Marinus Boezem

The Artist as an Object of Art (1962)

Marinus Boezem (1934, NL) belongs, together with Jan Dibbets and Ger van Elk, among the most important representatives of the Conceptual Art and Arte Povera movement in The Netherlands. In the 1960s, Boezem discovered that he could use elusive elements such as air, weather, wind, and light as visual materials and made a name with radical, immaterial works that were far ahead of their time.

The work The Artist As An Object Of Art (1962) shows the artist Marinus Boezem presenting himself, ironically, as an object of art.

In 1962, Marinus Boezem, with some irony towards being an artist, had his picture taken holding a garden hose and a piece of transparent material as attributes. The photographs were made by Pien Robijns. Three of these recordings remained intact. The first picture is a close-up of the artist’s face and shoulder area, completely enveloped in shiny plastic, through which his face is invisibly hidden. The second photo shows him standing against a gate with a writhing garden hose draped around him, and the aforementioned crumpled piece of plastic in his hand. The third photo, in which he is sitting cross-legged in the street with the garden hose surrounding him, is a document of an action in Gorinchem that shows the barricading of a street.

The images have the same aura as the Fluxus manifestations that were made at the same period wherein the pictures were taken. The compositions have a parallel with ‘Het eerste (voorlopige) a-dynamische manifest’, signed by Ger van Elk, Wim T. Schippers en Bob Wesdorp (Vrij Nederland, 30 December 1961, p.5), in which personal expression of the artist is looked upon ironically and shapelessness is praised