Endurance and the Art of Guido van der Werve: Nummer veertien, home

Endurance and the Art of Guido van der Werve: Nummer veertien, home

For me, the act of running is pure and sublime. Minimal in preparation, the simple tying on of a pair of sneakers and slipping out the front door makes the ordinary a bit wild. Even the short distances I run, hovering around five or six miles, are always a worthy journey because of the chance at the unknown. This active contemplation in nature often brings me home drenched and sour, my legs scratched and briar-laden, sneakers caked with mud. But the pace allows the mind to wander, and in endurance is solitude. The act brings one with nature; in a way, we become wild. I return exhausted always, but complete.

Guido van der Werve is an artist/composer/filmmaker who, through the need to create an autobiographical work, became interested in mountaineering. His ultimate goal was to climb Mount Everest. For Mountaineers it is necessary to acclimatize at the base camp of Mount Everest (5,400 meters) for two months to improve the blood’s capacity to transport oxygen. This seemed the ideal time for van der Werve to work on this autobiographical work. For him the possible looming near-death experience could trigger a deep, reflective mood. In preparation, he summited Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest mountain outside of Asia (6,962 meters). It was a certain test of high altitude, but the experience was not pleasant. Said van der Werve of the experience:

I had expected it to be tough, but the lack of oxygen made me feel terminally ill. I think I was looking for wisdom during this period and was hoping to find some at the summit. I had heard the stories: “If you make it to the summit, you realize it’s all worth it” and “You climb up a boy and you come down a man.” After two weeks of pain and suffering, we finally reached the summit. Besides being completely exhausted, I didn’t feel anything. I decided to leave my Mount Everest ambitions for what they were.

After resigning from the possibility of coaxing out a reflective mood with a near-death experience on Everest, van der Werve created the exploit artificially by composing a requiem. This would become the soundtrack for Nummer veertien, home, Guido van der Werve’s most recent work—a 54-minute poetic film, intertwining his youth in Papendrecht, Netherlands with the lives of his childhood heroes, Frédéric Chopin and Alexander the Great. All is told and structurally based on van der Werve’s lovely classical requiem: three movements and twelve acts.

The movements correspond to the three disciplines in the triathlon (swim, bike, run). The twelve acts follow the classical structure of the requiem (1. Introitus, 2. Kyrie Eleison, 3. Gradual, 4. Communion, 5. Sequence, 6. Tract, 7. Sanctum, 8. Agnus Dei, 9. Offertory, 10. Libera me, 11. Pie Jesu, 12. In Paradisum). I didn’t use the original mass text but wrote my own libretto. The texts are based on my diaries, experiences, memories, and the mass text itself. The twelve parts of the requiem are all in a different minor key so the requiem becomes half a book of preludes. The musical theme consists of the notes d.e.a.d. 

As a young pianist of twenty, Frédéric Chopin filled a silver goblet with soil from his boyhood home of Warsaw and embarked on tour of Europe. As war broke out, he was never to return. In Paris he settled in self-exile where, for eighteen years, he composed music based on Polish folk melodies and musical structures: Mazurkas and Polonaises. When Chopin lay dying in Paris, 1849, at the young age of 39, he was longing for his homeland and asked his eldest sister, Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, that his heart return to his beloved Poland. He died soon after and, dutifully, she had the organ removed, preserved in excellent cognac, and wax-sealed within a crystal jar. After spiriting the package beneath her skirt, she stealthily passed Austrian and Russian border guards to eventually rest her brother’s heart in a pillar at Warsaw’s Holy Cross Church. It bears an inscription from the Book of Matthew 6:21: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Nummer veertien, home is a loving, endurance journey of promise, solitude, and resolute longing. The film, expressed by van der Werve’s soulful requiem, also acts as a visually voluble cinematic interlude of sublimity. It begins with piano and a slow cascading movement down the pillar to Chopin’s heart’s grave. Steadily the scene pulls back to reveal van der Werve in a forbidding rubber wetsuit at a Steinway grand. Atop the piano sits a silver cup (a vessel he will subsequently fill with the soil of Chopin’s boyhood home). Continuously the scene opens to the ensuing violins, then the entire orchestra spanning the dark hardwood pews of Holy Cross Church. As if the camera is attuned to adagio the interior expands vertically to balcony, pipe organ, and the succeeding choir. All twenty string instruments and a forty-piece choir is framed in a brilliant uninterrupted sequence; movement matching the score—a cinematic motif and foreshadow of an arduous passage to come.

