De Indringer/The Intruder
Mounted on the exterior of the 15th century deVleeshal is a large PA speaker-horn
that emits in both Dutch and English a short Dutch children’s story
approximately 10 minutes long. The story is sounded only once a day after
the 1:15pm bells at a volume that can be heard just out of the public square
that the deVleeshal faces. A professional female voice actor from Los Angeles
read the English version, and a well-known male Dutch voiceover actor read
the Dutch version. The story is from a book by Piet Prins, a Dutch author
and the story deals with the subject of oppression and ethics during the Reformation
within a typical narrative structure.
On the interior exhibition space of deVleeshal is two other works. One is
a freestanding medium sized sculpture fabricated of small aluminum I-beams
that are bolted and riveted together and whose orientation and composition
may recall a late modernist formalist style of expression. The third element
is a wall-mounted digital C-print whose image is derived from the sculpture
itself as it is modeled in a 3D comic book style. The fourth element of the
project involves an 18” x 24” poster that uses a double image
of the deVleeshal tower. The poster was put up around the town of Middelburg
as part of the exhibition.
With these four elements, the story, the sculpture, the image, and the poster,
I hope to set up a discussion of the relationships between the attitudes expressed
in each, such as modernist formalism, narrative structure, oppression, and
the space of morality. I am interested in the relationship also between the
site of the deVleeshal itself, the architecture, and the impending chaos of
the street or square. The town hall is on the edge of the public square that
is used weekly as a market, a space of gathering and commerce, or as it has
been said about the idea of the town square, that the town square is umbilical
and is where the nutrients of the culture are produced. I am interested in
the authority of the deVleeshals’ presence as an historical marker but
also as an expression of the civic voice of the town hall to the square.
The reading of a story, especially a children’s story, can be thought
of as a somewhat intimate act set in a room with another person or maybe with
just a few listeners. I want to expand that idea by amplifying the story through
an industrial sounding device, to impersonalize the experience and to cast
the mass users and occupants, sellers and buyers of the market square as a
group in dire need of a story, that is about individuals who are oppressed
and greedy, as well as the simple allegory of good and bad.
I also want to suggest that the future holds in store for all, an amplified
voice, so to speak, of the institution, whereby we are all treated as mere
children in need of edification and are subjected to an even more totalitarian
regime of oppression and conformity. The voice may appear to be as sincere
as the story seems, but there is a subliminal perhaps more controlling subtext.
The selected story may have subtle suggestions referring to the Reformation
and Calvinist attitudes.
The sculpture itself may possess evidence of the idea for a type of corporate
model of a large outdoor work that is to be erected and dedicated for the
public square in front of the deVleeshal. The composition of the sculpture
should be thought of as uplifting and motivational suggesting a forward movement.
The modernist heroic stance and beliefs of such a work may also align with
the futuristic totalitarian vision of the story (such as resolve, fixity and
finiteness, even oppression) but looking back on it from a post-deconstruction
moment.
Similarly the graphic work will frame and contextualize the deVleeshal from
a tourist point of view by the styling and city as well as the exhibition
title. The poster is intended to frame the project within an international
art tourism image. The poster may also contextualize the sculpture as a monumental
work placed within the public square. I am interested in the conservative
corporate vocabulary that this type of placement would suggest, such as civic
landmark, corporate ownership, control of common aesthetics for the worker,
the expo, and new urbanism.
DS