Art
Going Dutch
John McEwen
Dutch art is to the fore of the contem- porary London scene just now with large exhibitions by two of Holland's most highly considered practitioners: a new show by Jan Dibbets (Anthony d'Offay, 23 Der- ing Street till 13 March) and a retrospective, courtesy the Arts Council, biased in favour of recent work, by Ger van Elk (Serpentine Gallery till 7 March; Arnolfini, Bristol, 3 April to 15 May). Both artists have excep- tional connections with England and America and their 'pictures' have been ex- hibited pretty regularly here over the past decade. Dibbets spent a crucial period in London on a British Council scholarship in 1%7 and van Elk, whose father was a Hollywood cartoon-film animator, studied art history in Los Angeles.
Dibbets's new show is entitled Circles. As before, he uses photographic sequences to describe selected views, sometimes the full 360 degrees of them, from a specific point. The views treated prove to be mostly of some aspect of the interiors of famous buildings — a panoramic sweep of the walls and windows of Bourges Cathedral, a tiled floor in Spoleto, a detail of the Eiffel Tower; but some, as was the case in his last English show, are more obviously to hand — his carpet viewed through 210 and 360 degrees, the gallery's own ceiling. As every holiday snapshot taker knows who has tried to capture this kind of spread, perspective, hence geometry, soon spoils the fun. The presentation of Dibbets's images is diagrammatic to display their accuracy on this count. The fan of photographs is set within a determining framework of rulered and compassed pencil calculations. Pencil is also used in more decorative and ques- tionable ways, most obviously to smooth
the necessarily stepped edge of the overlap- ping photographs into a continuous curve by shading the gaps. This introduces a ten- tative note, but it is offset by the greater glamour of the subjects and a larger and more confident size.
Most artists resent their work being discussed in terms of their nationality and in the past Dibbets has been no exception, but the Dutch nature of his sensibility is undeniable and stated here more assertively than ever. His images are neat, orderly and beautiful. The beauty is obviously most determined by his initial selection of sub- ject, but enhanced by the repetition and composition induced by the mathematical logic of his inquiry. The art most characteristic of Holland as a place — neat, squared-up and reclaimed from the sea; recreated, perhaps, in neat, squared-up New Amsterdam — flourishes within strict mathematical confines; and the art of Dib- bets is a further expression of this national tendency. The impeccable architectural analyses of the 17th-century Saenredam always seemed the closest to his own pic- tures in spirit, and now with the inclusion of church interiors he also addresses himself to Saenredam's subject. For many people, not least in Holland, Dibbets is worthy of consideration as the latest lord of this Dutch analytic tradition, in succession to Mondrian. It is difficult to disagree, and at 41 he should have plenty of time to con- solidate the claim.
Van Elk has collaborated with Dibbets, is the same age and of much the same analytic persuasion, though the point of his work is more to do with humour than beauty. A Dibbets you feast your eyes on; with a van Elk you get the joke and look no further; it is throwaway, not death-defying; and in this, of course, the artist shows his American connections. Europeans tend to make art for generations yet unborn. Americans, on the whole, do not take themselves, or the subject, quite so serious- ly. This is emphasised by the cartoonish liberties van Elk takes with the structure of his images — several of them canvas cut- outs spanning whole walls. Like Dibbets, he is original as an artist in exploring the possibilities of photography beyond its con- ventional norm. Most people use cameras to take pictures, Dibbets and van Elk use cameras to take photographs to make pic- tures with. Invariably the image with van Elk is of himself, presented not as a self- portrait but a convenient symbol of artists in general. The message would often seem to be that art today is a matter of ludicrous- ly small concern and concerns. Recent pic- tures show life-size photographs of van Elk stuck on canvas and half painted over to blend with a prevailing sea of 'meaning- fully' abstract pigment. Personality swamp- ed by theory? Art finally submerged? It ends the show on a low decidedly unfunny note, as if throwing it away inevitably leads to chucking it in.
Timothy Behrens's latest acrylic paint- ings (Browse & Darby till 13 March) are the best he has shown at the gallery to date.
Previously he has tended to concentrate on people and interiors, but a move to Spain has beneficially attracted him to outdoor subjects. He conveys the glare and liquid shimmer of heat very successfully, thanks to a mature understanding of how to use acrylics — as watercolours, in other words letting the paint do the work. In some arresting seascapes and landscapes the washes run and intermingle unchecked by hand, but considerable control, without any loss of delicate transparency, is used to equally good effect in a large picture of a neighbouring house and the distant sea viewed from just inside a window. A small study on paper of the Japanese film direc- tor Kurosawa and cameraman, shows that he can be no less felicitous when it comes to people — though to lavish this talent on public rather than private faces seems a waste.
Paul Rosenbloom, a generation younger than Behrens, takes his first bow in a Lon- don commercial gallery with a one-man show of paintings and drawings at Nicola Jacobs (till 11 March). The medium is oil on linen; the composition in every case a monochrome ground scattered with a few variously shaped and variously coloured marks. The marks hint at natural forms --- plants, birds, mountain peaks — without being descriptive, and are indeed worked up from landscape notes in sketchbooks. They are like signs. Rosenbloom benefited great- ly as a painter from a trip to Australia a couple of years ago, and is demonstrably still coming to grips with the boldness this encouraged and the ideas it generated --- style and intention shift within the adopted theme and options go unresisted. It is tran- sitional work, therefore, but full of promis- ing details.
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