Mark Manders, Pt I

NOUGHT BUT THE LEG
By Andrew Maerkle


Dry Clay Figure (2014), painted bronze, wood, 101.3 x 42 x 45.1 cm, installation view at Gallery Koyanagi, 2015. Photo Keizo Kioku, © Mark Manders, courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, and Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo.

Born in 1968 and currently based between the Netherlands and Belgium, Mark Manders is unique among artists working today in the single-minded consistency of his ongoing project, the “Self-Portrait as a Building,” which began with an epiphany in 1986, at the age of 18, that he could combine his aspirations toward literature with the form of a conceptual building that would be realized through art. Manders refers to that moment as a “super-moment” extending through time, in the same way that the words of an encyclopedia always exist in the present, and insists that all his works over the past 30-odd years were made in that moment. A self-described “cannibal” of cultures, he draws from the entire scope of art and visual history in creating sculptures and installations that borrow equally from Etruscan statues, Catholic altars, Indonesian shadow puppets, modernist interior design and functional mechanics.

Manders has held exhibitions across Europe and the US at venues including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in addition to the Dutch Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. He was recently in Japan for the opening of his first solo exhibition ever in the country, at Gallery Koyanagi in Tokyo. ART iT met with Manders prior to the exhibition’s opening to discuss his work and ideas in greater detail.

Mark Manders’s exhibition at Gallery Koyanagi opened April 14 and continues through June 13, 2015.

I.


Inhabited for a Survey (First Floor Plan from Self-Portrait as a Building) (1986-1996-2002), writing materials, erasers, painting tools, scissors, 8 x 267 x 90 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Howard and Donna Stone. Photo courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.

ART iT: As a prelude to talking about your work in detail, perhaps we could start with the specific moment when you were 18 years old, and had the realization that you could create a self-portrait through a building – a moment which also marks the birth of the artist “Mark Manders.” It fascinates me that someone could come up with such a decisive and sophisticated idea at such a young age.

MM: Yes, but it’s also a very logical idea. At the time, I thought that if you are a writer, and you want to write a book, you should write in the first person – I talk about I do this, I do that – so making a self-portrait seemed like a very fundamental thing to me. But then I lived in a small town and had nothing to say, so I created this imaginary building where I could talk about things. I created an imaginary person.
It’s always surprising how once you say something, and make one thing, and then another, and another, you create a language, and the more works I make, the more I can express. If you look at the development of humanity, once we create language, evolution is able to go faster, because for the first time you can make combinations of concepts and think in complex ways.
I think my work is very small, and as a person I’m super small, and I will die, and everybody will die, but at the same time, it’s so fascinating that while you are alive, you can do things in the world – you can move objects on the table. There’s something so beautiful about that. And as an artist you can record these things. You can record actions into objects and exhibitions.

ART iT: You’ve referred to the moment in 1986 when you came up with the concept of the “Self-Portrait as Building” as a super-moment which continues indefinitely in the present, so that all the works you have made over the course of your career are actually made in that same moment. I am curious to understand how this works. For example, was Mark Manders the artist already present before 1986?

MM: I’m not sure. Another reason why I started this self-portrait is because I was in love with someone, but since I was living with my parents, I didn’t have a place for this person to come, so it was very logical to make an imaginary building. Maybe it’s a bit strange, but as a poet it’s a very logical response to the situation.

ART iT: And as for language, do you have the sense that you are discovering the words to the language as you go along, or are you consciously fabricating new words?

MM: It works both ways. Ideas and works are like machines – they work for you and generate other ideas and works. All I have to do is be attentive to what’s happening in my studio and what’s happening in my mind. I’m really curious about the next step. I generally progress very slowly in my work, but sometimes I look back and find some things have changed a lot, or when I make a work now, it also changes a work that I made 20 years ago.
But it’s the same if you’re a writer. You write one word and then you write another word and it changes the first word, and that’s how you build sentences. That’s the magic of language.

ART iT: Is the super-moment a space of language?

MM: Yes, I think so. But actually what fascinates me more and more are objects that function almost like words but which cannot be retained inside your head. I think in some of my works I succeed in making the viewer see something that is stronger than time, and stronger than what you can think at one moment.
I once realized that if you make a good work it becomes like a round object, and you can think around it, but if you think about it from one side it also means you cannot see the other side. So you can see it all at once but you cannot totally think about it.


Perspective Study (2011), offset print and acrylic on paper, wood, chicken wire, 57 x 42
x 4 cm. Photo Keizo Kioku, © Mark Manders, courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, and
Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo.

