From May 5 through June 17 the Dutch artist Vanessa Jane Phaff will have her first exhibition of paintings outside of the Netherlands. The artist first showed in New York in 1997, when she exhibited a series of drawings at I-20.
Vanessa Jane Phaff, 34, lives and works in Rotterdam. She was included in the recent exhibition “Examining Pictures,” curated by Francesco Bonami and Judith Nesbitt, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The exhibition at I-20 has received support from the Mondriaan Foundation Amsterdam, for the advancement of the visual arts, design and museums.
A catalogue (No.12), with text by Marie Jeanne de Rooij and Wim van Sinderen, senior curator of the Kunsthal Rotterdam, will accompany the exhibition.
MEETING VANESSA JANE PHAFF
Rotterdam, March 2000
Dear Marie Jeanne,
I wonder if the same thing happens to you – that if you’re really captivated by a work of art, you never really wonder about the nuts and bolts of its actual creation? It’s as if the image has always existed, just as you feel that you yourself have always existed. The way in which the work is self-evident, and the way in which you’re sure of yourself trigger off a moving personal encounter. You’ve found one another, and analyses are unnecessary. And that’s how it was when, in a number of different places, I had a series of “encounters” with Vanessa’s work. Where do these images come from, I marveled?
I finally found Vanessa’s studio somewhere in a nondescript side street in an ugly part of town. Though I was late, she made no remark, betrayed no sign of irritation, but showed me courteously to her small fourth-floor apartment. Sometimes, the size of a piece of art is determined by the amount of space the artist has available – by the height of the doorway, for example, or the sharpness of the turn at the top of the stairs. Vanessa takes her work up to the last, critical centimeter.
Just then, she was working at a tight schedule. Her first solo show at I-20 would be taking place in seven weeks, and there was a lot to get done. And here’s what I hadn’t realized before: she literally pulls her prints off the floor! The moment I stepped into the room, there I was, standing on a huge block, which, with the patience of a saint, had been gouged out of a gigantic piece of linoleum. Standing in the corner awaiting treatment there were a few more rolls of the best lino.
I already knew that Vanessa’s paintings were linocuts that were painted with a brush, but I’d never for a moment considered what the process might involve – I just thought it strange that such large works could be linocuts. In the small prints by Emil Nolde and Erich Heckel, I notice relief printing straight off because the thin paper has nearly been destroyed by the wood grain and the ragged edges. But in Vanessa’s prints, the technique has been made almost invisible by the enigma of the image.
Yet in her studio, I was greatly impressed by the laboriousness of her chosen technique. It’s by no means painting in the normal sense, where you build up the picture layer by layer and stroke by stroke, and where any decision can be retracted at any time. It’s more of a kind of sculpture in the literal sense: the planned reduction of the material into an irreversible form. And the rigidity of the technique is at the service of the severity. In relief painting, there’s the expressiveness of the sort in which Nolde indulges himself; or there’s decorative charm of the kind that was stressed in the early work of Philip Taaffe. But in Vanessa’s work these play only a subsidiary role. That’s what must have kept me from spotting the technique for so long. And maybe I should be sorry that, now I’ve had a glimpse behind the scenes, I’ll always see it. I’ve analyzed her handwriting, so to speak, but luckily it reflects no mere dazzling virtuosity. It’s just cleverly hidden behind the image.
Vanessa told me that she started out as a professional dancer, who performed with a variety of well-known modern dance ensembles. Dancers are generally highly disciplined and hardworking – obsessed, almost. They’re the medium of the choreographer, who is constantly pushing them to the furthest limits of what they can do. But one day she’d had it up to here, so she decided to go her own way. She enrolled at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, where she maintained her discipline and zest for work, but focused instead on her own creative development. She became a choreographer herself. Her dancers were her pictures, which she, in turn, got to move to the limits of the possible. The controlled, nearly monumental poise and motoricity of a dancer (which I believe I can still glimpse in the way Vanessa moves and looks) can be traced back to the poses of her “models”. The absurd theatre acted out in her pictures is subtle and studied. Her characters are – literally – of a piece, and, with the greatest sobriety, they come to the fore.
The sobriety of children – it never fails to get on grown-ups’ nerves. That ghastly smart-alecky brat in Gunther Grass’ Tin Drum, Diane Arbus’ stressed-out little guy with his clenched fists, Sally Mann’s over-self conscious children: I observe them with a mixture of recognition and horror. Vanessa Jane Phaff summarizes the realism of all three in her disquieting images. I’m curious to know which musings Vanessa evokes in you. After all, you’ve decided to bring one of those Phaff girls home with you.
Let me know!
