Harm van den Berg
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[Texts]
Judith van Meeuwen
Peter van der Meijden
Len Borgdorff
Press
Processes of drawing: beauty in complexity
Judith van MeeuwenRecently, I had the pleasure of meeting the artist and viewing his drawings in his Amsterdam studio. There, the drawings lie vulnerably on the table - sturdy white sheets in various sizes. Precious and fragile. At first, I hardly dare look, afraid to disturb their order. Later, the artist points to two spots on the studio wall. Suddenly, you realize the drawings could be anywhere. Like thoughts emerging from a rhizome, a root system, they can surface wherever the artist’s graphite pencil decides. With Harm van den Berg’s drawings, you immediately sense the artist’s wonder at the nature of things - wonder at natural phenomena and the laws that govern them. I would like to highlight a few of these phenomena:
Chain reactionsEach drawing has a single starting point, a single origin from which the work unfolds. Never multiple beginnings on one sheet. The drawings can be seen as notations of a moment, a growth phase of an undefined process. Sequences of identical forms - chains of squares, circles, triangles, or lines in a precise, regular rhythm. Like silent chain reactions: cause and effect. One notation directs the next. But it is the artist who determines when it begins and ends.
The power of repetition
Through the endless repetition of small marks, the drawn process becomes a pattern. A recognizable rhythm for the mind, creating an instinctive logic, even though you cannot quite name what you are seeing.
Micro and macro
It is as if you are peering through a magnifying glass at a petri dish, watching tiny building blocks interact. Yet, at the same time, it is a translation of the starry sky, of celestial bodies seeking connection.
Time
As a viewer, you know the artist has invested considerable time and energy in each drawing. Philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) distinguished between clock time and experienced, inner time (la durée). It would be wonderful if the viewer took the inner time to truly engage with the drawing. Harm’s work offers ample opportunity for this and deserves to be experienced at length.
Movement
The sequences of marks, in straight and curved lines, create the suggestion of movement, frozen motion. And not just on a flat surface. By varying the pressure of the pencil, the artist suggests depth, making the spectacle spatial. The association with music is clear.
Chance
The patterns and lines seem to arise by chance. Is there an algorithm at work? Each drawing unfolds differently, undirected, unstructured, without purpose. Yet only a highly practiced hand can apply this automatic notation so perfectly. And from chance, we arrive at the meaningful phenomenon of emergence, where chance also plays a role.
Emergence
The title of the book is Emerge. In Dutch: emergent - spontaneously arising, coming into being. The development of complex, organized systems gives rise to new properties. For me, this is a complex concept, not easily grasped, but I sense it is a fitting term for the work. While researching emergence, I came across a photo of a murmuration of starlings in flight, a stunning example of a phenomenon not yet fully explained.
In conclusion
In our conversation, the word monnikenwerk (monk’s work) came up. I thought of a monk in serene silence, illuminating a manuscript in the scriptorium, working with full concentration on beautiful script and scholarship. But to my surprise, Stoett’s Dutch Proverbs and Sayings defines monnikenwerk as futile labor, requiring much patience and time; unnecessary effort. Another definition describes it as an unspectacular task demanding great care and perseverance… I must firmly distance myself from the first. I find your work the result of spectacular action and well worth continuing!
Judith D. van Meeuwen (1967) studied art history in Leiden after completing teacher training in drawing. She worked as a final editor for Kunstbeeld magazine and has been a curator at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort since 2008. Her special interest lies in themes at the intersection of visual art, design, and the natural sciences.
Emergent: beyond form and content
Peter van der Meijden
”characters and forms ‘more palpable than legible’” [i]: these are the words Octavio Paz uses to describe Belgian poet, author and painter Henri Michaux’ mescaline poems and drawings. They could just as well be used to describe Harm van den Berg’s automatic drawings. “A step beyond the sign and the image, something transcending words and lines”. Nebulous entireties at a distance that upon closer inspection dissolve into minuscule, but perfectly sharp signs. Despite the difference, Michaux’ pictorial language – the language of l’informe – strongly suggests itself as a reference. Both Michaux’ twisted, impossibly detailed shapes and Van den Berg’s sign-fog are the product of an absolute control coupled with an absolute loss of it: the one in the grip of a psychedelic alcaloid, the other focused on the single sign without ever lifting his head to survey the whole.
