Who's afraid of modern art?

KienhuisHoving is organizing an exhibition of the work of Tim Roeloffs, collages.

The motto of this exhibition: ‘Who's afraid of modern art' is derived from a painting by the American painter Barnett Newman (1905-1970) from 1967 which hangs in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum ‘(Who ‘s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue).’

From the end of the 1950s onwards Newman painted immense blocks of colour, sometimes interrupted by vertical lines in a different colour. The surroundings become submerged, as it were, in the colour of the paintings. Newman gave shape to colours.

His blocks of colour appear to be ideally suited to arousing an aversion to modern art as such. Exclamations such as ‘anyone can do that!’, or 'if that's art, then …' are commonly heard, which goes to show that not everyone recognizes the importance of Newman's work.

This is despite that fact that Newman's ‘Who’s Afraid’ was an entirely logical step in the history of art. Newman turned away from the traditional content of paintings, such as representation and texture, concentrating entirely on colour and its spatial portrayal. And by doing so, he brought a temporary halt to a trend that had begun around the middle of the nineteenth century.

Abstract art was born.

When organizing these modest exhibitions, the compilers asked themselves how the works on display relate to Newman's milestone in the history of art: is there affinity, or precisely the opposite? Looking at Newman's work, is there a continuing development of our understanding or are we harking back to earlier chapters in the history of art?

‘Born in Enschede in 1965 I travelled the world, where my sense of humour has been influenced by a thousand impressions of television, beer and daily life on the streets. Enschede, England, Bavaria, Mallorca, Portugal, Turkey, Belgium, France, Mexico, Cuba, the USA, the Czech Republic, Poland and Greece were my classrooms. Tacheles was my teacher.’

Tim Roeloffs on his sources of inspiration

At the moment that global traveller Tim Roeloffs (Enschede 1965) arrived in Berlin (1992), the city had just cast off the artificial division that had held it in its iron grip for almost forty-five years. Gone was the border between West and East Berlin. Gone was the distinction between the capitalist and the communist system. But the memories were still visible everywhere. The communist system had in fact imploded.

In the final years before ‘die Wende’ (1989) the demise of the system was already tangible in the gloomy atmosphere of the capital of the DDR, the eastern half of Berlin: many empty streets, where no-one knew precisely what was going on behind the historic facades. Although these façades had been reconstructed after the Second World War - the historic heart of the city is in East Berlin -, the splendid architecture could not disguise the harshness of life under the communist regime.

This ghost city changed overnight following ‘die Wende’, when the squatting community took possession of East Berlin. Huge buildings were put to use as apartments or studios, without a single authority taking exception. At best, the legitimate owners were living all over Europe and initially it did not occur to them to demand their property back.

Kunsthaus Tacheles was just such an initiative, where a collective of artists took over an old warehouse from 1907 on Oranienburger Strasse, or rather what was left of it after war and communism. It is in fact one large ruin housing not only shops, but also a former cinema. The squatters came to live and work there. In their art, they wanted ‘tacheles reden’, a Yiddish phrase meaning 'to speak clearly'. The Kunsthaus Tacheles is in the middle of the city's old Jewish quarter, and developed into the heart of a hip, underground culture.

Tim too became inspired by this movement. Following his arrival in Berlin he took on all kinds of jobs, including giving tennis lessons, his original profession. Then quite by chance he came across in some old rubbish the paraphernalia of a 'doka', a darkroom, and discovered his passion: photography. He combined his photographs with texts, images and advertisements from newspapers and magazines, supplemented by anything that caught his eye during his walks through the city - preferably with his dog Pivo -: wrappings, labels, empty cigarette packets from the former DDR and suchlike. This led Tim to develop his own collage art (‘collage’ refers to the French verb ‘coller’, meaning 'to stick' or 'to adhere') in his own style in which - how could it be otherwise - Pivo often plays a central role. At first sight his studio appears to be total chaos, but if you look more closely at his website, for example, which has an interview with Tim in his studio, you will see the raw materials for Tim's art: piles of magazines, photographs and books. Other visual material and requisites are kept carefully sorted in crates against the wall.

In his studio Tim works in perfect solitude to convey his impressions of the real world around him in his own descriptive language.

Tim's art quickly attracted attention; so much so that he was invited to move to the Kunsthaus with his art when a new gallery, or rather a sales area, became available in Tacheles. That was in 1995, and now Tim is the main driving force behind the Kunsthaus (which incidentally continues to be earmarked for demolition).

Tim has witnessed how Western consumer society is slowly but surely taking over former East Berlin. In his work, Tim records aspects of this process with a keen eye; you could say he speaks ‘tacheles’. Whether it concerns social abuses or politics, Tim's work always hits home, sometimes ironic, then shocking, but always with a humorous undertone. His art is crammed with images. Not surprising for an artist who lives and works at a time in which, unlike in the past, people are constantly bombarded with images.

