Re-Magazine #11 (Marcel)
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Puking... or how to upset my brain and stomach by eating brain and stomach, and twenty-four other favorite recipes...
When I was a child I once mistook a cowpie in my aunt’s barn for cooked spinach. It took me a long time to stop hating spinach. Once I was really ill for two days from a rancid canard a l'orange leftover, and it was years before I could shake the memory of it. But experiences like these shaped my sense of taste. If all you’re trying to do with food is make it nice and tasty then you are literally doing yourself short. There’s a fine line between full-flavored but appetizing and full-flavored but nauseating. It’s exciting to seek out that boundary. Tasty is not enough; I want it all.
Poulet cru
Once I ate a raw chicken breast. They were packed in pairs and I only needed one for the recipe. It tasted pretty okay, a bit like sashimi. Since then I’ve developped a love for raw food. Why is a raw carrot acceptable, but not a raw egg? You can experience completely new flavours and textures when you experiment with cooking times - the whole spectrum from raw to charred. An raw egg has an extraordinary slitheriness. You don’t even have to swallow; it finds its own way to your throat. At first you taste nothing, but after that the animal-protein taste hangs at the back of your throat for a long time.
Croquembouche
Caramel is just burnt sugar, and the level of burning determines the bitterness. Once I was busy making caramel for a croquembouche – a tower of cream-filled profiteroles with threads of angel-hair caramel spun around it – when the doorbell rang. It was someone collecting for the Heart Foundation with a brochure giving tips on how to lower your cholesterol. I ended up in a discussion until the point when a cloud of black smoke came floating into the hall. The pan was completely black, and for two days the house smelled of burnt sugar, but I finished making the croquembouche. I dipped the profiteroles in the tarry mass, stacked them, and then wrapped black caramel threads around them. Then I dusted it with icing sugar. It looked fancy, but you could have easily chipped a tooth on the rock-hard caramel. The sweetness of the profiteroles and the cream clashed with the bitterness of the burnt sugar. It was as if cancer were spreading right there in my mouth.
Omelette de truffes
Burnt food has a powerful taste, but this is also relative. Charcharis are Bengali vegetable dishes that combine three cooking procedures: boiling, steaming and frying. Though other cuisines in the world use the same procedures, and in similar sequence, only the charcharis are brought to the point of charring. I never had it, but I once ate an entire burnt Omelette de Truffes. The top half was still good, but the bottom was completely black. The good part and the burnt part merged to become a third, more bitter flavour that had a sweet vanilla tinge. It was unpleasant, but I imagined that this was a delicacy and ate it anyway.
Boeuf bourguignon
Eating directly from the pan is a completely different experience to eating from a plate at a neatly set dinner table. Eating with a dessertspoon is quite different to shoving the food into your mouth with a serving spoon that barely fits in your mouth. The spoon stretches the corners of your mouth and the food is only defined by the amount you can fit in. Not at the table, but standing at the counter. Not warm, but cold. It’s amazing how a delicious boeuf bourguignon can turn into a pan of cold meat with a yellow layer of congealed fat that has separated from the rest and breaks when you push a spoon through it. Eating out of the pan can be just as satisfying as being served a piping hot meal by candlelight in the company of good friends.
Dorade rose en croûte de sel
I visited a restaurant that had been given 9.5 out of 10 by a local critic. The food was okay, but definitely overrated. People were joking that the man had never given a restaurant less than a 7.5 since he’d started taking Prozac. The antipasti were good, but certainly not sublime. I already had a feeling of unfulfilled expectations when this was followed by the arrival of the dorade en croûte de sel. The waiter began to serve the fish with indifference, tapping the salt crust around the fish with the back of a spoon. Part of the salt crust ended up on my plate along with the fish, which should not have happened because it ruined the taste of the dorade. I picked at the salt crust on my plate and ate it. About one heaping dessertspoon. I felt how the salt sucked up my saliva, my taste buds were paralyzed and everything in my mouth and my head was contracting as if my brains were shrivelling up right inside my skull. When my mouth was full of salty saliva, I swilled it back and forth in my mouth for a a few minutes, which is a traditional cure for the blisters which you can get from exhaustion or a vitamin deficiency. Eventually I swallowed it – with great difficulty. Then I ate the rest of the dorade, which was quite bland, and I left without taking a dessert or coffee.