French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe Michaux’ process as a “rhizomatic work of perception” in which sign and meaning are no polar opposites but are endlessly interlaced like the mycelium of a fungus. The result is an image of the world that only consists of “speeds and slownesses without form, without subject, without a face”.[ii] Intoxicated, the poet manages to transcend the dualism of form and content and therewith all simple dualisms. In the same manner, perception and the imperceptible start to coincide, as do total self-absorbedness and total lack of control. “You will no longer be master of your speeds, you will get stuck in a mad race between the imperceptible and perception”, as Deleuze and Guattari translate the message left by Michaux’ after his death; “you will be full of yourself, you will lose control”.[iii] What can be linked to euphorants in Michaux, seems to be a combination of data and natural growth, of process control and the multiplication and diversification of cells, in Van den Berg’s work.
Recognized and unrecognizable, out of control and under control: Deleuze’s and Guattari’s words connect Michaux to that other great French thinker of the formless, philosopher and writer Georges Bataille. One of the entries in the latter’s critical dictionary, that appeared as a feuilleton in the magazine Documents (1929-1930), is informe, “formless”. It reads:
“A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.”[iv]
Bataille’s text deals with dictionaries and defintions rather than with the formless as such. What a dictionary ought to do, he says, is to describe what words do; and what they do, is to drag things down to a lower plane, to give them a shape or meaning. Maybe things do not have a fixed shape, but in saying so, one gives them a shape: characterising something as shapeless, informe, is the same as identifying it as a spider or saliva; but it has to be done nevertheless, because it is important to establish that they are emerging. Meaning and task, sign and process: Van den Berg’s drawings are the results of a process, but the only thing they reveal is the fact that the process has taken place. Even the word “process” is a mathematical frock coat in this context. The only thing the artist does, is to concentrate on his minimal signs, his lines and circles. The word “process” suggests planning, and planning does not come into it at all. All there is, is the act.
American art theorist Rosalind Krauss and the French art historian Yve-Alain Bois, Bataille’s call the shapeless an “operation of slippage”, a displacement of form and content or even an insult to the idea of the two as a biunique pair.[v] As an operation, the shapeless does not change the shape or content of things, but the structure that causes the two to appear as one another’s fixed polar opposites. Viewed from a distance, Van den Berg’s emergent drawings display shapes that cannot be fixed, but in close-up, they consist of clearly recognizable lines and circles that multiply in every direction. There are signs, but they are impossible to combine into a legible sentence. Or rather, a sentence is presented, but it cannot be analysed in terms of main clauses and subclauses or of substantives, adjectives and verbs. Phonemes are at work, but it is a labour of sign production that never becomes the production of meaning.
French writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, co-founder of Documents, described the magazine as “a war machine against received ideas”.[vi] He probably meant it literally, but in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, war machines are something else entirely: assemblages of living beings and objects whose function is to keep things in motion, to prevent things from congealing in the shape of rules, conventions, fixed meanings. The war machine and the nomadic way of thinking it engenders belongs to the horizon-less space of the steppe, the desert or the sea.[vii] All that such environments offer, is the matter that surrounds one. Moving in it means feeling one’s way through the grass, the sand or the water. It is a terrain that is beyond the capabilities of even the most accomplished cartographer and the most advanced cartographic methods. Meaning is not given beforehand, but emerges as the war machine moves through the landscape. Van den Berg’s procedure is exactly such a war machine: a hand with a pencil that moves across the paper in minuscule steps, leaving signs behind as if they were footsteps. Always moving, always coming into existence – always emergent.
Emergent: in the process of coming into existence. A texture rather than a text. Extreme control that calls an uncontrolled and uncontrollable organism into being. A visualisation of data that is never reducible to a reality that it can be said to refer to. A procedure that will not allow shape to establish itself as shape and content to establish itself as content.
