Myth and metamorphosis. Modernism in the work of Ton Kraayeveld
Bertus Pieters
Reflections on the modernism of the twentieth century, particularly its second half, play an important role in the work of Ton Kraayeveld. The cultural movement of modernism played a crucial role in shaping the twentieth century with its belief in social engineering, standardisation, registration, efficiency and technological progress. Although all this also led to huge disasters – in Europe mainly in the first half of the century – and although there were always objections of a psychological, social, and artistic nature, modernism in all its expressions reached its most successful phase in the spirit of reconstruction after the Second World War. To such an extent that modernist standards still prevail, even though we are by now living in a totally different cultural era. Kraayeveld shows himself to be not so much a fierce opponent of modernism; he does see a certain emptiness in it, from which, however, new constellations develop in his work. He turns modernism into a postmodern or even postpostmodern myth. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) seems to be his ever-present witness and Kafka’s almost covert humour is wonderfully suited to Kraayeveld’s mythologies. Even when a historic strongman like Mao Zedong (1893-1976) pops up in Kraayeveld’s work, the charisma of the Chinese leader seems wholly subjected to the Kafkaesque silent humour of Kraayeveld’s myths. Myths were critically examined by the French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) shortly after the Second World War. He had a sharp eye for the culture of his own time and dissected several aspects of it methodically and in detail. However, looking at Kraayeveld’s work one sees that Barthes’ view, especially concerning myths, was mainly relevant to his own time and that great shifts have taken place since then, of which Kraayeveld’s work is in turn a witness. Kraayeveld is mainly a painter. Although it has repeatedly been declared dead in modernist times and those that followed, painting actually drifts along with the waves and the winds. Painting is a highly opportunistic discipline, especially because it is both testimony and imagination, and technically it is very versatile. Paint is patient and pliable, and allows itself to be treated according to the circumstances.
For Kraayeveld, several events in his life have played a decisive role for his paintings. For instance a residency in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, two decades ago, which led to more social consciousness in his work. At such a moment, several things seem to converge, such as – in this case – the light and the colours, the influence of modernism on colonialism and its aftermath etc. Another decisive moment was the stubborn appreciation of a gallerist for a work consisting of short words, which Kraayeveld himself considered to be no more than a somewhat absurd oddity, a fixed element of his studio to derive inspiration and distraction from. It resulted in what by now has become an important aspect of his oeuvre: paintings with words. They involve very short words of not much more than four or sometimes five letters. Very short words are the mortar of our languages, they are like short leaps in time and space, both meaningful and meaningless. Something that’s very visible in his work at the moment is a visit to China a few years ago, even though the visit was brief and informal. Again, different aspects of this Chinese journey appear in his work: the formal vocabulary, – again – the use of modernism, visions of political power, etcetera.
An artist like Ton Kraayeveld, who was born in Western Europe in the fifties of the last century, found a world that had been fervently destroyed in the preceding decades. According to the modernist spirit of reconstruction in the fifties and sixties of the last century, the world could only get better after the disastrous first half of the century. Technological development would help the world to progress and the mere threat of efficient and total destruction would force peace and progress upon the world. The latter was not the only internal contradiction of post-war modern thinking that was taken for granted, no matter whether you believed in a capitalist democracy or the dictatorship of the proletariat. The people who operated these systems and who believed in this modernisation could only be in the right. They had to; after all, life and the future depended on it. The progress of the wellbeing of humankind could not wait.
In fact, every description of history and every memory is to some extent a myth, and this is definitely true in the case of modernism, as described above. No matter how painstakingly parts of history are reconstructed, in the end it is the mythology that results from it and often replaces it that shapes thinking, culture and therefore visual art. In many cases, visual art works with associations, and associations require memory and history, because associations work with myths. In any case, that is true of Kraayeveld’s work. The things he experiences in daily life, but especially during his residencies abroad, lodge themselves in his work and keep expanding the myths he tells. There are a number of things to which he returns time and again: the design of modernism, patterns, the visual language of power, and the spirit of Kafka that keeps returning in all kinds of shapes. This all sounds serious, but Kraayeveld’s visual language is wonderfully light-hearted. From modernism he inherited the language of the comic book, the culture of simple visual information, of film and practical arrangement. In his work, all those things have merged into a self-evident technique and subject matter. As much as his paintings are about their subject matter, they are also about colour and the treatment of paint.