Although my mouth was parched and I was extremely thirsty when I returned home, I was curious what would happen if I consumed even more salt. I took another full dessert spoon of salt from the pot. It was so salty, my mouth couldn’t even produce any more saliva. I forced myself not to spit, but to swallow. The undissolved salt got stuck to the back of my throat and oesophagus. I ended up nearly choking. It was as if I had eaten a mouthful of sand. I then began to drink one glass of water after another, but the salty taste persisted. It was terrible and wonderful at the same time, and in some strange way physically exhausting. I had eaten about 30 grams of salt, only five times the recommended daily allowance. Committing suicide can be very easy: one kilo of salt is all it takes.
Harissa de Tunisie
I come from a big family, and if there was a wedding, there were always a couple of uncles who having drunk far too much would hold a harissa-eating competition at the end of the night. The chili paste would turn them a fiery red. They started to sweat like pigs, and tears rolled down their cheeks. I always wanted to take part, but I wasn’t allowed. I practiced secretly at home with peppercorns. I popped a couple in my mouth and chewed them until my mouth was on fire and I got a sharp stinging feeling in my nose. Nowadays I can eat as much harissa as I want to. If you eat a jar of Harissa you’ll get a pain in your stomach. Stomach cramps from black pepper settles further down and they can also cause discomfort when you open your bowels. Stomach pain from vinegar or citric acid sits much higher up. And too much onion or cabbage produces wind in the intestines.
Pommes de terre
I think potatos in their skins are very depressing to look at. So prehistoric, like a denial of every sign of progress. What in heaven’s name does a potato have to do with the microwave I use to prepare it? Nothing at all. I’ve made a habit of swallowing pommes parisiennes without chewing. I’ve also eaten a hardboiled egg whole. A potato swallowed whole can make your chest extremely tight, especially if it’s still piping hot. The potato forces your throat shut when the heat hits your vocal chords. It's scary, especially if the potato gets stuck halfway down. Once it reaches your stomach the pressure soon diminishes. I also have fantasies about swallowing bigger things: an apple or a courgette or my mobile phone. Open wide. Swallow. Gone.
Tartare de boeuf à l'américaine
When I still lived with my parents we used to eat meat no more than twice a week. So it has always had an aura of luxury to have meat around the house, even if it’s just a simple hamburger. It’s kind of a relief that meat like a hamburger or chicken wing has become an everyday industrial product – with all the associated consequences, of course. Secretly I find it exhilarating that the flesh of at least 10 and maybe even hundreds of different cows is mixed together in every single hamburger from any given fastfood chain. I mean, if I was to have sex with hundreds of women one after the other, then one of them is bound to have a venereal disease. There has been hardly any research into the mass production of food, and if there has been then it is deliberately and systematically kept out of the news. The meat may very well be produced in line with all kinds of strict regulations, but that doesn’t prevent microbes, spread primarily by fecal material, being present in 80 per cent of all hamburgers sold. Even if it's in miniscule quantities, there is literally shit in your Big Mac. In the US, at least a couple of hundred people die from eating hamburgers every year. It's Russian roulette made flesh. And what happens if you don’t eat just one but 10 hamburgers one after the other? With the most conservative estimate, that’s 500 cows. There are two patties on a Big Mac, so then we’re talking about an orgy of 1,000 cows. But there could just as easily be 20,000. And with eighty per cent of those 10 Big Macs you’re consuming the dung of 800 to 16,000 cows. Bon appetit.