The visual journey is also an actual extreme performance on which the traveler has shed everything extraneous. Stripped down to the essentials, the self is reduced to its barest rudiments, leaving just the baggage of thought. At the end of that opening scene, van der Werve, stands from the piano in his rubber wetsuit, takes the silver cup, and parts the orchestra. Comically, and yet with complete earnestness, he runs up the road to step into the river, and to begin swimming 26.6 km. The breadth and depth of the river engulf van der Werve. He plies heroically against its aggressive, muddled water. The entire duration of the actual journey took van der Werve over three weeks, a triathlon covering more than 1,500 kilometers—seven times the length of an Ironman. From the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, he swam 27 km in two days, cycled nearly 1,400 km in eight days, and ran the remaining 289 km in seven days.

I’ve been running from the age of sixteen, but never in a very structured way. In 2008, I finished my film “number twelve” and, after working on that project for two years for fourteen hours a day, I needed some distraction. I started running to clear my head and soon I found myself running daily. In 2009 I ran my first marathon, in 2010 I ran three marathons, and in 2011 I ran 100 kilometers around my house in Finland. Last year, I started doing triathlons. Running gives me the structure to organize my life, it helps me to stay clear in my head, and by running you produce endorphins and other substances that make you feel good. I never saw races as goals, but I always enjoyed the running itself. I always think it’s a pity that the race is finished, I would rather continue. For this reason I started doing longer races and I’m currently training for an Ironman triathlon.

Adequately capacious, clear and brilliant, the landscape broods with sublimity. Spring is sweeping in, emitting an even light that stirs up the deepest colors, the richest shadows. It’s a different kind of saturation, a light that is water-soaked. It’s a landscape that is heavy laden with weather. This sensitivity is expressively captured in cinematography, offering paths through the landscape where the journey becomes implicitly mythic, steeped in van der Werve’s haunt of heroes. Landscape is not just a backdrop, it’s a living character. It is simply an amplification of the way that environment lifts the soul. The roads winding through bucolic melancholic fields are threads of a story—the rivers and streams are coruscating surfaces that are doorways into other worlds. These doorways become literal when the film moves to the artist’s birthplace. Laid out in a grassy lot along the river, the entire orchestra plays. The moody weather brushes the trees, early in bud, and accentuated by a burst of forsythia behind the cello section. Far right, van der Werve enters in a dark suit completely on fire. He crosses in front of the orchestra and straight into the river to douse the flames.

These volatile tensions mark the film as nearly as comical as it is poignant. The series of calamities represent epiphanies that embody a bittersweet coming of age yearning. The admixture of the outlandish, literally explosive moments are appropriate as van der Werve plays them deadpan. The comic underlies his earnest, careworn demeanor. These explicable metaphors create a wild actuality that leaves us pining for something left in our heart—that place we try to get as far away from as we can; the landscape of family, friends, scents, sounds we dote on through our entire lives. Home.

I abstracted a few important childhood memories to integrate into the script. Abstracting my personal memories and experiences is a process that I always apply in my work. I try to make my work as open as possible by doing this; I abstract the narrative until only the mood is left. Mood is a medium that everybody can relate to and, more importantly, everyone has their own relationship to the mood. The artist stops being important.

