WILMA SÜTÖ: DO NOT STRUMBLE NOW…

I

A diabolical exercise in balance

Large-scale architectural installations are the speciality of Marjan Teeuwen, who is known as a sculptor and photographer. Given the current urbanization with the city functioning predominantly as a growth market for multinationals,[i] such a sentence tends to sound of capital and glamour, but glamour is quite the opposite of Teeuwen’s practice. She operates at a distance from glazed buildings and mirror façades. Her building materials consist of ordinary houses: a former snack bar with living space in ’s-Hertogenbosch; a group of terraced houses in Rotterdam South; a Russian wooden house in Siberia; a council housing apartment building in Amsterdam Slotervaart and, finally, more than a dozen apartments in Amsterdam North. The locations in themselves are an indication that we are not dealing with the most representative areas of the city here.

Caution is required when walking round in her installations, for Teeuwen works with condemned buildings and debris. She unleashes destructive forces, demolition in fact. This demolition is contained, transformed and organized just enough to remain upright and simultaneously act as a model, a symbol of demolition. The dwelling, with its front door, hallways, staircases and various rooms, is basically still there, but now as a glorified ruin. Against the ideal it once represented, to the residents of the building and even before that, when it was erected with the best social intentions, Teeuwen sets her own architectural typology. Rather than a cornerstone or personal refuge, the dwelling as she presents it is a treacherous area, comparable to the human mind: rich in hiding places, views and insights, but also in dark nooks and abysses.

The transformations executed by the contractor plus a small team of workers, including Teeuwen herself and following her instructions, imbue the house – and sometimes the entire block – with a strong inner and mental charge. This may sound abstract, but it is anything but vague. In accordance to the actual construction of the houses, the symbolism of this interior space is hard as stone, steel and concrete. Teeuwen is building a personal form of architecture parlante, in which the psychology of the house is revealed and can be read from the material, complete with scars and traces of violence. It cannot be denied that suffering has cut deeper than love here. The communication breakdown is expressed in grubby electric wires leading nowhere and a half-buried telephone horn; with a barely concealed, almost aggressive display of sexual symbolism a single stovepipe protrudes starkly, accentuating the ‘orgy of debris’[ii].

The block has been bared of all decoration, stripped to the bone. One tiled wall has remained erect and may be called an exception. Except for the main load-bearing walls and a minimum of circulation space, a large part of the skeleton has been destroyed – and thoroughly, too, for walls have been demolished in part or entirely, floors have been turned over or sawn in half. Sometimes they hang in diagonals between two floors; elsewhere they drop down perpendicularly. In those cases, the floor turns into a blank wall, blocking the view wall-to-wall and on eye level, a void gaping right at your feet: an abyss of chunks of concrete, with remnants of reinforcement sticking out on twisted iron bars.

Do not stumble now, is the motto. And apart from that: keep your eyes open, put your organ of balance on edge and stick out your antennae. A certain acrophobia makes itself felt – and this is only part of the disorienting effect on site, for it doesn’t stop with dropping floors. Everything is off balance here, and anything that still stands, topsy-turvy, consists of piled-up debris. The house has risen from its own remnants. Not entirely its own remnants, but almost. In Rotterdam South and Amsterdam North, Teeuwen also used recycled sheets of plastic. Given the dominant impression of crisis and trauma control, it is paradoxical that the plastic should shimmer. It spreads points of light among all the grit and debris, like sparks of hope in a deserted chapel. For the rest it is predominantly dusty and bleak, damp or, conversely, unpleasantly dry and dark, rather like in a tomb. Daylight has been pushed out, provisions such as electricity have been abolished. At the most, an occasional bare bulb burns, powered by long black cables from outside.

And still, in these ruins, these sublimated spaces, in which Teeuwen welcomes her guests, something else is felt besides emptiness, depth and havoc: a heightened degree of intensity, discipline and order. All planks, doors and doorposts, chunks of concrete, half and whole bricks, grit, glass and iron, roughly collected by Teeuwen according to type and colour. She turned these collections into stacking structures, semi-monochrome arrangements. These are the new buttresses and pillars in the room: architectural structures emanating from the house itself end giving it its new shape. These stacking structures, accumulations against the walls or indeed, replacing these walls, are reminiscent of diabolos. They have intersecting and zigzagging outlines. They expand, but can also recede sharply, creating chinks and gaps: perspectives that end abruptly in the darkness behind – as in a cave system or subterranean labyrinth.