But this ‘horror vacui’, or the fear of a vacuum, doesn't always make it easy to interpret Tim’s work. Besides, the observer must have a considerable level of social involvement and a thorough understanding of history, particularly that of Berlin, the history of art, literature (including the Bible), cinema and architecture to understand his art.

As an illustration, take the artwork entitled: ‘Bonjour Tristesse’, in which three women are depicted wearing scarves on their heads, but only their heads and shoulders are visible. An image that is relatively easy to understand. One holds a broom, another a shovel. I feel I recognize them as figures found in the art of the DDR known as 'social realism', an art movement whose role was to express the excellence of the ideal socialist state. However, the heads appear to have been manipulated by Tim: two women are smiling. The title ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ is an allusion to the book from 1965 by Françoise Sagan, which created such a sensation at the time because of its open description of a free and exuberant lifestyle, despite which the leading roles could not avoid their tragic fate. What is Tim trying to say with his ‘Bonjour Tristesse’? That the women who carry out heavy (male) work with their own hands for the benefit of a socialist society will be toppled from their pedestal? Is it a farewell to the socialist ideal? Is it finally to have done with external appearances?

The art historian in me sees a number of possible meanings.

A similar work bears the title: ‘Desperate house wives’. Once again women are depicted within the context of social realism, this time holding a spade, hammer and axe. One woman looks into the distance, shielding her eyes from the sun. A large orange sphere can be seen in the background.

The title refers to the well-known American soap series about a group of women living in a quiet suburb of an American city. The initial impression is that life is harmonious and well-ordered, but gradually it becomes clear that behind every door a secret, mystery or crime is being played out.

Is Tim’s art an allusion to the unmasking of East Berlin's political and social system? The women in that system appeared to be idealistic, but maybe or possibly were in fact desperate. History has at any rate taught us that not everything was rosy under the communist system.

And the we have the phenomenon of Pivo, Tim’s dog. Tim himself explains the use of his dog in his art by the fact that his could not afford expensive photographic models. An accidental but fascinating explanation. Pivo with a human body looks just like Anubis, the Egyptian God of the Dead, although there the head is in fact one of a jackal. During the Middle Ages it was believed that cynocephali, humans with dog-heads, lived on the very edges of the world. The dog stands for loyalty and devotion. The images of Pivo, sometimes more than one in a single work of art, allows the observer to concentrate more on the action itself being depicted. At the same time the observer is challenged to take the place of Pivo and become part of the action.

Tim cuts and pastes images on card and assembles them into large artworks. And massive works they are, at least as far as the originals are concerned, because as a true child of his time he uses digital techniques to reproduce the originals to any desired size. Most of Tim's admirers therefore only know his work from the reproductions and assume that he is particularly skilful in computer techniques. This, however, is not the case at all, he makes each original in three dimensions first.

Tim is following a major tradition in the history of art with his work. The technique he uses harks back to Cubism (1906-1920), the major twentieth-century movement that brought an end to the traditional way of looking at art. Instead of carefully composed artworks in perspective (with horizon and vanishing point), Cubism emerged as a direct representation of what was going on in the head of the artist as he records reality. Tim does just the same, as we see in the bizarre flights of fancy in his collages, the fragmentation and his own mix of colours. He himself says that his work lacks ‘Tiefe’, or depth. It is simply ‘one-on-one’, which is correct in so far as any formal perspective is lacking. However, by making cut-outs and with the clever use of large and small, foreground and background and the depth already inherent in the cut-outs, Tim's works do show some depth.

In terms of attitude, Tim is a genuine Dadaist. He himself says he draws inspiration from the painters Otto Dix (1891-1969) and George Grosz (1893-1959), due undoubtedly to their satirical representations of metropolitan night life.

Dadaists were the artists who after 1916 deliberately aimed to be irrational and rejected general laws in art. These were artists who couldn't care less about the artistic establishment, and just as Tim were cheerful 'alternative thinkers'.

This makes Tim part of a rich tradition linking him to John Heartfield (1891-1968) who, born as Helmut Herzfeld, founded the Dada movement in Berlin in 1919 and is regarded as the pioneer of photo montage. But also to Neo-Dadaists such as Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), the assemblage artist who believed that the observer had to be actively involved in the creative process. Or Richard Hamilton (1922-present) whose collages full of visual advertising language forged a path towards Pop Art.

Tim shares with Pop Art the direct focus on the observer, without explanation or use of irony as a style element necessary to obtain a good understanding of the work. But where pop part is in fact highly superficial and without any further message, Tim's work is one big message. His visualized observations are exclamation marks, as it were. Exclamation marks which prompt us observers to think about the situations or wrongs being portrayed.

Good art does not provide answers, but poses questions. And that is what Tim Roeloffs does in his work. And the way he does that, namely by combining many images in a single work (to produce a state of turmoil, as it were) makes him a highly involved and contemporary artist.

Frans Jozef Art Historian & Désirée van der Vaart

Mei 2011

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