Experiences of Loss - To the sculptures of Hans van Meeuwen

If it is feasible, return with a part of your weaned and adult feeling to any one of your childhood objects which occupied you a good deal. Recollect if there was anything closer, more familiar and necessary to you than such an object ... This small forgotten object that seemed ready to mean everything to you, it made you familiar with a thousand things as it played a thousand roles: it was an animal and tree and king and child - and as it receded everything existed.
... They can hardly remember this and are seldom made aware of it ...

Rainer Maria Rilke1

I.
Hans van Meeuwen’s sculptures seem at first to be almost realistic but at the same time monumental, larger than life and fragmentary. By means of these attributes, that are characteristic for nearly all his sculptures, the viewer is transfered into a certain perspective, which supports a child’s view of the big world of animals and objects.

Who can still remember one’s own view from the perspective of a child? A vision which the adult can hardly imagine anymore. From a small person’s point of view everything seems so sinister and large. The objects, animals and other fellow-beings from one’s own environment, are to begin with, still the great unknown which becomes familiar with increasing experience and the development of the mind. Through the development of the body and gradually becoming human (seen here as growing up) everything receives a relative significance. No longer a child, the world around us is set in relation to one’s own self which on its part has already received a certain dimension.

Hans van Meeuwen’s sculptures lead us back to one’s own childhood memories and allows us to discover his object-related sculptures, from a child’s perspective. For a moment the artist leads us into a world of memories, dreams and fairy-tales. We see the trunk of a stork, two over-sized duck’s legs, with an implied, bowl-shaped stomach, which are suspended from the ceiling; an enormous potato which hangs on the wall and seems to almost float instead of resting in the earth, a monumentally extended section of the eye; a horse’s snout which projects out of the wall or horse’s legs which stand, bodiless, on the floor, among indefinable red elements; or a large flying carpet with seven fragmentary heads, with upward looking faces, the backs of the heads projecting from beneath the carpet. Here we are reminded of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves.

The animals, which in his own way Hans van Meeuwen depicts, are endearing to children and mostly play a well-known role in a fairy-tale or a song. The ducks remind one of the song “Alle meine Entchen”, the stork as deliverer of babies or the song: “Auf unserer Wiese gehet was...”. The horse is an animal to which most children and youngsters are drawn to, with a desire to pat and care for it. The otherwise so winsome animals from the child’s world, like the duck, stork and horse are not as sweet as they seem because the artist has effected a transformation into something ominous. As a part of nature the same seem alienated.

These terms only represent attempts, to mentally understand the visible. Ultimately we fail with these attempts because the objects or animals in Hans van Meeuwen’s sculptures are only insinuated and are therefore fragmentary. The small child may have a fragmentary view of objects, because of its size and view-point it is not in a position to grasp these objects in their entirety. The adult however recognizes the fragmentary elements as such, but tries to describe them with the notion of describing an integral whole. Just as a child cannot fully master the act of viewing in its entirety, linguistically the adult can only partially approach the fragment. Both viewpoints lead - through van Meeuwen’s essential stylistic devices of monumentality and fragmentation - to that act of failure.

A small child’s approach to the world of objects is comparable to the original experience of nature as threatening and unknown and the control of nature through human beings, as described by Adorno and Horkheimer in “Dialektik der Aufklärung”. The child places the seizable objects in its mouth because it wants to discover them and because it cannot yet name them. It does not yet know what a ball, a potato or a duck’s leg is. The child can only captivate these objects by naming them, but at the same time they also loose their magic. Only when it can say “ball” does it know what a ball is. Through knowledge it obtains power over the hitherto, unknown world of objects. Whereas before it was still at one with its environment, through the development of language it can thereby abstract and simultaneously control the progressing self-education. In this respect the process of education is comparable to the control of nature where helplessness reverts to power. The development of thought and understanding pays its price with the disenchantment of the world, because only in the unknown lies magic.

Hans van Meeuwen’s sculptures lead us into a wonderland behind the mirror of reality. They develop a spell, an almost mystical, magical state between reality and fiction, truth and untruth. The objects and animals are modelled on our habitual everyday and natural surroundings and in spite of their fragmentation and monumentalization they are without a doubt identifiable. But precisely because they are such enormous details of an integral whole they are manipulators, which overstrain our visual habits in a nearly psychotic way.

With his three-dimensional works Hans van Meeuwen conveys the viewer into a conflicting situation: on account of his understanding, no longer a child able to fall under the spell of the magical world. But at the same time he is not able to describe in terms, adequately, what he has seen without circumscribing (e.g. through adjectives), precisely because the sculptures are monumental and fragmentary. The state of inner discontent is a state of inner strife. He wants to understand. But because he recognises that this is not possible, he wants to place himself in the situation of a child and to see the objects from the perspective of a “David” in the sight of “Goliath”. Nevertheless in the situation of the adult and educated art viewer the separation of seeing and thinking cannot take place. The viewer, in the presence of van Meeuwen’s sculptures, feels the painful loss of childhood experiences. If he were able to exactly describe the objects the loss would not arise or even become topical. But in the intermediary zone of seeing, knowledge and understanding which - by all desire fall by the wayside - it allows one to feel one’s own incapacity (whether being able to act well on one, or on all sides at the same time) and the loss becomes evident. The viewer has to try and solve the contradiction in another way. At the sight of these sculptures man no longer has control over the objects, they have literally outgrown him.