Love, Wim
Amsterdam, April 2000
Dear Wim,
So far, we’ve kept our promise, and told each other nothing about our separate appointments with Vanessa Jane Phaff. Hanging over my desk is my Phaff girl: a prepubescent girl with a green apple in one hand, and a cable-release (or is it a mouse?) in the other. She’s lying over backwards on a Swiss flag, surrounded by turned-around Polaroids, so the shots aren’t visible. Sticking out of one of the drawers (under her bed?) there are a pair of braids, looking like Brunhilde’s wig (was hermother an opera singer?) Maybe she’s murdered the little girl next door, or put poison in her sister’s chocolate milk. A visitor this week cautiously confided in me that this Cristina Ricci-look-alike in her role as the daughter playing morbid little games in the film of The Adams Family made her feel uneasy. With my feet planted on the red carpeting, I look up from my keyboard – yes, she’s still hanging there, staring at me. I’ve brought the evil eye home and I’m feeling exceptionally at ease with her. Phaff’s paintings – that’s what she calls them herself – don’t particularly move me, but they do comfort me.
The pictures Phaff serves up are solidified archetypal memories of the person you once were, somewhere on the threshold between being and acting, between evil and worse, between child and later. Phaff’s prepubescent children, usually girls, find themselves in the blissful, dangerous state of provocative recklessness, coquettish shyness or grotesque cruelty, a state of raised awareness that is not so much a mood you remember as something you intuit. And the scenes wish neither to be a memory nor to elicit a far-off dream image with a nasty fuzzy edge. To me, the linee forze make a strict pact with chaos, averting in each image the unease and the panic at the yet-unfocused but omnipresent self-awareness.
The graphic clarity wonderfully accentuates the radical and awkward dauntlessness of the aspiring young witches. Phaff is mistrustful of the virtuosic image that drags you along in the wake of its beauty, leaving no space for your imagination. (Perhaps that’s why expressive virtuosity a la Nolde and other German expressionists fails to excite me much: they follow too closely all the fickle affective twists and turns of aspiration, thereby cramping my own imaginative space, my own interpretation.)
The linocuts give her an exquisite vehicle for bringing together the contradictions in her work: the lucid riddles of the scene and the cryptic clarity of the technique. Till now, Phaff has used pronounced colors to give added accentuation to the contrasts: in her most recent paintings she experiments with black-and-white and gray tints. All to good effect: I can zoom in even quicker to the pathetic interior world of the sadistic universe of which, as a child, you are the absolute but lonely ruler.
In her sitting-room/studio, we drank tea and she told me about artists who have influenced her. She spoke of the crushing impression Kiefer once made on her: in his work she particularly admires the heroic and the mischievous. The Dutch draftsman Pieter Holstein is a very different kind of inspiration: his pictures may have something slightly silly, but despite this, or rather because of it, they’re intriguing. And of course there’s Balthus. She praises his purity of style and intention, the poetry, the enigma, the absence of blemish.
Dear Wim, you talk about children, but in fact the label is too tame for the unfathomable creatures we all once were. It’s amazing how quickly we forget (or want to forget) the irrational and amoral Sturm-und-Drang of our own prehistoric personage. But something always remains in the depths of our soul, or hides in inexplicable habits and preferences. The fascination with dressing-up is certainly a relic of that far-off past – when that non-personage of ours still entertained the illusion that every day one could choose which skin to creep into, how holy one wanted to be, or how bad. When you look at the romantic mises en scene and tableaux of Lewis Carroll – over the years he gathered an extensive collection of costumes and stage props for this purpose – what is particularly shocking, being an unvarnished sign of life from another world, is the cold, animal gaze of those fairies and ragamuffins. The predominant attraction of childhood scenes is not so much the nostalgic longing for the lost paradise of youth, where god and devil are still interchangeable, as the comfort offered in the carefully-constructed fragments of fairytale fiction, the concentrated phantom images you can dissolve like sugar-lumps in the weak tea of adult life. The comfort that, no matter how dispersed, the traces of that untamed girl are still lurking in your current personality.
To draw the sometimes-painful sting out of these afterimages, we often call the poses endearing or pathetic. Phaff herself also stresses the tongue-in-cheek aspect of her work. The humor that enables us to swallow the loss of the dark side of our existence.
The carefully-studied poses, which can undeniably be traced back to Phaff’s background in ballet, bear all the hallmarks of a gifted control freak. Before me, I see the little ballerinas exercising at the bar, ceaselessly assessing their physical image in the mirror. Critical, with the body virtually an object that has to obey the caprices of the game. Improvisations will not be appreciated. Perfect performances are called for. I am fascinated by the irresistibility of those stubborn attempts to find a temporary shackle for the chaos of life that is still all around you like a mer a boire when you’re young. The echo of the dressing-up rituals of the adult world chafes and comforts me in equal measure, as if, glancing up now and then at my naughty girl, I get a little respite during the changement des tableaux in life.
In short, my love: a Phaff girl in the house is a real comfort. You should try it yourself.
Love, Marie Jeanne
Translated from the Dutch by David Alexander