As a distance runner, I feel the endurance and solitude in Nummer veertien, home. When van der Werve finally reaches Paris, framed against the teeming traffic and the city-ambient noise, he is dreadfully worn. He rests on a iron gate, sweat-drenched, pain-squinted. This is where the oneiric and metaphysical become realistic: his tired slump, the heavy breaths. It feels like an ending and brings to mind Chopin’s Prelude in E minor Op.28 No.4.—heart beating and breathing, despair at the same time searching, slowing relenting, but with resolve. Incidentally, it was one of the pieces played at the composer’s funeral.

When I’m running my mind is blank and when I stop, I’m confronted once again with my thoughts, demons, and everyday life. For this reason I don’t run to finish, but see the finish line as a starting line for the next race. I think that this is the reason why I couldn’t understand mountaineering. I would rather circle the mountain than climb it. I’m not interested in routes from A to B but more in the distance in-between.

Reaching Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where Chopin’s body (sans heart) rests among luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Jim Morrison, van der Werve places the silver cup of Polish soil and simply moves from the screen. Is he more of an embodiment of his accumulated miles, swimming, biking, running; is he the incarnation of enduring forward motion? The Art World’s cinematic poet of willpower, endurance, struggle and solitude, Nummer veertien, home is a performative feat of self-containment and a yearning to a return to innocence through a harmony with nature, and a continuum of the push and pull of the homeland.

Images: Film stills from “Nummer veertien, home” (2012).

See it here in its original form at the Michigan Quarterly Review: 

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2015/04/endurance-and-the-art-of-guido-van-der-werve-nummer-veertien-home/

Landscape as Process: The Art of Susan Goethel Campbell, by Robert Sparrow Jones, Michigan Quarterly Review, October, 2014

Susan Goethel Campbell, an environmentalist at the core, is a multidisciplinary artist who is deeply steeped in tradition and profoundly connected to nature. Her work is a slowly evolving dance devoted to researching, collecting data, and balancing two or three projects in different forms of completion at once. She has worked with scientists and meteorologists, but her work is far from rigid. In fact, her ideas are manifested in atmospheric ways that align our thoughts, emotions, and actions with nature.

With her large floor installation, Resisting Certainty at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Campbell takes the art of horticulture and ingeniously turns all conventions upside down. Inverted, natural sod tiles are used as the building blocks of a larger grid. This grid intersects, overlapping three larger, flat geometric planes. The planes are dark and ominous, hovering an inch from the floor and evoking a sense of groundlessness with the shifting change of environment. Together, the organic and the synthetic push our vantage to a further point. In this atmosphere, Campbell provides us with a rich, intuitive approach to discovering and meeting nature with its patterns. These relationships are not only intellectually stimulating, but also emotionally and spiritually satisfying.

Susan Goethel Campbell in her Detroit Landscape, 2014

As Campbell was growing up in the new suburb of East Grand Rapids, Michigan, the idea of “landscape as a process” left a lasting impression on her. She played freely in the open fields among sumac, milkweed, and wild pheasants. In her exploration, deep visceral observations encompassed life and death within the drama of seasons. She understood that change also included the cultural environment that was being built. The hushed bucolic spaces and the emergent landscape would inform the center of her future work.

“The infrastructure for future housing already existed in the landscape and I thought of this as one giant playfield. Two huge, raised sewers were at the bottom of a hill where I used to go sledding. They had raised cement caps with ladders that allowed you to climb down into the sewer. During the summer months, I would climb inside where it was cool and explore what I thought was a ‘natural’ underground river. Seasonal change included not only flowering plants, but newly erected wooden armatures that dotted open fields. The framing for a new house imposed a type of geometry on my field of vision where earth and sky were bracketed by angles and planes. The smell of new lumber mingled with the smell of earth. These early experiences influenced my art and process.”

Ironically, when Susan moved to Detroit as an adult in the early 1980′s, just as many open fields existed in the city as did in her childhood landscape. And much like her youthful experience, wild pheasants were seen on deserted roads and steam vaporized from lone sewer holes. While gravity and weather dissolved houses into the earth, nature overwhelmed vast plots with trees taking root in the eaves of derelict buildings. These lasting experiences in nature are apparent in the materials and methodologies Campbell uses in Resisting Certainty. Each sod tile is molded by a vacuum-formed plastic container. Campbell grows these in her Detroit studio, tending to them for several months at a time. However, against all good horticulture practice, she allows the grass to become root-bound. By using this process, the underneath is conformed into a near perfect positive, including a symbolic grid.