Côtelettes de saumon
Ten to fifteen percent of every pig carcass is rejected because the pork turns into sweating pale cuts of meat that ooze liquid in the packaging and become leathery when cooked. Together with the scraps of beef, chicken and ostrich, this waste is rendered into fish-feed for farmed fish: salmon, trout, cod and other whitefish varieties. Once you’re aware of this, it’s only a matter of switching one image for another to taste what you really have in your mouth. It’s not the wild salmon which gets its pink colour naturally from eating crustaceans in the open ocean and then makes a journey of thousands of kilometers to powerfully and majestically swim against the current in the Scottish Highlands before leaping up a waterfall, but an artificially fattened organism with a poorly developed tailfin from a floating pen containing 12,000 other salmon which attack each other out of sheer stress. And if there are already 50 cows in a hamburger, then it’s completely impossible to work out what an average farmed salmon ingests from that slaughterhouse waste. Antibiotics are added to the food to combat disease, but the salmon become immune over time, so the dose has to be increased again and again, and eventually it all ends up on your plate. At the same time, you aren’t doing yourself any favours if you start getting sentimental about it. I also drink milk with added calcium, orange juice with extra vitamins. Maybe the antibiotics in my fillet of farmed salmon boost my own resistance and are a precursor of a much bigger trend - pharmafood. Pharmafood will be big business over the next 10 years: chocolate that smooths wrinkles, radish against Parkinson’s, hamburgers with fat-blockers, espresso coffee against dementia, anti-anxiety medication in airline food.
Kebab turque
A friend of mine is a bodybuilder and his diet regime includes one junkfood day every week, when he can eat anything and everything in massive quantities. He eats pizza and hamburgers, 20 eggs and three kilos of fish, so he can turn it into pure muscle. The fish odour literally exudes from all his pores, and even if he can’t keep it all down he just has to keep eating. I’m not into bodybuilding, but I did adopt his idea of a junkfood day. On a junkfood day I tour all the fastfood restaurants in the area: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King and Quick, and a few small kebab shops and grillrooms. I order the most standard meal: a Big Mac menu at McDonald’s and a kebab at a grillroom, and always with fries. Fries are OK, it’s fat and starch, and a good carrier for all kinds of sauces. Every place I visit on a junkfood day I take a different sauce with the fries: ketchup, Flemish mayonnaise, mustard, remoulade, shashlick sauce, garlic sauce, tabasco, 1000 island dressing, vinegar, peanut sauce. If you really want to stuff yourself, you can do two things: eat fast, which means only your stomach gets full. Or you can eat more slowly so that the whole alimentary canal is filled with food at different stages of digestion: oesophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine. In this second case, the feeling of being full is all-engorging. You display the same symptoms as with excessive consumption of alcohol. You end up losing your sense of balance, so you can no longer walk straight and you have to hold onto something in order to stand up.
Mousse au chocolat
At the end of every junkfood day I undress and stand in front of the mirror. I look at my body while I’m eating a large bowl of mousse au chocolat, a pack of cakes or a bag of crisps. Each time I see how my jaws mechanically crush the food and how the envelope of my body gradually expands to an ever-greater girth. My body is able to withstand incredible transformations. It has never been an integrated whole. There is nothing that holds it together. It’s like a drawing by someone who can’t draw, or has accidentally slipped. My torso is set on my pelvis in an unnatural way, like building blocks which have been stacked carelessly.
Pain à la campagne
I’m 43 now. That’s about the age that people died in the days when they began organized agriculture and livestock rearing. That means my body is actually ready to die. In fact I’m already past death. The decay set in a long time ago. That’s an interesting situation, because according to the statistics I will still be around for another 40 years. In this body.
Pizza aux quatre fromages
Over a stretch of eight years I’ve gained 40 kilos, which is half as much again as the 80 kilos that I weighed when I was 35. Other people have a piercing or a tattoo, but I went for the extra kilos. Putting on 40 kilos is hard work. You could say gaining 40 kilos equals 160 packs of butter: a pack at breakfast, a pack with lunch and pack at dinner. If it were that simple, you’d get there in no time. But most of what you eat you also shit out. So it’s always two steps forward, one step back. I turned it into a multi-year plan. It takes hundreds of kilos of food to achieve that – and a different mentality. You can snack on biscuits and savouries between meals, but to gain substantial weight you have to raise the stakes across the board. If you put a frozen pizza in the oven, you have to add a couple of extra layers of cheese and salami. Snacking from the fridge before going to bed has to become a meal in itself. The point when people start to see you as a fat person is somewhere between 90 and 95 kilos, I noticed.