Similar to diabolos these stacking structures, carrying and supporting this glorified ruin, stand for an exercise in balance. Teeuwen has put everything on edge. Order is found in disorder, but it is a diabolical harmony.

[i] See: ‘Making Cities: De stad van de toekomst’, broadcast of Tegenlicht, VPRO, 16 April 2012 http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/afleveringen/2011-2012/Smart-City-UnLtd-.html

[ii] During his opening speech, Ludo van Halen, curator of 20^th century art at Rijksmuseum, described the installation Verwoesst Huis op Noord, the former housing property on Wieringenwaardstraat in Amsterdam, as a combination of two extremes: an ‘orgy of debris’ and a three-dimensional still life.

 

 

II

Demolition towards the end of the capitalist dream

‘Their home would rarely be in order, but its disorder would be its greatest charm. They would hardly bother with it, they would live there. Their homely comfort would seem an established fact, a first given, a natural state of being.’

In his novel Things, A Story of the Sixties Georges Perec dwells on the Paris apartment of his two protagonists Jérome and Sylvie, who earn their money in the world of advertising, for many pages. They give a face to the first luxury generation after the Second World War. Perec directs our gaze across the grey carpeting in the long, high, narrow hallway of their home, and from there it goes on: across the ‘light wooden cupboards with shiny copper hinges’, the prints on the wall and the curtains, to the living room, where the carpeting would make way ‘for an almost yellow parquet floor partly hidden under three carpets in matt colours’. Using a detailed voyeurism he drives us deeper and deeper into the house, yet all precision and suggested luxury cannot disguise the fact that his is a conditional voyeurism. The apartment full of antique furniture and luxurious accessories lightening up in the dusk is a fantasy. Nowhere does the author confirm the material illusion he evokes; on the contrary, he consistently inflects the verb ‘to be’ indirectly: the house would look like that, yes, if Jérome and Sylvie’s dreams were to come true, but this is not the case. In their pursuit of wealth, luxury and comfort these petty heroes of consumer society are mercilessly confronted with the emptiness of their materialism.

‘No plan would be impossible for them. They would know no resentment, bitterness or envy, for their financial means and their desires would be in harmony with each other in every way.’ Sure, it would be that harmonious, if, alas, it were not different. In the epilogue, in which Perec takes stock for Jérome and Sylvie, he exclusively uses the future tense, which sounds like an ominous prediction: ‘They will run away.’ And: ‘The journey will be pleasant for a long time’, but: ‘The diner they will be served will be downright tasteless.’ Perec even concludes his sociological tale with a moral, a quotation of Karl Marx, in which that truth is not recommended as a palpable result but as a search: ‘Searching for the truth has to be truthful itself.’

Things, A Story of the Sixties was published in 1965. With the hindsight of half a century its clear-cut moralism may deviate from current standards, but this does not make the book, or its moralism, any less compelling. On the contrary: the global financial crisis that followed the implosion of the American housing market in 2008 made the failure of life fulfillment through possessions all the more topical. While Perec describes his critique of consumerism sufficiently subtle and with much feeling for the magnetic attraction of ‘things’, in Teeuwen’s case a similar core of criticism leads to demolition. In her work, the story from the 1960s gets a visual sequel, seen from the other side of the spectrum: at the beginning of the 21^st century, towards the end of the capitalist dream.

Sometimes timing is telling. After all, parallel to the outbreak of the crisis in 2008 Teeuwen started in her own city of residence ’s-Hertogenbosch with the first installment of what has since grown into the famous series Destroyed House, culminating in the treatment of fourteen apartments at once in Amsterdam North (2014). It is hard not to consider this expansive urge to dismantle and this sublimation of destruction a comment of a perverted grab culture and the destruction of the welfare state. Particularly sour is the realization that our malaise still represents other people’s dream world: Teeuwen’s destroyed houses can also be viewed as monuments for all migrants who were driven from their homes by force of arms. While Teeuwen opens existential abysses in her installations that transcend place and time, current affairs also lend an inescapable context to her work.