Up close, the sod tiles are wonderful to explore. Constricted, the roots intricately form a natural weaving in the ribs and crevices. Around the edges, individual tiles softy sweep away like the wheat fields from Campbell’s childhood. In the center of the tiles are raised flat circles. The circle is repeated in the sod tiles left upright. This orientation allows their square-constricted bottoms to become obscured after the long grass has naturally wilted outward. The idea represented here is certainly the cycles of change. It is also the attempt to include green space in urban planning, city parks, and perhaps in the center of all communities. This motif is repeated in smaller, rolled sod tiles.

The type of natural material Campbell cultivates is a grass that, against all odds, finds a home in the rooftops of dilapidated buildings. It is a weed that thrives in the poorest of soil and is able to survive the harshest of weather conditions. We find this type of grass waist-high in a neglected plot of suburbia.

Is this blatant commentary of our attempt to coexist with nature? Or is it a failing attempt to control nature without any regard for sustainability? I don’t think the work is didactic at all. Campbell is using an appropriate symbolic building block, a micro meditation of natural and artificial environment. The work on a whole arouses an emotional response stemming deeply from the environment of our youth.

Susan Goethel Campbell, “Resisting Certainty”
2014, Grand Rapids Art Museum

Resisting Certainty is informed by the constructs of our cultural landscape. Information, by way of data, charts, graphs, and mass-produced construction are distilled into vacillating grounds of synthetic and organic planes, as a large topographical map. Yet, our movement through the installation is graceful, controlled by Campbell’s aesthetic ability. She clearly considers social interaction and bodily movement. At once I felt winged and limberly circling. Discovery was offered at every turn. Detail beckoned attention, banking around and through implied paths of organic and engineered spaces.

“My relationship to landscape has to do with impermanence, change and movement. My earliest influences and emotional epiphanies came from dance rather than visual art. The performances of Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Martha Graham, and Eric Hawkins were visual distillations of the body in time. This spoke to me. The movement was minimal, repetitious and sometimes glacial. In my late 20’s I fell in love with the Butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku. Their reference to the ground plane in their dance led me to consider cycles of renewal and decay in the landscape. This encompasses the built environment.”

Campbell takes tradition and brings it into the current era. Her manipulation of landscape is an elegant form of printmaking. The plastic container is her matrix and every sod tile is a multiple, therefore a document of the container. Campbell earned a master’s degree in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has been awarded printmaking residencies in Belgium and Germany. She also taught studio art for 15 years at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. I think that printmaking is an appropriate adaptation here.

“Throughout my artistic career, I have been interested in process and the intersection of nature and culture. Trained as a printmaker, the idea of recording and transferring marks from one thing to another has shaped how I work and see the world to this day. A line can be formed from an insect chewing on a leaf or a backhoe bulldozing a new road through a forest. Both micro and macro views are visual marks on the landscape…My job is to bring a voice to the material.”

The other works around the perimeter of the exhibit are just as contemplative. InSeasonal Flyers: Spring, Campbell repeats her systems on a much simpler yet still complex level. Tiny individual downy seeds of dandelion are harvested in an attempt to construct a single building block the size of a brick. Presented is a work so tenuous, so delicate that one more dandelion seed would topple it over. Closing in for a micro view, careening overtop to revel at Campbell’s precarious feat, I was most thankful for the protecting vitrine.

Campbell’s work summons reflection of the changing environment around us. Her methodology establishes a mode of interaction between people and landscape that provokes reciprocity, wonder, and gratitude. Perhaps she wants us to encounter her work as we should approach nature—respectfully discovering exactly how all its parts (ourselves included) belong.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/10/landscape-as-process-the-art-of-susan-goethel-campbell/