Although one can say that his work, in the way it now meanders through the reality of the imagination, only reached its maturity at the beginning of the twenty-first century, its foundations can already be seen clearly in the last decades of the past century. Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) and Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) stumble upon each other in Kraayeveld’s early work, in the wake of the new expressive painting, especially in Germany, that became popular with young artists in the Netherlands in the eighties. Something of that wild painting can still be found in Kraayeveld’s work now and then, as if he sporadically still feels the need to evoke the chaos from which he distils and isolates his subjects. But he does so in a highly controlled manner. This can be seen particularly in a number of works on paper. Especially after his short stay in China, he allows chaos to enter those smaller works. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) also appears unexpectedly amid all the chinoiserie, although his work and that of Kraayeveld actually have little in common, apart from the fact that in Dutch Kraayeveld’s own name can trigger a random association with Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows.1 Nevertheless, Vincent in China (2019) shows him walking in his sun hat, against the background of a socialist-realist labourer and a profusion of pink-orange. In an untitled work on paper (2019), Buddha’s hand seems to create order in an even more chaotic background. In the painting Vincent Goes to China (2020), the painterly chaos is still somewhat present, but seems to have been tamed. Vincent, still bravely marching onwards in his sun hat, is now situated in a constellation of more or less Chinese things, against the background of two overlapping diamond patterns, possibly derived from the textile lining of an old-fashioned suitcase. Another faint echo of the wild painting of the eighties can perhaps also be found in the treatment of the paint in a number of paintings with short words, such as GO-FALL-UP-RISE (2020). In it, the brushstroke is clearly present in a seemingly unpolished way, in part to achieve a transparent effect for the words, which have been painted partly on top of each other. However, they also create a sense of movement in the words, as if they can change any moment.
Polke and Dürer mainly taught Kraayeveld how to structure. Structuring is a human act, or rather a way of thinking, that attempts to ward off chaos by means of fragmentation and categorisation. In the images too, the motto is: divide and rule! Polke’s raster-dot paintings, derived from the rasterisation of photos, played a role in this, as did his collage-like way of working, but also the way in which Dürer tried to capture perspective in a grid. In 1994 Kraayeveld wrote about an instructional woodcut by Dürer, which shows how the German Renaissance artist tries to capture the perspective of a reclining nude two-dimensionally: “Seeing how he looks at things, how he explores the shapes of the woman in front of him with his eye, and all around him frames, grids, objects and attributes, aids for perception and knowledge of reality.”2 This fascination for what Dürer is doing in his print, and what he shows in it, in fact remains of importance for Kraayeveld’s later work. The same holds true for the sentence that immediately follows in that text: “Permanent metamorphosis. Images stand for values and concepts, change into different images again. (…) What seemed immaterial at first, becomes really present until it returns to the essence of paint on canvas.”3 It would not be out of place as a motto for Kraayeveld’s work.
Such a statement might suggest a postmodernist agenda in Kraayeveld’s work. On the one hand such an agenda exists, on the other hand it does not. It is postmodern because Kraayeveld actually says that his work is not about the formal essence of images (although it is about “the essence of paint on canvas”), surfaces and expression, and the dialectics of innovation and progress, which modernist painting emphasised, but rather about the continuous metamorphosis of the painted image. For him this metamorphosis is not subject to innovation and progress, but it is an observation with which he approaches the here and now of art and visual language, maybe once partly inspired by Polke’s metamorphosis paintings, although Kraayeveld by no means practises alchemy. Kraayeveld’s work can be regarded as a comment on modernism – which would make it postmodern – but it leans heavily on the visual language of modernism at the same time. Although Kraayeveld confronts modernism, he does so with the language of modernism itself. Neither can one say that he despises the modernist things he pictures. His bus shelters, empty filing cabinets and modern armchairs have definitely been painted with devotion. It may seem a bit pointless to debate the isms that Kraayeveld’s work may or may not contain, but it also says something about how art nestles in the contradictions of its time. Therefore, the metamorphosising of art is not so much a postmodern belief, but rather something to which art always is and was subject. That it was precisely that aspect that was mentioned by Kraayeveld in 1994 is therefore on the one hand characteristic of his time, but the time also gave him the opportunity to again use and emphasise the metamorphosising aspect of art that had always been present already.
