckere main inspiration: the strength it takes to carry them, to dash with them through the forest, followed by the humiliation of shedding them year after year. In the Romeu, ‹my deer,› 2010–2011 drawings I explore the many moods of passion. The antlers, ultimate symbol of seduction, also embody destruction. They are attached to your body, they grow from your body assuming infinite proportions preventing you from standing straight. The antlers turn into branches, roots, straining to return into the soil, holding you down, dominating you, taming you. I asked my model, the dancer Romeu, to adopt different poses with the antlers I had made out of brittle wax. To express in his movements the fragility of the antlers, his urge to hold on to them while at the same time wanting to tear them out, knowing that this symbol of seduction will cause his ultimate downfall. A passion this grand will consume you. And yet you have no choice. To exclude passion is to castrate, is to deprive man of one of his deepest needs: the desire to love and the suffering it entails. My drawings express our incapability to control our passions. Romeu’s struggle with the antlers grew into a spontaneous dance performance. Forgetting how fragile the wax antlers were, the dancer ultimately shattered them, «accidentally,» leaving us all stunned. It was the only possible ending to the performance. Another extract from Ovid further elucidates the relation between Eros and violence captured in the drawings. «And now the mountain slopes were stained with blood of many kinds of animals, noon had come and all shadows had grown short, the sun was at the mid-point of its course, when Actaeon spoke calm and quiet words to his band of companions that roamed the hunting grounds: ‹My comrades, we have had good luck today, that’s enough, our nets and spears 132
1 Philippe Vandenberg, On his way in a cage is a man, his hands red, manuscript, reading for the Foundation of Psychoanalysis and Culture, 17 October 1998, Bruges. 2 Ibidem.
133
Philippe Vandenberg and Berlinde De Bruyckere The pairing of Philippe Vandenberg’s and Berlinde De Bruyckere’s drawings in this catalog is the result of a series of visits Berlinde made to Philippe’s studio at the invitation of the Philippe Vandenberg Estate. Berlinde, age 48, is one of Belgium’s established artists and is best known for her abject and corporeal sculptures of contorted human and equine figures. Philippe, a restless painter and prolific drawer, who tragically passed away in 2009 at the age of 57, represents a slightly older generation of Belgian artist for whom art, life, pain and doubt were inextricably intertwined. Although Berlinde’s and Philippe’s drawings stylistically couldn’t be more different, both artists share certain experiential and philosophical similarities. First, each had early formative childhood encounters with old master paintings and religious iconography that left lasting impressions. Secondly, they share similar preoccupations with how personal doubt and despair, sexuality, death, and the darker side of human nature play out in aesthetics and in the reception of the artwork by the viewer.
in the library as an escape from the nuns and the issues she experienced at school. It was here that she became familiar with the history of Catholic art and iconography. In her later teenage years she began visiting museums and experiencing specific paintings, like Rogier van der Weyden’s Pietà (1441) at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, gave her a deep understanding that art could transmit strong emotions to the individual viewer.
Drawing Vandenberg produced thousands of drawings during his lifetime. His work ranged from figurative, to pure abstraction, to all text-based concrete work. Vandenberg says about his drawings, «I started drawing to escape from the oppression of daily life. Drawing gave me solace; it also provided me with a certain degree of security. It still does. As long as I am in studio, I feel safe and bolstered to create order in the chaos around me.» 3 Five highly charged series of drawings by Vandenberg are presented in this catalog. These serial drawings are all figurative and are all executed in a quick sketchy, cartoon-like style that fluidly moves from detail to abstraction from drawing to drawing. Several of these works are based on masterpieces Art History by other artists like The Entombment of Christ For Vandenberg, who was born in Ghent, his (1602–1604) by Caravaggio, the Martyrdom earliest mental images and creative output of St. Erasmus (1628–1629) by Nicolas Poussin were linked to religious icons. Vandenberg says, and the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1475) «The first impressive images that I saw where by Antonio Pollaiuolo. In these drawings, those in church: the crucifixion, the Stations of Vanderberg takes the frozen moment captured in these paintings and animates the scenes the Cross, the Madonna, the Pietà. Now I’m becoming increasingly conscious of how these to provide a more complex, modern and nuanced reading of these iconic Christian became basic symbols for me. Moreover, the images. Jan Vanden Berghe wrote, «One of drawings I made as a child were not real Philippe’s great feats of strength is that he children’s drawings, such as for Christmas or is able to endow these classic images of the old Mother’s Day, but they were heavily laden masters with an innovative, universal human from the very start. That has never changed.» 1 As an 11 year old, his visits to The Museum significance. Formally he preserves the of Fine Arts in Ghent produced a revelation for inheritance but he makes it timeless. He takes Philippe: «What I had been doing for years— the themes back to their origins, gives the flag drawing, sketching on bits of paper—was a another connotation: that of the deepest but human tradition.» 