Assiette de fromages variés
If I go to an expensive restaurant these days, it’s not just to eat good food, but also because the waiters are too polite to say anything when you take a whole Brie from the cheeseboard instead of just a dainty slice.
Sauce au beurre
The great thing about butter is that you can melt it, which means you can drink it. It’s different with cheese. When you melt it, you are left with cheese fondue.
Le Coca
Cola Light is my favourite drink. I always have a crate of 1.5-litre bottles at home and in the back of the car. You don’t get fat from it, so they say, and there’s aspartame in it, as they also point out. Aspartame is an artificial sweetener that, by the way, will give me cancer faster than cigarettes, which is ironic since my Cola Light addiction began when I stopped smoking. The liver breaks down aspartame to its toxic components. This process puts stress on the liver, so the liver has less energy to burn fat, which results in fat storage. So the complicated thing with Cola Light is that besides losing weight you also gain weight. You’re losing weight in your head, but your body is gaining weight. It cuts three ways.
Fondue du Valais
Gourmandizing is completely different to gluttonizing. Gourmandizing gives you an instant high, while gluttonizing ignores the taste and the nature of what you’re eating. It could be anything. You can gluttonize randomly, without a system, but you can also go about it in a methodical way. Alphabetically, for example: Apple pie, Brisket of beef, Cashew nuts, Dried fruit, Egg salad, Fondue – and if you make cheese fondue you can also arrange the cheeses alphabetically: Appenzeller, Brie, Camembert, Danish Blue, Emmental, Feta, Gorgonzola, Humboldt, Kernhem, Leicester, Mozzarella, Nut cheeses, Old Amsterdam, Pecorino Romano, Queso de Cabrales, Stilton, Roquefort, Taleggio, Vache qui rit, Wensleydale... There are always a couple of mould cultures in there which curdle in combination with each other, either in the pan or in your stomach. Curdled fondue is difficult to eat, but the consistency and texture is really special, and worth trying. You’ll retch at first. You have to prepare for it by pinching your nose shut to begin with. I find these kinds of spontaneous refusal by the body intriguing; you realize how your body and mind are at odds with each other. A good binge is food for thought. I don’t just gorge myself. I’m not addicted to eating. If I’m addicted at all, then I’m addicted to the complexity of what an addiction is.
Tripes à la mode de Caen
I have a second brain in my stomach. Like Siamese twins, my gut brain and the brain in my skull are interconnected. Emotional states from the head brain are mirrored in the gut brain, and, just as my head brain can upset my stomach brain, my stomach brain can disturb my mind. I eat tripe as well as brains I play them off against each other until one of the two says: ‘Stop!’ Retching is a form of refusal, a physical reaction that is not mentally prompted and impossible to repress. Self-expression, you might say.
Cervelle de veau
If the stomach has a brain, then it’s the same the other way around and there is some kind of digestion in my brains. While bingeing I often read diet books full of dos and don’ts about eating: "Welcome to the fast, easy, energy-empowering, never-be-hungry, delicious, hi-pro/lo-carb art of creative weight loss.'... 'First of all, stop your consumption of sweets made with real sugars. Sugar has no nutrition value and is directly harmful to your health.'... 'Eat slowly and extend the meal to give your brain the time to signal satisfaction before your stomach is distented and you feel stuffed.'... If you squeeze an orange you must never drink the juice, but pour it away and eat only the flesh, because there’s less sugar in it.'... 'Don't count calories, count carbs.'... 'Never eat food labeled as "low-fat", it means it's "high carb" To make low-fat products taste good, manufacturers add lots of sugar.' These kinds of imperatives have a strangely schizophrenic effect on me when I'm wolfing down my third plate of pasta with cream and bacon.
Salade Montignac
Something else that works well is following different diets simultaneously. One day the Atkins diet, without carbohydrates, and the following day a bread diet. Or Atkins in the morning, Montignac for lunch, Fit for Life in the evening, and a couple of SlimFast bars in between. Or just candy bars. You’ll soon lose track. One mouthful is ultra-healthy; the next mouthful from the same plate is pure poison.