In the twentieth century, the symbol par excellence of metamorphosis is of course Kafka’s story Die Verwandlung, in which the protagonist wakes up one morning and finds that he has changed into a beetle.4 An echo of it might be seen in Kraayeveld’s more recent works with a scarab (Bug and Red Bug, 2019), in fact, given the excessive presence of Kafka in Kraayeveld’s work, the association is unavoidable. Kafka created his own myths and those have in turn become myths of Western culture. In that way they also play a role in Kraayeveld’s universe. However, in a way Kraayeveld’s scarabs are not Kafka’s beetle; they have become part of the myth that Kraayeveld creates himself, through the metamorphosis of images. In Kafka, the metamorphoses, the reversals that are often the inspiration for his works, are ominous events that challenge the actors to dig deeper into their own motivations, while they grow increasingly removed from them at the same time. In 1922, four years after the First World War, the first great disillusion of modernist progress, Kafka wrote in a note: “Wir graben den Schacht von Babel” (we are digging the shaft of Babel).5 In doing so, he referred explicitly to the Tower of Babel and the myth of the confusion of languages that arose there. Such a tower, for the building of which humankind was punished mercilessly by a jealous God, at least offered a view and the different languages that emerged led to different options for expression. Kafka turned the myth on its head: here it is no God who punishes but humankind itself that drives itself into the dark, and confusion of languages is reversed into muteness; humans in a dark no man’s land that is nevertheless created by humans themselves. The logic does not follow the laws of modernist progress, but follows only itself and in that way also metamorphosises. For Kraayeveld, Kafka seems to have become an ally in the myth that the writer has created with his disastrous reversals. Although Kraayeveld avoids the often unpleasant endings of Kafka’s stories, he cherishes the reversals, the metamorphoses, in order to let them follow their own logic. In the same way, Kafka’s hat (Kafka’s Hat, 2016), his clothes or other things that bear a relationship with him (for example, K.’s Shoes, 2019) can turn up unexpectedly in Kraayeveld’s work. But the alliance goes further than such externals. An imaginary medal for reaching the Open-Air Theatre of Oklahoma of the protagonist of Kafka’s American novel also features in his work sometimes (for example in K. on Journey, 2013), more often than not accompanied by all kinds of paraphernalia of modernist life. Scenes from Orson Welles’ film The Trial (1962), based on Kafka’s Der Prozess, can also appear unexpectedly in Kraayeveld’s works. That film was made in the heyday of the modernism of the uncompromising philosophy of progress, after the Second World War. Therefore Kraayeveld’s painting Citizen K. (2018) shows lead actor Anthony Perkins in a room with desks – densely crowded in the film, wholly deserted in the painting – that can only be identified as modernist.
No matter whether it’s Kafka and his paraphernalia, bus shelters (for example Fictional Nomads, 2012), empty filing cabinets (for example Free File, 2012), a Cape Dutch façade (for example Cape Dutch, 2009), an empty corridor in an office building (for example Corridor, 2011), an empty hotel lobby (such as Chinese Lobby, 2019), a portrait of Moritz Schreber (Portrait of Dr. Schreber, 2015), the scholar from Leipzig after whom later allotments were named in Leipzig and who wrote influential books about children’s upbringing, no matter whether it’s a computer screen (for example Screen, 2017), short words that turn up as Act of Presence in 2013, the statue of Mao (for example Mao Greets You, 2020), the interior from a photo by Jeff Wall (Smash Stage, 2017), they all seem to become elements of the same mythology in which all things, no matter how disparate, sooner or later bite in each other’s tails.6 In Kraayeveld’s work Kafka, maker of myths that seem more familiar than reality, becomes a mysterious but still familiar boy-next-door, a keeper of Kraayeveld’s mythology of humans as fatally progressive beings who rule in empty spaces, corridors, offices, prison cells, filing cabinets, in travelling, in waiting areas and hotel lobbies. This is done with a refined use of colour and paint and with mild irony.