ART iT: I actually had that experience looking at your “Perspective Studies,” made with your custom newspapers with all the words chosen and arranged randomly as if they were headlines and articles. When you look at this “nonsensical” newspaper, you realize the human eye actually has the capacity to take the information in all at once, but when you approach a newspaper or text with the preconception that there is a meaning to the sequence of information, it suddenly blinds you to everything except the words upon which you are focusing.

MM: Yes. For me it’s also interesting that I only started making the “Perspective Studies” because I needed to use papier-mâché for a different work, and papier-mâché requires newspapers, but I am not allowed to use real newspapers because then I would bring time into my work, and I don’t want to have dates because everything is made all in the same moment. I solved the problem by making fake newspapers. And once you have a fake newspaper, you can also make it in perspective, and turn it into a perspective study. So because I made one thing, it generated ideas for other things as well.

ART iT: It seems like you are playing with shifts between an infinite, conceptual perspective and the closed spatial notion of three-dimensionality. In that sense, when you first start thinking about the super-moment it can be a bit baffling, but really it’s just an alternative way of perceiving existence.

MM: Yes, and once you have the idea of the self-portrait, it’s the same thing. You can take a piece of paper and make a square on it and think yourself in the square, imagine things happening in the square. So you can make your world very small, and then you can make it big again. Through these restrictions you create so much possibility for poetry. What I look forward to with the work is that once I am totally finished with a piece, I can make a list of all the words I used in completing it, like table, newspaper, chair, yellow, dog – only a few words. It’s really nice that you can say so much with just these few words.

ART iT: This reminds me of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), which points to the intersecting gaps and equivalences between the word chair and the thing we call a chair and what we see in a “chair.”

MM: And all the more so when there’s poetry involved. The interesting thing for me in my work is that there are a million different ways of making a chair and of making a work with a chair. There are so many possibilities for making works with existing objects, and I’m really lucky that I have time to think about that. If I want to, I can spend a day thinking about a shoe, and whether there is a way to make a work with a shoe, and if it doesn’t work out in one day, I can also take ten years to do the same.


Left: Reduced Rooms with Changing Arrest (Reduced to 88%) (2001-02), installation view at Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002, with Machine Constructed to Provide Persistent Absence (Reduced to 88%) (1996-2002) in foreground and Staged Android (Reduced to 88%) (2002) in background. Right: Reduced November Room (Reduced to 88%) (2000), painted aluminum, iron, wood, ceramic, plastic, painted wood, stainless steel, sugar, paper, 710 x 1850 x 1250 cm. Installation view as part of Reduced Rooms with Changing Arrest (Reduced to 88%) (2001-02) at Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002. Both: Photo Geert Goiris, courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. Bottom: Staged Android (Reduced to 88%) (2002-14), iron, wood, painted epoxy, painted canvas, clothes, 381.5 x 290 x 350 cm. Photo Peter Cox, courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.

ART iT: Yet all your works are theoretically dated back to 1986, right?

MM: Yes. In the beginning I actually put the same date on all my works, but then I realized that if I continued doing that I would not be able to function in the world, because museums could not accept it. So I’m also part of the real world. But, visually, if I make a big exhibition, it’s fantastic to combine works from 25 years ago with something new, because you cannot tell which one is the earlier work. They all look like they were just made.
The strange thing that happened last year is that I started making these dried-out clay figures, which are also on display here in Tokyo. Normally I want my works to appear as if they were made five minutes ago, as if the person who made them has just left the room. But in the case of the new works, it’s as if they were made a week ago, and have been left out for a week – of course, all these things are made of painted bronze.
There were a few times in my studio when some works which had got dried out and started to crack and crumble, and I really liked them, but at the time I didn’t have the technical capacity for making them, so then I kept looking for a way to freeze them.

ART iT: But that’s the question about the super-moment: does the artist Mark Manders age, does he grow with experience?

MM: No, he’s always 18. Absolutely. That’s my age as an artist, and as a person, I flip between being 18 and my real age. But I think everybody has something like that, a certain age or moment when you suddenly become who you are.

ART iT: So the super-moment is a wormhole that allows you to travel between different times?

MM: Yes. In my work, I really feel like a time traveler, because there are so many gaps in art history, so many works still to be made, and I can go and make a work that should have been made in the 1920s. Or for a long time I was working on things that should have been made in the middle ages. It’s a very interesting problem to think about – that you would try to make something that fits exactly in the year 1920. It’s possible.

Part II | III

Mark Manders: Nought but the Leg

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