[i] Octavio Paz, “introduction”, Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle, translated from the French by Louise Varèse & Anna Moschovakis, New York: New York Review Books, 2002, pp. v-xi; pp. v-vi.
[ii] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translation and foreword by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 283.
[iii] Ibid., p. 285.
[iv] Georges Bataille, “Informe”, Documents, jaargang 1, no. 7, december 1929, p. 382.
[v] Rosalind Krauss & Yve-Alain Bois, Formless : A User’s Guide, New York : Zone Books, 1997, p. 15 + 16.
[vi] Michel Leiris, ”De Bataille de l’impossible à l’impossible ‘Documents’”, Critique, no. 195-196, 1963, pp. 685-693 ; p. 689.
[vii] Deleuze & Guattari, op.cit., p. 379.
Peter van der Meijden is a Dutch art historian, based in Copenhagen, with degrees from the Universities of Amsterdam, Essex and Copenhagen. He is specialised in modern and contemporary art, museology and cultural heritage. He currently teaches art history at the University of Copenhagen and works as a project researcher at the National Gallery of Denmark. His research revolves around ephemeral art from the 1960s until the present in the context of exhibitions and museums.
Stacks of stillness
Len Borgdorff
Intermittently, but for more than twenty years now, he does it without handwriting, without gesture, without a line that glides onto paper as smoothly as it does from his pen in einem Guss. Instead, Harm van den Berg draws somewhere on an A3 sheet, with a black 0.05 mm fineliner, a tiny rectangle. And precisely where that rectangle comes to rest. No colour, no event, no warmth, no sound. Nothing. A rectangle of nothing.
Then a second one comes to lie against it, and that calls for a third, and after that a fourth, a fifth. Rectangles summoning rectangles, small blocks that each stand still in a row and then, it seems, would very much like... to move.
I look at them and think of Zeno's paradox of the arrow that stands still and shoots through space. A fineliner does not think - it draws rectangle after rectangle. And somewhere, something happens.
Someone dances, for instance, in a single line. A row of rectangles calls for a second line. Dunes, I think. Sea. Birds. A giant insect. House. Child. Land to live in.
Much white to look at. Nose up close, a few steps back. Handwork without handwriting, movement from a stack of stillness.
Looking, looking, and looking again. Something simply presents itself.
Text (in Dutch, below) published in the literary journal Liter, July 2018
Stapeltje stilstand
Len BorgdorffMet tussenpozen, maar al meer dan twintig jaar, doet hij het zonder handschrift, zonder beweging, zonder een lijn die even soepel als vrolijk uit zijn pen 'in einem Guss' het papier op zeilt. In plaats daarvan tekent Harm van den Berg ergens op een A3-vel met een zwarte fineliner van 0.05 mm een rechthoekje van niks. En wel daar waar het rechthoekje komt te staan. Geen kleur, geen gebeurtenis, geen warmte, geen geluid. Niks. Een rechthoekje van niks.
Daar komt dan een tweede tegenaan te liggen en dat vraagt weer om een derde, op die en die plek, en daarna een vierde, vijfde. Rechthoekjes die om rechthoekjes roepen, blokjes die stuk voor stuk stilstaan op een rijtje en dan, zo lijkt, wel bewegen willen.
Ik kijk ernaar en denk aan de paradox van Zeno over de pijl die stilstaat en door de ruimte schiet. Een fineliner denkt niet, die tekent rechthoekje na rechthoekje. En ergens gebeurt iets.
Er danst bijvoorbeeld iemand in één lijn. Een rijtje rechthoekjes vraagt om een tweede lijn. Duinen, denk ik. Zee. Vogels. Een reuzeninsect. Huis, Kind. Land om in te wonen.
Veel wit om naar te kijken. Neus er bovenop, paar stappen achteruit. Handwerk zonder handschrift, beweging van een stapeltje stilstand.
Kijken, kijken en herkijken. Iets doet zich zomaar voor.
Tekst verschenen in literair tijdschrift Liter, juli 2018