It is as if that mild irony is accompanied by a certain kind of doubt, because to what extent can a myth really approach reality? Roland Barthes already brooded over this in his collection of essays Mythologies.7 Here is not the place for an in-depth discussion of the argument that Barthes unfolds so extensively and in some places rather ponderously. Nevertheless there are interfaces – be it in the form of contradictions – between Barthes’ ideas and Kraayeveld’s work. For example, Barthes emphasises that the subject that is shown in an image can in itself be rich in meanings, but that the representation impoverishes its meaning, narrows it down to what wants to be expressed by it: the myth. The myth excludes a number of meanings of the subject. To a certain extent, that is also the starting point of the myths that Kraayeveld creates, but he turns things around. Take for instance the paintings of beetles mentioned earlier. As said before, one cannot ignore the meaning that the beetle has in Kafka’s Die Verwandlung. What is more, the model for the beetle turns out to be a thing from Kafka’s desk, an object to which he apparently felt attached. At the same time, however, Kraayeveld does not impose the narrowing down of that myth on the viewer. He concentrates on the depiction of the object and explains that he considered the earlier grey version not really outspoken enough and therefore made the red version. That is a painterly argument that already passes by the starting point of Kafka’s beetle, whether it is about the concrete object or Kafka’s story. There is a metamorphosis, in which the stylised dung beetle gets a life of its own, although he does not deny the mythology of its existence in the Kafka constellation. Thus at first sight the myth may seem to narrow down, but in Kraayeveld’s hands it expands again. Of course, such a beetle is originally just an insect. In terms of colours, the beetles are also far removed from Kafka’s “old dung beetle”. Then one is also struck by their refined colour scheme and treatment of colour. Kraayeveld lets the colours do their work, without using varnish. The pigments have to do their work themselves, like in all paintings by Kraayeveld. The gloss is depicted by him by means of paint. Due to skimming light, the gloss of the varnish would also too much obscure the view of the painted gloss of the shapes. Adding a layer of varnish would actually add a metamorphosis that would wipe out all other possible metamorphoses in the paintings. However, this is not about making the reality of the images of the beetle “more real”, Kraayeveld’s way of depicting is after all totally artificial, as artificial as the beetles are themselves. They are memories of a real beetle and of an ornamental trinket, that as such can evoke different memories and associations in turn, whether these involve the dung beetle, the scarab worshipped in ancient Egypt, the beetle of Die Verwandlung or an individual memory of the viewer that mixes with the grey and red of the painted depictions, each of which can in its turn evoke its own emotional associations and memories. In fact, the myth is here as full or empty as the viewer wishes, in contrast with what Barthes sees as the functioning of the myth. Of course Barthes wrote his essays in the era of the heyday of modernism; an era in which images that dealt with contemporary living conditions had a strong tendency to be one-sided in their message. By now we have even moved beyond postmodernism, and images have received not so much a different meaning as one that is more pluralistic. This is also what makes images controversial at the moment: they are one-sided for the focused viewer, but at the same time multifaceted for other viewers. Kraayeveld’s mythologies live in this postpostmodern world. In fact, Kraayeveld fully understands what Barthes also understood, but as he metamorphosises the culture in which Barthes lived, he actually also metamorphosises his theory about myths.
