The impossibility and necessity of sculpture
'L'art est un fruit qui pousse dans l'homme, comme un fruit sur une plante ou l'enfant dans le sein de sa mère.'
Hans Arp's definition of art as a naturally growing organism, as a spiritual fruit of man, seems to fit Rini Hurkmans' organic sculptures quite well. At first sight, part of her forms resembles Arp's bulbaceous, biomorphic art, but where Arp wants his sculpture to be as natural as any living organism, Rini Hurkmans' spiritual fruits are growing on different soil. Her forms are meant to be mental vehicles, rather than a homage to the naturalness of art or to art as an autonomous object in the world.
Rini Hurkmans: 'I have a love-hate relationship to art as an object. I need the object, but I am more interested in the experience of it than in the object itself. But I need the object to make that experience possible.'
For Hurkmans the reality of an object is no more than the sum of the experiences that people have from that object. In other words, Hurkmans is more interested in the way the object is interiorised in one's mind, than in its three dimensional existence. Perhaps that is why Hurkmans uses photography as a medium in its own right. Though she gives the title Simulacrum to, among others, the photo piece in the Holly Solomon Gallery, it is not to accentuate the photograph as a derivative, but, more in the Baudrillard sense, that it is the simulacrum itself that counts, and not the reality this simulacrum is referring to. Isn't our experience in fact also a derivative of the reality surrounding us, and isn't it our mind, our perception of reality, that ultimately creates the condition of our existence?
What exactly do we see in the three installations depicted in this book? What are the ingredients directing our experience?
The basic form is always a dualistic one: an open structure - referring to domestic interiors, like tables, chairs and cupboards - which supports the biomorphic forms mentioned above: styrofoam forms lying passively, sometimes covered by lead bandage. The lack of colour, the intangible forms and the sterile iron structures add to a sense of melancholy.
They remind me of Francis Bacon's poignant paintings, where human figures, mostly deformed, are set in an architectural structure. But in Hurkmans' work Bacon is completely stripped bare from all human character.
Here the first stanza of Paul Auster's poem Interior comes to mind:
Grappled flesh
of the fully other and one.
And each thing here, as if it were the last thing
to be said: the sound of a word
married to death, and the life
that is this force in me
to disappear.
Melancholy, but at times also aggression, like the alarming cocoons in the film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These forms look like embryos which are not yet fully-grown, although they are already quite big . What kind of monsters will they grow into?
Melancholy, as the impossibility to express the unspeakable, is surely an important theme in Hurkmans' work. The organic forms are reflecting our innermost dreams, fears, longings, the part in us that has not been given the opportunity to develop itself fully. Controlled Passion, is a title of one of Hurkmans' earliest pieces. The supporting structures are defining the context of the supported objects. They provide them with a place where they can linger, but the structures, at the same time, seem to restrain their expansive possibilities. Furthermore, the curtains hinder our physical approach to the sculptures, as, for instance, in the installation in Almere. They are so close and yet so unreachable. The sensibilities of the beholder are also tested.
The melancholy is the melancholy of longing, like the clouds on the cover of this book; clouds often are the symbol of longing. The book is entitled Mute. The unspeakable has no words to express itself. There is also the sad nothingness of the grey, the colour of the ashes, which is the nothingness of death. But it is not necessarily physical death. 'How long does it take to erase memory ?', Hurkmans asks herself. Is it in this absence of words, of memory where we ultimately will find ourselves? The last stanza of Paul Auster's poem expresses perfectly this idea of hope:
In the impossibility of words,
in the unspoken word
that asphyxiates,
I find myself
Bert Steevensz, Amsterdam, February 1998