II.
As Hans van Meeuwen’s sculptures deal mostly with fragmentary descriptions of nature it helps, to begin with, to understand Adorno’s reflections on nature, art and fragments. The fragment itself is a metaphor, which visually manifests the above described loss. The fragment within and as a work of art can visually, in a concealed manner, implicate the conception of a whole. At the same time it does not exactly pin-point the status of this entirety, so that it is left to the viewer if he wishes to understand the implication of this whole as fallen apart, cut up or only partly realized.2 After Adorno, art does not achieve to emulate nature, in that it copies it (in the sense of a mimesis) but in that it becomes second nature. The work of art is an aesthetic illusion identical with itself and in this respect can also be understood as an inversion of prevailing reification. In modern art though an imminent criticism of the pseudo-character is discernible upon the intrusion of discord, the ugly or the fragment: “In that the work falls into fragments it dispenses with the illusion of an absolute mediation between detail and entirety. ... As in Shakespeare’s Prospero, it puts aside the magic wand and turns the imperfect mediation process, frozen in aesthetic illusion, outward. In this way, in the disintegration to a fragment, the work of art unfolds its true substances. ... What is true of the fragment is not the reconciliation of the universal and the especial, of the identical and the non-identical, but precisely the impossibility of this reconciliation. The fragment only becomes the site of this truth as the result of a failure not as a loose, assumptive gesture.”3 The fragment reminds one, as a broken unity, of the possibility of reconciliation which is not present within itself.

Consequently the non-occurence of reconciliation remains utopia. Hereof and with the idea of the non-identical Hans van Meeuwen’s sculptures deal with. They thematize with its idea of fragments not least the loss of nature, the relationship of humans to nature, the transitoriness of the world and its objects. The increasing alienation of humans to nature is underlined by the use of highly synthetic materials like polystyrene and polyurethane.

Two further examples thereto:
In two wooden shelves are stored bizarre, blue shapes, resembling ice-blocks. In each of these small ice-blocks are placed two capsule or bomb-like shapes, which project from various parts of the ice-block or penetrate it. While the ice-blocks have a “natural” shape, it seems as if the round and smooth capsules are formed by human hands. This formal contradiction alone indicates two differing areas: nature and the world of objects formed by humans. Yet the ice, stored in the shelf, also reminds one of an archive, in which much is stored: “a 1000 things from a 1000 years” says Hans van Meeuwen. The four shelves with their seemingly serial-like originals which - seen as a unit - appear as fragments of a destroyed unity, but they also remind us of a self-service depot, of nature, for man. Not least, nature here seems to be a starting point for biological or geological research in a laboratory.

In an older work he created two identical face halves. There is no mouth or nose, its eye is at the top, hair and beard are found below. Nothing therefore seems to be in keeping with the ideal of a human face anymore. The two face halves do not result in a whole here. What would normally belong together cannot be joined. It is nightmare-like, traumatic, an almost surrealistic vision of a deficiency, the failed experiment by a geneticist.

III.
To furthermore understand Hans van Meeuwen’s sculptures the role of the artist, his experiences and views of the world must be reflected upon. Indeed many of his works are a confrontation with his own childhood. He remembers for example that his mother used to say him he should always eat lots of potatoes, so that he would grow up to be big and strong. His own development is translated by him with his work “The Education of the Giants”, in the strength of the potato, where he blows it up gigantesque to an excessive presence. Van Meeuwen also experienced the effect of Alzheimer’s disease in his mother, through which she lost her sense of orientation and did not know where daily objects were anymore. This situation is enforced through the unusual placement of the object and animal sculptures.

Hans van Meeuwen reflects on the fragmental character in relation to today’s news reporting: “we solely see fragments of our world, all the ‘news’ and all the suffering is brought together in just 10 minutes. Today we no longer have an integral view of a world which has fallen into many parts.” This reflection of a fragmentary, momentary perception is surely not new. Alfred Döblin expressed this in the theme of his urban novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, in the 1920’s. Yet today’s comprehension of the world as a much-divided, no longer entirely clear unit of life is surely also forced by the medium television. Not even the Internet and its seeming globalization of the world, by means of networks, will not change this. Much is disparate, very little still falls into place. The experiences of a child to still view its world as one, as we know, also looses itself in growing up; though we have gained the possibility of mobility through this.

With his multiple “Mobile”, which depicts a pair of huge shoes cut concentrically, van Meeuwen finds the current, visual equivalence to our nomadism today. Mobility is clearly symbolized through the quadruplicate fragmentation of the shoes. The division of the shoes and the slight displacement of the parts enforces an “en route” feeling in or between the four cardinal points. The whole shoe is divided, its unity though remains in spite of its division into four fragments. The symbolic pair of shoes ultimately not only remind us of the experiences of “Cinderella”, with her strange wedding shoes, but also of the song “Hänschen klein ging allein”.

Hans van Meeuwen’s sculptures animate us to reflect upon the widening of one’s own horizon. Adults are reminded of the lost world of childhood in which a reconciliation with adulthood cannot take place. With their phenotypes of the fragmental, from the animal and object world, they offer impulses that not only question the solid synthesis of the factual but also our relationship to nature, objects and language.

1 Rainer Maria Rilke: Auguste Rodin, quoted from: Dinge des Menschen, catalogue: Städtische Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, 1985, no page reference.

2 compare Eberhard Ostermann: Das Fragment. Geschichte einer ästhetischen Idee, Munich 1991, p. 12.

3 Eberhard Ostermann, ibidem, p. 162 .

 

1999, Dr.Ulrike Lehmann, curator, art historian, Mannheim, Germany