Social consciousness is also evident in the work’s kinship to the pioneering work of the American architect Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), who in 1970s New York attacked abandoned buildings with chainsaws and angle grinders, partly out of protest against the prevailing lack of occupancy and new housing rage. Cutting geometric forms out of walls, floors and ceilings, Matta -Clark turned condemned buildings into sculptures. He opened sightlines from the inside to the outside, straight through the floors, creating a dynamic and spectacular three-dimensional effect: as if a meteorite had soared through the entire building. Calling it ‘anarchitecture’ he gave his work a political twist, coupling architecture to anarchism. In doing so, he tilted the dividing line between the political and the personal, between the privacy of a house and publicness, between the interior and the exterior, aiming, as he formulated it himself, to convert a place into a state of mind.[i]

A similar state of mind is driven even further by Teeuwen. Her glorified ruins also relate to life outside, with its social, economic and political intricacies. The house stands in the city; the city defines the house. But unlike Matta-Clark’s transparently perforated sets, here the wind of publicness and the public domain have to squeeze their way through chinks and gaps, soon encountering heavily densified stacks of debris. To a much greater extent , Teeuwen’s is an inner world in which the psychological dimension triumphs. As a house of the mind it transcends matter. Once chairs, tables and beds stood here, photographs may have hung on the walls, carpets lay on the floors and spoons in the drawer, but now it is no longer the domain of things; on the contrary.

While Jérome and Sylvie quench their thirst with the things they surround themselves with, Teeuwen does away with them. Exit all dead weight! She performs a form of exorcism charged with a clear social commitment, but with an urgency derived from personal motifs. There are autographical notions in her architecture parlante. Even if they can’t be read to the letter, they do provide this mental domain with its intensity. The densely stacked layers of building materials constitute an archive with chiseled-out thoughts and feelings.

[i] http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tatte-papers/towards-anarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-le-corbusier

 

III

‘This is how I stand’

At the interface of order and disorder; making and breaking; life and death

Prior to her architectural interventions in houses and blocks, Teeuwen focused on installations covering no more than one room (during the years from 2000 to 2005)[i]. This simple room consists of a floor, a ceiling and three walls. There is no fourth wall. The room opens up to the audience like a theatrical stage or, seen in its simple cubic form: a folded-out show-box. Only photographs of it survive, in the same way that only photographs eventually remain of the complex ruins. Their function is not merely documentary. The photographs are well-balanced as autonomous works of art. They present the interior frontally, their flatness reinforcing the character of the typical Teeuwen construction: at the interface of order and disorder; making and breaking; life and death.

A remarkable feature, in the light of the demolition of the houses, is the overwhelming number of things with which the rooms are filled. It is mostly everyday things and utensils: plastic bags, shoeboxes, archive folders, books, clothing, matrasses, newspapers, storage racks and sometimes some foodstuffs such as a bag of oranges or a couple of red cabbages. All these things have been piled on top of and next to each other, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The rooms bulge with them. Apart from a hysterical collecting urge, a frenzied stacking mania is also evident here. Some rules that have been used, both formally and thematically, can be read from the arrangement. Colour plays a role. Compositions have been created with bright oranges and reds of almost luminous plastic; voids have been filled with blocks of wood, piles of newspapers form separate columns. Valuables are absent. If anything shines, it is the translucent wrapping of roles of kitchen and toilet paper. But there is another thing that highly matters in this non-hierarchical household. More than once, a pair of shoes can be seen right in front, near the picture’s edge, virtually in the middle. The noses point inward, as an invitation to the viewer: come, step into the image! But at second glance one discovers that these are orthopedic shoes, tailor-made and consequently far from suited for everyone. The assumption that these are the shoes of Marjan Teeuwen (Venlo, 1953) herself is confirmed by her own appearance before the camera: full-length among all those things around her, both reinforcing and warding off the loneliness of her figure. There she lies: her back turned towards us, on a pile of matrasses, squeezed between piles of newspapers, clothes and shoeboxes, subordinate to a higher order, a thing among things. No wonder she finally decides to wrest herself free from matter and – exit dead weight! – hit back. The room unfolds like a self-portrait, filled with a compressed symbolism, in which mental and physical oppressions confirm one another.

