CHRISTOPHE VAN EECKE, ENGLISH 2011
THE ARTIST WITH THE CHILD IN HIS EYES.
Some Notes on the Work of Warre Mulder
Warre Mulder takes the everyday out of objects and looks at them with childlike spontaneity. When a child enters a room for the first time, all the objects in it have an overwhelming immediacy: they are present as forms, not as objects with an identifiable function. To enter a room is to enter a universe where everything can seem out of proportion. The objects, like the people, tower over one. We lose this childlike way of looking when we grow up because, as we mature, the world looses some of its strangeness. Adults tend to see the meanings in and the connections between objects. The objects of the world have been assembled into what Heidegger would call a Zeugzusammenhang: they are all related in a practical way. The chairs are organised around the table as objects to sit on for dinner. Cutlery, plates, the table cloth: all these objects are part of a network of meaning. But to a gaze that is not yet familiar with that web of connections all these objects are primarily volumes and shapes. Just objects with little symbolical baggage.
Warre conjures this childlike way of looking in his work. In one of his monumental creations he has crafted a table with cutlery and food, but everything is slightly larger than in real life, just that one size too big, and the forms seem to melt or sag, and the colours are anti-naturalistic, as if we were living in a surrealistic cartoon. The objects in that installation hover somewhere between the familiar and the strange, as if they were part of a world that looks uncannily like ours and yet turns out to lie just beyond our reach. Because of this, our encounter with this world is suspended for a moment, which recalls the experience of a child entering a room it is not familiar with. It takes awhile for objects and forms to fall into place. There is an uprooted familiarity here, a sense that, yes, it does all belong to the human world, but the key to understanding exactly how it all fits in, is temporarily out of reach. This initial lack of comprehension kindles a very human need in us: the desire to understand; Children, even very young children, intuitively reach out to the world. They want to grasp it with their hands. Especially if that world manifests itself in simple forms and appealing colours. Human nature is investigative and exploratory. The process of growing up is a slow move out of the child’s realm of magical realism to a growing insight in the rational and functional interconnectedness of objects. This is a gradual process. The world is first discovered as a wonderland where the space under the dinner table can be a grotto, three chairs in a row can be a tunnel, and the back of a sofa can be a mountain range. As we grow up, the world becomes disenchanted and all the objects take their orderly place in the functional system of things. The child’s sense of exploration develops into the adult’s scientific will to knowledge, the desire to discover the deeper meanings of the world.
The will to know is connected to the recovered spontaneity of Warre’s approach to the world. This is especially clear in his graphic work: drawings and paintings created either by hand or on the computer. Part of Warre’s inspiration for these works is culled from medieval bestiaria. Because these illustrated manuscripts are full of bizarre creatures in preternatural landscapes it is very easy to forget that these texts and images are really the expression of a scientific frame of mind. Fascinated by the unknown these medieval scientists tried to create a truthful image of the world. Although the strange creatures in such manuscripts look very fantastical to us, medieval man often believed that the world and its creatures were really like that. The distance between image and reality was largely due to a lack of knowledge or empirical information. Another reason why these images often look strange to us is quite simply that the reality that they did accurately reflect has simply ceased to exist. The bizarre clothes that the figures wear, or their grotesque glasses, faithfully reflect the way medieval dress or spectacles looked.
The journey of the scientist or explorer is often a journey with an unknown destination. The scientist needs a fundamental ability to allow himself to be surprised and amazed at his findings. This is nowhere more clear than in archaeology. Every layer of dirt that is shifted can reveal new elements that could potentially upturn and discredit everything we thought we knew and held as true about our world and its history. All our preconceptions can be overturned by brushing away some dust on an old document. Warre works in a similar way: his installations, such as his miraculous table with its uncanny fruits, look like otherworldly objects that have only recently been dug up from the archive of the underground. They are fossils from wonderland. They look vaguely familiar and yet fundamentally strange. They force us to look again with that childlike spontaneity that we lost in growing up and that allows us to question everything. The same questioning gaze can be found in his graphic work, whether it is the preparatory drawings for his sculptures or the self-contained works: every time the drawings seem to provide an account of a contemporary archaeology of the unknown.
The worst thing that could happen to the seeker, but also to the artist, is to find that everything has been discovered. That one day everything would have been dug up. When the will to know comes to a halt because there is nothing left to discover, mankind will lose its driving force. It is here that art has a crucial role to play. If the infinity outside ourselves may one day reach its limit after all, we will still retain the infinity inside ourselves which is the imagination. To that extent Warre’s work answers a contemporary sense of unrest. We live in a world in which science seems to uncover deeper structures at a startling pace. Our deepest desires, impulses, and needs are being charted, measured, and analysed. Capitalist reason has disenchanted and commodified everything, making it quantifiable. Warre’s work turns that trend around and re-enchants the world by reforming its forms. His installations and drawings look deceptively simple. But it’s a treacherous simplicity, for it really signals the ease with which we can undo the charting and commodification of the world.
One way of re-enchanting the world is to refuse to see accepted meanings reflected in it. Like a child entering a room for the first time we must learn to once again see objects as forms, rather than as things. To experience wonder and amazement, we must make abstraction of function and meaning in the way we look at the world. Warre’s work puts our gaze on its way to such a way of looking by creating a world that echoes the everyday (look, there is something there that looks like a table, littered with objects that resemble fruit, and other objects that look as if they might be cutlery) but resists the everyday’s functionality (but it’s not a table to eat from, and the food is inedible, and the cutlery cannot be handled). It is a world that is finally only there for our perception. The disarming beauty of Warre’s work lies in its complete (and intended) uselessness in the realm of the practical and the servicable. One must look at it and admire it. And in looking, the world is made new.
Christophe Van Eecke