That is how an obsessive atmosphere came about. The nightmare, the menace of hopelessness, was just some background noise. Even if everything had fallen apart and the viewers' eyes had been confronted head-on with chaos, I am convinced a myriad of wishes would have emanated from this almost infinite number of spheres.
SSAnd how do you deal with the discrepancy in provoking
and encouraging participatory actions while also
setting limits?
The following situation occurred with the installation
Jelly Soap in W139 (Amsterdam, 1998). An endlessly
long makeshift table with integrated washbasins wasdotted with a large number of jelly soaps, round in shape and in alluring colors, transparent and with the somewhat subdued sheen of various prototype samples wrapped in cellophane. At the opening, people were cautious. Suddenly, one guy approached the setting and shouted: "Hey, this doesn't work. Nobody is doing anything." He tears open one pack after the other, takes out the gelatinous and soft soap bars and scatters them all around. Then he contentedly looks at what he has done. But the havoc that he has wreaked
is not all that bad. Chaos helps some visitors overcome their inhibitions – they pick up the torn open bars and rub them. By most visitors Jelly Soap is not perceived as soap, because she bars only begin to melt when pressure is slowly exerted on them by the hands.
Rubbing alone won't do. And this brings us again to the meaning of handling, to a manipulation that is all of a sudden quite different and unusual. A soap which, when exposed to the heat and pressure applied by our hands, starts to melt is a minimum shift to a fictitious parallel world. Whatever happens – in many settings the real intentions are invisible at first.
A key element in presenting your work is to suppress
the notion that as an artist you are vulnerable. Since
many of your works are virtually indestructible –
interventions and destruction already being an integral
part of the conceptual setting - you have acquired adegree of freedom to present artistic action as being unharmed and autonomous. This observation was very important for me since it challenges habitual institutional actions and sheds a completely different light on questions such as preserving, insuring, and
damaging. The work The Web is a case in point.
