Arnoud Holleman

Amsterdam — Tuesday 03 December, 2024
nl / en
#printed matter

Family and Friends

seven drawings

Recent Me Too scandals have led to two powerful affects in people: anger and shame. Those two affects are intimately related, because anger is often expressed by inflicting shame on the person at whom the anger is directed, as in ‘shame on you!’ We punish people by making them shameful. (Ernst van Alphen in SHAME! and Masculinity)

Platitudes

De Gids Literary Magazine

Every artisthood is teeming with platitudes. Repetitive anecdotes, topoi, that give every artist biography the same setup: he or she, always alone; real talent eludes schooling; thousands shouted out, only a handful chosen. Large or small talent, they all put their lives at stake for something that wants to transcend life. Art goes before offspring, reaches beyond death.

I Shot Madonna

media recycling

When she comes past I click away hysterically. Not even with the intention of getting her picture but I'm in the press enclosure and have to pretend that I'm a photographer. I'm so occupied 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 Madonna showed up with a black hairdo instead of her usual blonde, so nobody recognizes her on the photo.

Now

Club Donny magazine #1

What happens is that the grit under your feet mixes with the noise in your head. And in the monotony of the constant succession of footsteps, residual thoughts escape like intestinal slugs. Initially this is unpleasant. The physical exertion is a booster, the cadence of your breathing and your footsteps become the haunted baseline under the story of your life, as you recount it to yourself at that moment.

Re-Magazine

collaboration with Jop van Bennekom

Re-Magazine's great virtue is its willingness to expose sentiments that seldom find public expression, most often relating to the apparently trivial experiences and memories that make up the larger part of existence. Alongside this editorial idiosyncrasy, it is beautifully designed and photographed, each issue adopting a form to suit its subject - Emily King, Frieze, October 2003.

Tekeningen 1995 - 1997

drawings

Met een zweepje onder z'n oksels geklemd 'berijdt' een naakte man een op z'n kop staand paard. Terwijl hij met z'n anus over de paardenlul glijdt, perst een eveneens naakte vrouw zich met moeite in het poepgat van het rijdier. Om haar daad kracht bij te zetten, duwt ze met haar hand tegen een denkbeeldige muur - een muur die tevens de kadrering vormt van het op papier getekende seksspelletje. (Nathalie Faber - Het Parool 3-2-1998)

We

Kunstvereniging Diepenheim and Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede

The definition of the word definition is: 'the description of the essence of something in one or two highly precise and succinctly formulated sentences.' That is by no means easy, and we certainly don't pretend to be able to do so. Nevertheless, there are a lot of characteristics that we find interesting and that we come up against in wondering about what might be typical of the region known as Twente. But those things aren't so much absolute as they are relative.

Onkenhout

galvanized bronze, text

Staring at the picture of the garden on the postcard I catch a glimpse of my mother in a version of her life that she never lived, one in which Nico had gotten in touch, after that evening out. Perhaps now she'd have a different surname and be sitting by a different fire drinking wine with a different child. In a moment that feels like an oedipal short circuit, I experience something impossible: that I never existed.

Not knowing as a norm

Artist contribution for OPEN Magazine

When Zijlstra speaks, you hear the positive, neoliberal pep talk of Rutte, but also the anti-elitist, anti-globalist, populist talk of Wilders. Not only is radical change required, the existing structure must – as an end in itself – be torn down. In other words, creation and destruction go hand in hand and from Zijlstra’s mouth that sounds astonishingly unisono.