Lapin à la moutarde
Some foods cause allergic reactions in the body. This can vary from person to person. Passing through the porous stomach wall, bits of undigested food end up in the bloodstream. There they are attacked by the immune system because the food is recognized as being non-self. I was tested to find out which foods I'm allergic to, and if those allergies would cause a mild or more serious reaction. They tested me for 87 popular foods and five generic foodstuffs, like lactose, gluten, baker’s yeast, brewer’s yeast and tannin. It turned out that there were 25 products that I should definitely stop eating. And with 10 others it was advisable to stop. According to the test results, I couldn’t eat anything any more. I wasn’t allowed any coffee, any tea, any mushrooms, any oranges, any shrimps, any crab, any rabbit, any barley, any oatmeal, any rye, any wheat or any gluten. No bread, and no bran either. I still ate them.
Foie gras
In 1985 the American government donated 500 million dollars for famine relief in Africa. That same year, the American people spent 5 billion dollars, 10 times as much, to combat obesity. Just imagine that those 5 billion diet-dollars are the equivalent of 5 billion kilos of excess weight. Now imagine that every kilo of excess weight represents a food package to the value of 5 dollars, and then there is still an expense of 25 billion dollars to produce those 5 billion kilos of obesity – a total cost of 30 billion dollars. With numbers like this, surely it’s shortsighted to view obesity as a personal problem. If I lose a kilo, then someone else gains it. Fat has to go somewhere.
Le bouillon
Once I had managed to reach a weight of 120 kilos, I wanted to know what it was like to shed 40 kilos. From one day to the next I stopped eating and drinking. Now the battle between my head brain and my stomach brain was really on. In the beginning I became very lucid, but after six days my body gave a sign that I had to start drinking again: I fainted three times in a row. So I drank water. Just water, but in endless quantities. And one cup of bouillon for dinner. In the end I could drink and piss at the same time. Meanwhile I kept on fasting. If you starve the body and do not give it any food, the weight it loses is not fat; it’s muscle, and even bone mass. I looked terrible, and my eyes sank into my skull, while the lucid thoughts in my head gradually turned into hallucinations. In the space of a year I lost 40 kilos and then regained 30 kilos. That is a movement of 70 kilos of fat. I discovered that my whole body is designed to keep my brain alive. And my brain will burn everything up itself before it dies.
Saucisson sec façon portuguese
Once, in a delicatessen, I bought a Portuguese salami which was so old that the meat crumbled in my mouth when I took a bite. The sinews on the other hand were like rubber. You could chew on it for minutes to no effect. It was like eating an Egyptian mummy. The sausage was about 30 centimetres long and three centimetres thick. It was the nastiest thing I’ve ever eaten. I took another bite, and another, and another. I had a mouth full of mummy. It was just like human flesh. No other association was possible. It was like I was eating myself 100 years after I’d died. I saved up the sinews in my mouth and then I swallowed them one by one. It made me puke. When I puke, I puke as if I’m singing the national anthem: standing straight, looking straight ahead. The increasing pressure in my stomach and the contraction of my abdomen, forces the contents of my stomach out through the oesophagus into the outside world. I'm not going to politely cover my mouth or hide in the toilet and throw up into the washbasin. Puking should be celebrated. Projectile puking is my favourite form of puking. Big, undigested lumps of the hors d'oeuvre de moules à la ravigotte from the day before shooting over your clothes, across the table, across dinner guests, over the television and against the wall. And then another wave, and another, and another. Half-digested puke like a wholesome minestrone. If no more comes out then I stick my finger deep down my throat, so that the next wave to come out is mixed with gall and is ejected so forcefully that the flap in my throat doesn’t close in time, and it also comes out of my nose (as well). Once I even got a grain of rice coming out of my eye-socket. The puke burned into my eyeball. I couldn’t see a thing.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Een voorspoedig 2133!
Wie zich verdiept in de geschiedenis van tijdcapsules vindt genoeg redenen om er geen te maken. De meesten verdwijnen, omdat ze vergaan of omdat ze worden vergeten. Toch zijn we bezig om er een in Rotterdam samen te stellen. Want ook al zijn we tegenwoordig geneigd om alleen met ironische distantie naar tijdcapsules te kijken, ze bieden nog steeds mogelijkheden. Niet zozeer voor onze nazaten, maar voor onszelf.