2 This deeper understanding also the most heart-rending empathy with the that art was connected to human history gave human condition.» 4 Vandenberg also performs blasphemous acts on these images by drawing Vandenberg a new found appreciation for the St. Erasmus in one frame with an erection «bewitching» paintings in the museum by during his disembowelment; adding cartoon Van de Woestyne, Bosch and Permeke that ultimately led him to pursue the life of an artist. dogs with wagging tongues, cacti, ducks and palm trees to the compositions, and in the De Bruyckere’s early experiences with art St. Sebastian series, he depicts the saint began in her home in Ghent and were more ejaculating and the executioners with erections auto-didactic. Her parents had a set of Artis while shooting their arrows. Historia on their bookshelf with volumes titled Flemish Primitives and Paintings from the Louvre In the Erotic Drawings / Indonesia, 1996 and Paintings from the Prado. Berlinde was Vandenberg’s scatological impulses are even able to lose herself for hours in these books more unbridled. He draws dogs copulating, women on crosses and lashed to trees and they offered a foundational exposure to a being masturbated on by multiple men, acts wide range of masterworks in reproduction. of bestiality and explicit acts of fellatio. At boarding school, which she attended form These images bristle with an urgent sense of the age of 5 to 16, she pored over art books 134
immediacy and dark humor. Although these works are provocative, Vandenberg’s intentions are more closely aligned with neutralizing evil rather than celebrating it. «By drawing evil you get a grip on it, trapped on the paper it loses strength. The drawing becomes a fetish that has to keep the demons temporarily in check, it has to offer protection against the threatening, often inhuman world outside.» 5
These drawings represent the passion that Actaeon feels when he sees Diana bathing nude in the forest while at the same time foreshadowing his ultimate demise. It is after all the fact that Diana punishes him for his transgression that makes him unrecognizable to his own hounds, which eventually maul him to death. I can see a direct line between these drawings and Vandenberg’s drawings of the La Dame aux lions, 1996, which depict a woman being mauled and raped by lions. In this series we also confront power, lust and the eroding of the divisions between the natural and human worlds. One last point I would like to make is that both Berlinde and Philippe want to puncture the permeable membrane between what is created and what is experienced. They are interested in how images can provide an almost mystical transformation between a sense of pain, emptiness and lack, and a feeling of spirituality, completeness and awareness. When we look at these artist’s drawings it is as if the whole world has become naked and now we as human beings can no longer keep anything hidden or unexpressed.
The works Berlinde has chosen from her own oeuvre in this catalog act as a counterpoint to and expansion on the themes proposed by the selection of Vanderberg’s drawings. Berlinde’s drawings are also always figurative and serial in nature; however, her style is more atmospheric and evocative than Vandenberg’s. Her brooding palette alternates between muddy charcoal and smeared dried blood. Her drawings have a tendency to circle around their content and register small perceptual and visual shifts that have the accumulative effect of watching something in slow motion from multiple vantage points. In an on-line interview I conducted with Berlinde she offered the following thoughts about her drawings: «The drawings are very intimate and occupy a prominent place in my work. They reflect my Brett Littman research into the relevance of an idea; they are Executive Director of The Drawing Center, where doubt is investigated. The drawings New York are always produced in series. A single drawing is insufficient to express the complexity of a feeling. Drawing is a slow process. I start a number of drawings simultaneously. Often with small shifts, differences that are not always clearly readable, I question myself while studying my themes in depth. In the course of the work I destroy drawings from each series, specifically those in which something has gone wrong, or those that have become overwrought. A drawing is the only way in which some ideas can be translated.» 6 In works like Parasiet, 1997, and Untitled, 2010–2011, Berlinde obscures or leaves out the details of the head and face of the subject. Her impulse to metaphorically «decapitate» and «blind» her subjects comes from her strong feelings about Flemish portraiture and its reliance on hairstyles, accessories, fashion and accoutrements in telling their stories. Her aesthetic is essentialist and in her drawings (and sculptures too) she is able to represent a more interior gaze that focuses on the uncontrollable, and sometimes shameful, inner thoughts that we all have, rather than on the external materialist trappings of subjectivity. Berlinde’s drawings also ply the thin line between Eros and Thanatos that we can clearly see in Vanderberg’s work as well. In Romeu, ‹my deer,› 2010–2011, which is based on Ovid’s myth of Diana and Actaeon, the figure sprouts antlers from his head and is portrayed as having a constant erection. 135
1 Philippe Vanderberg, Visite, Ghent: Museum Voor Schone Kunsten Gent, 2008, p. 37. 2 Ibidem, p. 37. 3 Ibidem, p. 43. 4 Jan Vanden Berghe, Gruesome possibilities (unpublished text), s.l., 2012. 5 Ibidem. 6 From an online interview conducted between Brett Littman and Berlinde De Bruyckere, October – December 2011.