At the end of the last essay in his book, Barthes introduces the “mythologist”: someone who sees the myths in reality, and he regards him as an isolated, pitiable character. “His language is a metalanguage, it does nothing; at most it reveals, and then again, for whom?”, Barthes laments.8 According to Barthes, the mythologist also isolates himself from society because he cannot embrace and experience myth. That is to say: the mythologist can experience myth, but at the same time realises that it is a myth. In other words: the mythologist keeps his distance from reality, because he knows that it is a myth, if he engages with it the myth falls apart and reality becomes empty. Is Kraayeveld that kind of mythologist? That seems to be almost a personal matter, a matter of character. But it is not. Because again, Barthes’ world and his ideas about mythology have changed, one can safely say metamorphosised. Kraayeveld himself contributes to that by painting. For instance, there was a time when every depiction of Mao Zedong was clearly a myth that was interpreted by his supporters and opponents in opposite but always one-sided ways. He was the charismatic Great Helmsman who enabled China to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, or alternatively the personification of the communist threat to the world. His portrait perfectly fitted the modernist world order. Andy Warhol (1928-1987) already gnawed away at those one-sided myths to some extent with his well-known screen print of Mao’s portrait, by depicting the Chinese leader as just a well-known icon.8 In his depictions of Mao, Kraayeveld again reminds one of the earlier one-sided myths, but Mao’s image is mixed with the history that came after Mao. Thus one can encounter Mao’s shadow in a Chinese hotel lobby among all kinds of smaller things, for instance a number of short words again (Chinese Lobby 2, 2021). Like Mao, these words have on the one hand been removed from their meanings, but at the same time they are significant in their context. At the front on the right there is the word “REAL”, as if to remind the viewer that the scene is “real”, but the remark in itself makes one suspect the opposite. Or maybe not even the opposite but something that can be more ambiguous. Thus the composition reminds one of perspective again, just like Dürer engaged with it once. On the right, in front of a passage, there is the word “FILE”, and now Kafka seems to creep into this perspective study again, because what file is this about? The viewer’s file? That of the unsuspecting visitor of the hotel? Have they done something wrong without knowing it? Does a file exist at all? Thus, a network of meanings unfolds when one views the painting for a longer time, meanings that can stand alone together but, given the rest of Kraayeveld’s oeuvre, also expand to his other works and so continue the metamorphosis. What Barthes considered pitiable and isolated in modernist times, has in Kraayeveld’s postpostmodern times metamorphosised into richness. Barthes has been proved right insofar as the modernism in which he lived has left behind a void, especially if one believes Kraayeveld’s empty filing cabinets. An empty culture that lives on in the angularity and supposed efficiency not just of its cultural symbols – the hotel lobby, the office room, the filing cabinet, the waiting room, the grid – but also of its ideas, which continue to rule the world despite the fact that they have since long been undermined. Kraayeveld’s myths about it are expressed in a metalanguage, a language derived from modernism, but one cannot say that it does nothing. True, it reveals, but not just that. It shows the void, in order to fill it again immediately.
Notes:
1. Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890, oil on canvas, 50.5 x 100.5 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
2. Albrecht Dürer, illustrations from Underweysung der Messung, Nuremberg, 1525.
3.Ton Kraayeveld, ‘Realiteiten (naar Dürer)’, in: Ton Kraayeveld (ed.), Ooglijdersgasthuis. Een keuze uit het werk 1985-1999, Amsterdam, 1999, p. 7.
4.Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), novella written in 1912, first published in 1915 in the magazine Die weissen Blätter, first published in book form by Kurt Wolff, Leipzig, 1915.
5. Harald Bost,“Wir graben den Schacht von Babel”. Ein systematischer Einstieg in die Poesie Franz Kafkas, Tectum Verlag, Marburg, 2014, p. 1 ff.
6. The starting point for Smash Stage is: Jeff Wall (1946), Boxing, 2011, photograph, 215 x 295 cm.
7.Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1957.
8.«Sa parole est un méta-langage, elle n’agit rien; tout au plus dévoile-t-elle, et encore, pour qui? » Barthes, p. 230.
9. Andy Warhol, Mao, 1972, screen print in different versions, 91.4 x 91.4 cm.
Bertus Pieters, published in LABYRINTH, Ton Kraayeveld – Paintings and drawings
Jap Sam Books – ISBN 978-94-92852-62-5