Wie zich verdiept in de geschiedenis van tijdcapsules vindt genoeg redenen om er geen te maken. De meesten verdwijnen, omdat ze vergaan of omdat ze worden vergeten. Toch zijn we bezig om er een in Rotterdam samen te stellen. Want ook al zijn we tegenwoordig geneigd om alleen met ironische distantie naar tijdcapsules te kijken, ze bieden nog steeds mogelijkheden. Niet zozeer voor onze nazaten, maar voor onszelf.
Rejected Conceptualism
Inventarisnummer BK53086 - BK53115. Serie van 30 potloodtekeningen. Begin 1 juni 1976, einde 30 juni 1976. Kunstenaar: Jan Hoving. Titel: Zonder titel. Beschrijving: Vierkant met potloodarcering, met begin- en eindtijdnotering. Materiaal: potlood, papier. Hoogte: 54,8. Breedte: 54,8. Staat: redelijk. Organisatie: Instituut Collectie Nederland. Rubriek: Beeldende kunst. Dit werk wordt afgestoten door Instituut Collectie Nederland.
Inventarisnummer BK53086 - BK53115. Serie van 30 potloodtekeningen. Begin 1 juni 1976, einde 30 juni 1976. Kunstenaar: Jan Hoving. Titel: Zonder titel. Beschrijving: Vierkant met potloodarcering, met begin- en eindtijdnotering. Materiaal: potlood, papier. Hoogte: 54,8. Breedte: 54,8. Staat: redelijk. Organisatie: Instituut Collectie Nederland. Rubriek: Beeldende kunst. Dit werk wordt afgestoten door Instituut Collectie Nederland.
Recto / Verso
Interview covergirl Lauren Hutton was photographed by Francesco Scavullo in 1973. She's wearing Galanos - from his exciting fall 1973 collection. Accessorized by Galanos, makeup by Way Bandy, hair by Rick Gilette. The photo was re-photographed by Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm in 2003, with model Uta Eichhorn posing as Re-Magazine covergirl Claudia. She's wearing a black dress by Hermès. Styling by Katja Rahlwes, makeup by Renata Mandic.
Interview covergirl Lauren Hutton was photographed by Francesco Scavullo in 1973. She's wearing Galanos - from his exciting fall 1973 collection. Accessorized by Galanos, makeup by Way Bandy, hair by Rick Gilette. The photo was re-photographed by Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm in 2003, with model Uta Eichhorn posing as Re-Magazine covergirl Claudia. She's wearing a black dress by Hermès. Styling by Katja Rahlwes, makeup by Renata Mandic.
Media Suicide
De 38-jarige Karst T. uit Huissen reed even voor het middaguur in op toeschouwers in een bewuste actie de koninklijke familie te raken. De man raakte zelf ernstig gewond en verkeerde gisteravond in levensgevaar. De man ontweek op de Jachtlaan in Apeldoorn twee afzettingen en reed met zijn zwarte Suzuki Swift in op de menigte. De koninklijke familie zag vanaf een paar meter afstand hoe de man tegen monument De Naald botste.
De 38-jarige Karst T. uit Huissen reed even voor het middaguur in op toeschouwers in een bewuste actie de koninklijke familie te raken. De man raakte zelf ernstig gewond en verkeerde gisteravond in levensgevaar. De man ontweek op de Jachtlaan in Apeldoorn twee afzettingen en reed met zijn zwarte Suzuki Swift in op de menigte. De koninklijke familie zag vanaf een paar meter afstand hoe de man tegen monument De Naald botste.
Destroyed Thinker
In january 2007 two thieves stole a small cast of the Thinker from the Singer Museum in Laren, Holland. Not knowing the value of the sculpture, the thieves started taking the sculpture apart to be melted down. Alarmed by the press attention for their theft, and learning about its estimated value, they burried the sculpture in their garden. A few days later it was found, heavily damaged.