The reflections on the human condition take shape against a personal background, which hails back to Teeuwen’s earliest childhood, in which she became disabled due to polio and was hospitalized over and over again. This disability made her world smaller, within a family that was far from harmonious. ‘That was crippling. I had to break free from that’, Teeuwen says about that now.[ii] And: ‘The artistic process coincides with who I am. Wanting to overcome obstacles has become part of my life and my personality. This is how I stand. As a disabled person I belong to a minority group. This makes me alert to the forces of power and powerlessness, construction and destruction, inclusion and exclusion, flowering and decline. Furthermore, I was born shortly after the war: a reconstruction child. Destructive forces dominate the news and usually receive all attention, whereas constructive powers are often taken for granted. But in my view, the are mutually linked.’

It is this ambiguity, this diabolical balancing exercise at the interface between making and breaking, that is essential to Teeuwen’s work. Her architectural installations are characterized by an almost palpable, animistic energy. The planks, bricks, concrete and glass: all this matter, with which we usually support our lives but in which we now also see the fragments of that life, is charged with emotions, in particular with feelings of loss and longing. The house is our private universe, a haven of refuge that can be both protective and restrictive, and Teeuwen unfolds its double bottoms. She reveals its dungeons, as a shelter for the soul, but also: to break free from it.

About the amount of physical effort required for this work, which is high enough to raise reservations as to the road she has to travel to achieve her goal, she says: ‘After graduating in 1988, from the department of painting and monumental design, I have painted for twelve years. I thought this was a wise choice, given my physical disability. But I am not a painter. I am a builder. I have a strong psychological urge to handle things that appear just a little too big. I probably made this choice to go to the max at a very young age. Resistance either makes you recoil or go to the max.

‘From 2002 onward I started making three-dimensional work related to architecture; more monumental than I would ever have imagined. In the process I had to deal with much resistance, chaos, mess, noise, debris and waste. Thinking big implies that you can fall deep as well. Maybe that is artistic maturity. It ensures that I will make the most of it, that I will go to the max artistically as well. And the endless process of stacking and building sharpens my mind, in that respect I am like a monk. In the process, I discover the solution to a problem.

‘It means that I can finally coincide with who I am. Not that I, as a human being, can overcome the polarity of construction versus destruction, for that transcends the merely human. In that, I agree with Dostoevsky. In his novel Notes from the Underground from 1866 he concludes: ‘Man is equally inclined to build up the world and destroy it; this polarity is in his genes.’

[i] See for an overview of the complete series of Living Rooms and the beginning of the later series Destroyed House the monograph Marjan Teeuwen-works. MMII-XI, Den Bosch 2011

[ii] Biographical notes and quotes were based on interviews and correspondence of the author with the artist, late 2013 and early 2014, and on the introduction Teeuwen wrote to the catalogue accompanying the group exhibition (curated by herself) The Glorious Rise and Fall (and so on), Den Bosch 2013

 

IV

A dusty palace of mirrors for the audience

Although Teeuwen considers the time-consuming process of breaking, stacking and building a painstaking task, her installations are more like the result of some ritual, formalized fury. In art, we know that fury from the drawings, sculptures and installations of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). In Bourgeois’ work, too, the home plays an important thematic role, from the important group of early drawings, etches and paintings under the title Femme Maison (1946-47)[i] onward. In this series, the house takes on a dominant, infantilizing form. For instance, the upper body of a nude woman disappears entirely beneath her own home, as if a doll’s house has fallen on top of her. Poor ‘housewife’ who, in the title Femme Maison as well, is transformed to a ‘wifehouse’ and is condemned to the role of child wife: two small arms protrude from the house, powerless as a doll’s, greeting or reaching for help.

‘My emotions,’ Bourgeois declared in various interviews[ii], ‘are too big for me. Therefore they hinder me! I have to get rid of them. My emotions are my demons. The intensity… It is not the emotions themselves; it is their intensity – much too much to cope with. Therefore I have to pass them on. I pass on the energy to my sculptures. This is true for all I do. It has nothing to do with craft. It has nothing to do with skills. It has nothing to do with the mastering of materials. Materials are just materials, nothing else. Materials are not the artist’s subject. The artist’s subject consists of: emotions… and ideas… those two.’

Teeuwen uses a similar approach. ‘I used to be afraid to follow my intuition’, she says. ‘I thought I had to study a lot, know much, gather knowledge. And of course, that is very important, but since I acquired confidence in my work as an artist, I have also followed my intuition more and more. In my intuition, doubt disappears and I find solutions to rational problems. In this self-conquest, psychological conditions play a role. My childhood was not only dominated by polio, but was also coloured by the death of my twin brother and the discordant atmosphere at home. This made me alert to extremes. Standing and falling. Order and chaos. Construction and destruction. Art, or at least my art, also consists of psychological transformation. Like science, art is a discipline par excellence in which man tries to fathom and overcome his faults.’

