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ANNE DAEMS - ELEGANT AMUSEMENT

11 SEPT - 23 OCT 2010
OPENING 11 SEPT, noon - 8pm


11.09 - Ikebana by Nelly Cautereels & Chris Piccard
25.09 - Ikebana by Nelly Cautereels & Chris Piccard
09.10 - Ikebana by Ko Masaki
16.10 - Ikebana by Jozef Prelis


The Transience of the World

Western art history, and contemporary ‘western’ art practice, will probably forever remain haunted by the partly delusional distinction – really an opposition: can the western mind think binaries other than dialectically? – between ‘fine’ or ‘pure’ arts on the one hand, and ‘applied’ or ‘decorative’ arts on the other. On one side of this divide stands the autonomous art object, made pour l’art même, a monument of disinterest, executed in a handful of methods deemed appropriate to produce such lofty objects of intellectual contemplation: sculpture, painting, photography, language, film – quite a few of which have become more and more technology-dependent as time progresses. On the other side of this divide stand the traditions of craft and design, serviced by a wide range of practices that, in some cases, because of their proximity to the domestic realm, have long been considered ‘feminine’ – and, as traditions, have long relied on good old handwork too (hands are the real subjects, one could venture, of Anne Daems’ film Elegant Amusement): weaving, quilting, knitting, and embroidering; cooking and pottery; feng shui and interior design; gardening and the art, so present in the present exhibition, of floral arrangement. Regular trips to the Far East, such as Anne Daems has made on a number of occasions, can of course serve many different purposes, but one thing such travels are particularly useful for is the following: curing the western mind from its anachronistic, arrogant attachment to the aforementioned hierarchical division and distinction – to find, for instance, that Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, is just as ‘fine’ and/or ‘pure’ an art as any other known to us under that dubious rubric. [The inverse effect of this conclusion is to appreciate how so many art forms habitually considered ‘fine’ and/or ‘pure’ in the western mindset, are in fact just as ‘applied’ as any other art form known to us under that dubious rubric.]

Ikebana is the ‘elegant amusement’ alluded to in the title of this exhibition, and the subject, if one can call it that (for the very concept of the ‘subject’ is just as deeply rooted in binary thought as the division discussed above), of the eponymous film on view in this exhibition – a muted ‘portrait’ of four Ikebana practitioners at work, one in the artist’s own backyard in fact. This unassuming horticultural motif underlines the present work’s thematic connection to Daems’ previous film, titled My Father’s Garden, which revolved in part around a Japanese tea ceremony. Like the art of preparing, pouring and drinking tea, the art of picking, cutting and arranging flowers is very highly regarded in tradition-minded Japanese society (both ikebana and the tea ceremony are regarded as ‘furuyu no asobi’, or ‘elegant amusement’), reminding us of the very different meanings that the classical avant-garde injunction to dissolve art into life can assume in different cultural contexts. It is precisely this critical displacement, the game of decontextualization and recontextualization with which Daems is concerned here: after all, hers is not so much a film ‘about’ Ikebana, as it is a reflection upon the Western fascination with Japanese aesthetics, including her own – a fascinated account of one of orientalism’s more innocuous expressions. At the same time, the film does not simply dismiss the well-meaning work of Flemish Ikebanists as a naive fantasy of exotic otherness: the camera’s close-up view of the Ikebanists’ patient, skilful hands effectively replicates the mildly hypnotic exercise of emptying one’s mind of quotidian worries through the art, precisely, of flower arrangement.

What about the basin, however? The massive receptacle that greets the visitor upon entering the exhibition? A water container that features actual examples of Ikebana, it seems appropriate to raise the question of this object’s status: is it a sculpture (‘fine’, ‘pure’ art) or rather a prop or tool (‘applied’ art)? Knowing that its design is based on the example of such an object as captured in a photograph of Ikebana practice made in 1920s Japan (when efforts were made to popularize the art of flower arrangements and pry it loose from its aristocratic associations, among others by such masters as Koun Ohara, the Ikebanist depicted arranging a large ‘mizumono’ or ‘waterscape’ in the picture) certainly helps to assure its status as an autonomous art object – but then again, it is being used, is it not? More interestingly, the receptacle is there to remind us, rather literally, that in Ikebana, everything starts with the pot – the vase is the base. In the beginning was the bowl: isn’t that one of the basic tenets of thing theory? It certainly is if you ask Heidegger. And whoever mentions pots, bowls and basins, must of course also mention ceramics – another craft that has long suffered the programmatic disdain of the critical art establishment, but has since experienced something of a revival that is connected, precisely, with the art world’s renewed interest in things as irrepressible reminders of the materiality of all being – of the essential transience of the world so beautifully chronicled in Daems’ vanitas-like drawings of minute compost heaps (the unassuming, unthinking result of a day’s work in the kitchen) that look like the artist’s own amused stab at Ikebana.


Dieter Roelstraete