Harm van den Berg
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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.