Image and idea are in line in Teeuwen’s work. Her installations are filled with feelings and thoughts; stories and inventions. Art-historical genres also whirl about in her works. Beside the self-portrait ghosting about, the still life unfolds here, in three dimensions, as a sculptural memento mori. And given the inherent cultural criticism, the glorified ruin is a historical piece haunted by current times. Associations with acts of war join resonances of the economic crises. The stacked-up fragments are reminiscent of the Tower of Babel: symbol of a confusion of tongues and thwarted pride. But none of the categories mentioned is sufficient by itself. And in addition to being a self-portrait, still life and history piece, each of Teeuwen’s installations is also a happening, an environment and the residue of a performance. The house as a factual construction accommodating fictions, seems to challenge its status as a work of art. It moves with the flow of projections and interpretations. In addition to being a chapel and a tomb, a memorial for beloved deceased maybe, it also is, dusty and all, a palace of mirrors for the public, which detects its own ghosts in it.

Psycho Building may be the most appropriate term available in the vocabulary of contemporary art: the name of a genre that did not become an actual genre until the beginning of this century, thanks to Hayward Gallery in London. Under the title Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture three-dimensional work was shown here in 2008 by artists including Mike Nelson, Do Ho Suh and Rachel Whiteread – soulmates of Marjan Teeuwen who, like her, dig out the subconscious of architecture. In their work, says director Ralph Rugoff in the catalogue, ‘we find architecture without its usual functionality, but as a location of desires, memories and doubts; as a shelter for personal matters and collective history; a clash of cultures and a mix of (pre)conceptions. This work does not only address us as spectators, but surrounds and influences us as participants in the space it activates, speaking to us in both a visual and conceptual way and appealing to what has to be experienced, physically, rather than just seen’.[iii]

Exemplary, also as a counterpart to Teeuwen’s, is the work of Rachel Whiteread (London, 1963), who in 1993 was the first female winner of the Turner Prize.[iv] Whiteread often choses a location outside the museum, in the city centre or in a suburb, where her sculptures emerge as mental images. Famous is her monumental installation House (1993) in Northern London: a cast in concrete of a Victorian house. With its austere, compressed appearance and blind façade on which the windows and doors stand out in relief, this temporary sculpture concentrates all secrets of domestic life, almost like a sarcophagus. For the exhibition Psycho Buildings Whiteread installed a ghost town of two hundred doll’s houses (Place, 2008). In this deserted town the public looks down like giants on the illuminated, but empty houses standing densely packed in the dark. Their inaccessibility, due to scale and size, but in hollow contrast to the wide-opened doors and windows, evokes feelings of disorientation and social miscommunication, which is typical of Whiteread. And of Teeuwen, who holds her own against any of her international colleagues.

Teeuwen and Whiteread both turn the dwelling inside out, re-organizing architecture and revealing spaces that usually do not bear daylight: hidden niches behind books on the shelves, behind the stairs or under the floor. But there is also an important difference between their Psycho Buildings. Unlike Whiteread’s work, the public cannot possibly read what the work of art contains from the outside. The façade does not betray anything.

With Teeuwen, it’s the public’s own turn. It will have to cross the doorstep with his entire body and limbs, into the darkness of a domestic abyss: keep your eyes open, put your organ of balance on edge and stick out your antennae.

[i] See the article ‘Farewell to the doll house’ by Lynne Cooke in Louise Bourgeois, Memory and Archietecture (exhibition catalogue), Muso Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1999-2000, pp. 63-75

[ii] Louise Bourgeois, Destruction/Reconstruction of the Father, Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, ed. By Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans Ulrich Obrist, London, 1998, p. 367

[iii] Ralph Rugoff in Psycho buildings, Artists Take on Architecture, featuring Atelier Bow-Wow, Beutler, Gelitin, Los Carpinteros, Mike Nelson, Ernesto Neto, Tobias Putrih, Tomas Saraceno, Do Ho Suh, Rachel Whiteread, Hayward Gallery, London, 2008 (exhibition catalogue), p. 19

[iv] Rachel Whiteread, Charlotte Mullins, Tate Publishing, London, 2004