The Art of Nihilism

- Thinking an Exhibition by Squire Broel -

A circle of dirty earth spread on the wooden floor lit by a spotlight from above. It is both spread and anxiously gathered together in a perfect disc shape. Painted fabrics hang on the walls. Cottons and vilts. Painted upon the fabrics are cut-through views of flowers. Views, right to the construction plan of nature, painted on a product from the nature factory, the cottons. Or is it a view to the construction plan of creation? In sofar it is a technical product, that it shows the displacedness of all the artworks. It doesn’t belong in here. Maybe it shows even its non-placeness. Somehow these pieces don’t like places at all. They have flown away from their origin. 

The flowers are cut between the roots and its blossoms. What do we see in this incision? Circles formed around a hollow centre. We see the empty canals where we ought to see the streams of life flowing from the roots up to the blossoms. But these paintings are aware: when we see the flowers life-canals, we only see the emptiness of the canals, not the streaming life. The life has gone because it has been cut through. The question can be raised, “Was life really ever there?” Or is it our melancholy expecting to see life in there? Melancholy to era’s which never were real.

We don’t see the blossom and we don’t see the roots. Nor do we see its life. We see the moment of its separation. The painting doesn’t complain about the moment of severing, and neither does the circle of dirty earth.  The circle suggests a place to root upon. But under the half-foot of black dirt there are borders imposed by the floor and the room. This suggestion of rooting can be a comforting illusion but that doesn’t make this dirt true ground. So, what has it left to us? Has it left us our roots? Has it left us our blossoms? No, these have been cut as well.

We are left with a cold, cut-through scientific worldview wrought with formulas, laws and equalities to rule our lives in very detailed and precise measurements. They rule even more precisely than is ever possible to paint. We have to be ruled by very detailed formulas and laws when we are cut-through. With that cutting action we are changed into perfect controllable pipelines of processes. We have to keep ‘going forward’ and when does this movement stop? As soon as we realize we’re cut-through people without roots and blossoms we have to keep moving to give ourselves the illusion of life. As soon as we stop moving, we’ll see the illusion of modernity. We will see ourselves plainly without roots or blossoms. At that moment we’ll see ourselves as a construction plan with hollow pipelines where once life itself flowed. But most likely we will never see it and therefore may conclude that life is nothing more than something chemical. Life is not alive (anymore).

Yet we shouldn’t despair because art still has its comforting elements. It still offers an escape in its crafts. But this art is honest - it stops the movement. It offers no escape. It has no comforting crafty, well-done element. It freezes the moving process. It uncovers the moving process and shows its illusion as a cut-through moment which has no inner life at all. Regularly the arts will show the movement in its finest side. It shows the never-ending stream of experiences.

Some of the painted fabrics are camouflage cotton that hang naked on the wall. Only part of each surface had been manipulated by the artist. What purpose has a square piece of camouflage cotton on a white wall? It is out of its element. Out of its imitating function is it poor and senseless. The imitation has no meaning outside the imitated.

Does it show us our intentions to hide ourselves in what nature gives us: the material of cotton? No, for that’s nothing more than the material. More camouflaging are the colours we imitate. Nature foresees in colours we need to imitate now because nature is no longer a living creation, but rather a dead space of relations. It will offer nothing else than its calculated techniques to imitate. We will only build up relationships by imitating. In our imitations we camouflage ourselves. In our imitations we even deny what we cannot deny: being created and being created alive. Stop now. Who have we become? A structure of hollow relationships without characteristics? In this white space even an imitation is without meaning. And that’s why our last job - building up relationships - seems so nihilistic.

We have here a nature that has become empty inside. There is no life stream and therefore nature is dead. We have only an outside to imitate. We see its colours and structures. But when the flower has been cut through, the blossom bows her head and dies. The camouflage cotton wants to imitate nature. But nature lost every meaning to life. It’s not alive anymore. Therefore is it impossible to imitate something wich has been cut-through. There’s only the moment of incision that is left to us.

Copying the techniques of nature has never brought our minds the treasures of life. There is - visually - emptiness inside. Therefore we focus on the outside. We camouflage our outside in fluid natural colours. And to depatternize this flat structure, arts are laid upon it as the most upper layer of our culture. It shows art being a product of the elites. Art is the upper layer. But the contradiction shows up here. This artist doesn’t depict our cultural state, but focuses on our lack of a cultural and rooted life.  In his work he understands the fact that there is no elite in the will to be an elite. He focuses on our cut-through life, which is not alive (anymore).

Tom Zwitser