This book accompanied the exhibition Philippe Vandenberg / Berlinde De Bruyckere. Innocence is precisely: never to avoid the worst. De Pont museum of contemporary art, Tilburg La Maison Rouge, Paris Editors Berlinde De Bruyckere and Estate Philippe Vandenberg Authors Berlinde De Bruyckere, Brett Littman Translation and Editing Jan Dumont, Irene Schaudies Photography Jan De Meester, Jan Mast, Thomas Muller Lithography Olivier Dengis Graphic Design and Editorial Support Thomas Mayfried and Swantje Grundler Published by Skira editore Copyrights 2012 for this edition: Berlinde De Bruyckere, Estate Philippe Vandenberg, Brett Littman, Skira editore Special thanks to Peter Buggenhout, Kurt De Boodt, Nele De Roo, Katrien Driesen, Piet Hoebeke, Paul Robbrecht, Jo Smet, Michaela Unterdörfer, Jan Vanden Berghe, Patrick Van Rossem and Hauser & Wirth With the support of the Flemish Government www.philippevandenberg.be The title of this publication is taken from Philippe Vandenberg, ‹Letter to the nigger› (2003), in: Philippe Vandenberg, «L’important c’est le kamikaze». Oeuvre 2000–2006, On Line & Musée Rimbaud, p. 59 All quotations in the essay by Berlinde De Bruyckere are based on the author’s free translation unless otherwise noted.
136
Philippe Vandenberg All works: Pencil on paper, 21 × 29.5 cm Berlinde De Bruyckere 089 Watercolor and pencil on paper 44.8 × 31.4 cm 090 Watercolor and pencil on paper 44.5 × 32 cm 091 Watercolor and pencil on paper 45 × 32.1 cm 092 Watercolor and pencil on paper 40.6 × 29.8 cm 093 Watercolor and pencil on paper 40.6 × 32 cm 095 Watercolor and pencil on paper 45.4 × 32.1 cm 097 Watercolor and pencil on paper 45.4 × 32.1 cm 098 Watercolor and pencil on paper 32.1 × 45.4 cm 100 Pencil on paper 24.8 × 33 cm 101 Collage and pencil on paper 24 × 33 cm 103 Collage and pencil on paper 20 × 31.75 cm 104 Collage, watercolor and pencil on paper 33 × 48.9 cm 105 Collage, watercolor and pencil on paper 33 × 48.9 cm 106 Collage, watercolor and pencil on paper 24.8 × 33 cm 109 Collage, watercolor and pencil on paper 31.75 × 24.8 cm 111 Collage, watercolor and pencil on paper 33.02 × 24.77 cm 112 Collage, watercolor and pencil on paper 32.4 × 24.77 cm 115 Collage, watercolor and pencil on paper 48.9 × 33 cm 117 Collage, watercolor and pencil on paper 48.9 × 33 cm 119 Collage, watercolor and pencil on paper 48.9 × 33 cm 121 Pencil and watercolor on paper 44.8 × 29.5 cm 122 Pencil and watercolor on paper 44.8 × 29.5 cm 123 Pencil and watercolor on paper 44.8 × 29.5 cm 124 Pencil, watercolor and gouache on paper 44.8 × 29.5 cm 125 Pencil and watercolor on paper 44.8 × 29.5 cm 126 Pencil, watercolor and Chinese ink on paper 44.8 × 29.5 cm
Beauty is what we can just barely endure at the adge of terror and we admire it so much because, unmoved , it deigns not to destroy us . Rainer Marie Rilke