In january 2007 two thieves stole a small cast of the Thinker from the Singer Museum in Laren, Holland. Not knowing the value of the sculpture, the thieves started taking the sculpture apart to be melted down. Alarmed by the press attention for their theft, and learning about its estimated value, they burried the sculpture in their garden. A few days later it was found, heavily damaged.
Rodin research
From 2005 onwards, I have been focusing on Rodin as a research topic. The main question that I ask myself is in what way Rodin consciously helped shaping the mythical proportions of his own artistic persona. By studying his life and works and by studying the timeframe of the second half of the nineteenth century – in which his work came to existence – I seek to create a context of paralel references as a source of inspiration for nowadays artistic practice.
From 2005 onwards, I have been focusing on Rodin as a research topic. The main question that I ask myself is in what way Rodin consciously helped shaping the mythical proportions of his own artistic persona. By studying his life and works and by studying the timeframe of the second half of the nineteenth century – in which his work came to existence – I seek to create a context of paralel references as a source of inspiration for nowadays artistic practice.
Miscellaneous
This is a selection of older works, dating roughly from 1990 until now. It's a reservoir of lose ends. Part of my practice is to go back in time, and re-evaluate previous motives and actions. Therefore, a lot of my works have an unfinished, ambiguous nature. Either they have lost their momentum after they were exhibited, or were never shown outside of my studio, or are just waiting for completion in another context.
This is a selection of older works, dating roughly from 1990 until now. It's a reservoir of lose ends. Part of my practice is to go back in time, and re-evaluate previous motives and actions. Therefore, a lot of my works have an unfinished, ambiguous nature. Either they have lost their momentum after they were exhibited, or were never shown outside of my studio, or are just waiting for completion in another context.
Co*star
Dus toen kreeg ik heel erg de wens, als mens maar ook als kunstenaar, om me te bevrijden van al die dingen... om werkelijk iets nieuws in te slaan. Maar dat gaat niet, want je kan het nieuwe niet bedenken op basis van al die ouwe zooi. Dus ik dacht, ik wil daar van af... en toen bleek dat soap ... bleek een deur te zijn naar... zeg maar dat je die ruimte in je hoofd weer werkelijk leeg zou kunnen maken en als een soort potentie zou kunnen gaan vullen... zelf.
Dus toen kreeg ik heel erg de wens, als mens maar ook als kunstenaar, om me te bevrijden van al die dingen... om werkelijk iets nieuws in te slaan. Maar dat gaat niet, want je kan het nieuwe niet bedenken op basis van al die ouwe zooi. Dus ik dacht, ik wil daar van af... en toen bleek dat soap ... bleek een deur te zijn naar... zeg maar dat je die ruimte in je hoofd weer werkelijk leeg zou kunnen maken en als een soort potentie zou kunnen gaan vullen... zelf.
Retitled
For the last couple of years in a row, artists had been invited who felt at home in a big show environment. This had thrown up a number of lively and playful installations, but this year the budding tradition was in jeopardy: for a variety of reasons there was next to no money for art projects. The only kitty in the budget that might be called upon had been set aside for the printing of the half a million paper napkins that were to be used during the festival.
For the last couple of years in a row, artists had been invited who felt at home in a big show environment. This had thrown up a number of lively and playful installations, but this year the budding tradition was in jeopardy: for a variety of reasons there was next to no money for art projects. The only kitty in the budget that might be called upon had been set aside for the printing of the half a million paper napkins that were to be used during the festival.
I shot Madonna
When she comes past I click away hysterically. Not even with the intention of getting her picture but more because I’m in the press enclosure and have to prove that I’m a photographer or so. I’m so busy with the camera and she goes by so fast that I hardly catch a glimpse of her. The print I have made is blurred. Also that night was the first time she showed up with a black hairdo instead of her usual blonde, so nobody recognized her on the photo.
When she comes past I click away hysterically. Not even with the intention of getting her picture but more because I’m in the press enclosure and have to prove that I’m a photographer or so. I’m so busy with the camera and she goes by so fast that I hardly catch a glimpse of her. The print I have made is blurred. Also that night was the first time she showed up with a black hairdo instead of her usual blonde, so nobody recognized her on the photo.
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