8/14/2019 Luc Tuymans - Premonition the Silence Before the Storm - Caroline Turner

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Caroline Turner, 2003

Luc Tuymans: Premonition the silence before the storm.

Caroline Turner

Pictures, if they are to have effect, musthave tremendous intensity of silence, a filledsilence or void. The observer shouldbecome motionless before the picture,freeze. A kind of picture terror. I showpictures with a direct intention. The effectthey should have on the viewer resemblesan assault that he or she does notexperience directly, but from a distanceinitially. When he or she comes closer, thisassault should loom again, but on a differentlevel. Something quite unmistakable thentriggers certain emotions, makes certaindemands. This can only come about in a

certain silence. I mean the silence before thestorm.'1Luc Tuymans

The art of Belgian Luc Tuymans is about asilence born of fear. His paintings are basedon memories, both personal and collective.They are linked by the hint of somethingbeneath or beyond the surface appearance,intentionally creating in the viewer a sense ofanxiety, triggering the fear which the artist hassaid has absorbed his own mind sincechildhood.

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Regarded as one of the most importantyounger contemporary painters, Tuymans'

work is deeply informed by European traditionand experience, past and present. This is notsurprising since Belgium has been historicallythe arena for great European power strugglesand its capital, Brussels, is now theadministrative centre of the new EuropeanUnion. Tuymans' art, while intensely personal,is thus at the same time immensely revealingof the post-postwar European generation thegeneration now in their forties and fifties, freefrom the ideologies and guilt of two world warsbut at the same time charged withresponsibility for a new Europe.

Tuymans is not, however, at first sight, an

obviously political artist. His paintings for themost part appear to depict the reality ofordinary objects: flowers, still life, landscapesand portraits (that are not quite portraits) andpeople going about everyday concerns. Hismostly small canvasses draw on the traditionsof Flemish realism and surrealism, although heexplicitly denies the latter. There are alsostrong affinities with the world of photographyand the paintings are often based on

reproductions. The colours of the paintings arepale, washed out and the images are oftenincomplete or cropped in a mannerreminiscent of film editing. The effect ispsychologically disturbing and disorientating,hinting at an atmosphere of violence; indeedthe artist has referred to the underlyingstructure of violence, both physical anddetached', linking his work, and to his art as ametaphor of violence.'

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Allusive titles such as Superstition, Rumourand Premonition for his exhibitions or forindividual works such as Gas Chamber (apainting showing an empty white room with a

drain in the floor) give a clue as to why his artis so unsettling. Several of the paintings withtitles related to the Holocaust are based onphotos from the concentration camps.Tuymans said with reference to this group ofworks: Western culture, I think, is one of thefew cultures that, in order to progress, hasincorporated destruction. There is a linkbetween annihilation, hygiene, consumerism,production and propaganda. When you thinkabout hygiene sometimes it can be connectedto ethnic cleansing... The final solution issomething hidden.

4Ambiguity is an essential

element in Tuymans' work: he argues that

'when something is not painted it makes itmore meaningful ... There is a sort ofindifference in my paintings which makes themmore violent, because any objects in them areas if erased, cancelled.'

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Tuymans' subject matter has focused onepisodes of Flemish history, includingcolonialism in Africa and war time collaborationof Belgians with the Nazis, as well as issues ofcontemporary relevance such as child abuse.He is also concerned about the rise of neoFascism, as exhibited by the ultrarightist andfiercely nationalist Vlaams Blok, which has

risen in 15 years to be the fourth strongestparty in Belgium, with the slogan our peoplefirst'. All this has encouraged Belgiangovernments to take a lead on moral issues inthe European Union, in an attempt to presenttheir country as 'the earth's conscience.'

6It is

thus significant that Tuymans was selected torepresent Belgium at the 2001 VeniceBiennale. The exhibition was entitled MwanaKitoko, beautiful boy or beautiful white man,

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(the name given to the young King Baudouinby the Congolese). The group of works were inpart a response to the allegation aired in a1999 book by Ludo de Witte that the Belgiangovernment was responsible for the 1961murder of Congo's first prime minister, PatriceLumumba, shortly after independence.

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Tuymans' series Heimat (1995) is a quitespecific protest against past Fascism andcontemporary neoFascism: he says that hehas tried to rebel against ... this Flemish ideaof a mythical, fixed identity. It is not onlypolitical but cultural as well. It is not aboutdeveloping feelings of melancholy, but about acertain form of deja vu... Nationalism is for melike a mask, unmoveable and hollowAllforms of nationalism remove the qualities ofreal life and create a uniformity out ofindividual differences.'

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His paintings have also touched on American

issues including slavery, race relations andmulticulturalism. It is impossible not to linkthese works to the fading of the Americandream for Europeans. Heritage (1996) wasproduced after the Oklahoma bombingspecifically to explore 'the fortress mentality'resulting from terrorism from within.'

9The

works are of seemingly ordinary images suchas baseball caps. One image shows a manapparently working at some mundane task butin actuality mixing toxic chemicals. In the showFortune (2003), paranoia' is again a theme.The images are similarly innocuous, such as astorefront, with mannequins or a paintball

contest, the latter image drawn from a`gunsand ammo' magazine, but violence is implicit:and in the words of the press release from hisNew York gallery, the mood and psychologicalatmosphere of these paintings heighten theterror that lies within.' It declares that Tuymanshimself states that these are a response to9/11 and that he sees the images of 9/11 as sopowerful because they represent one of themost stunning examples of collective memoryto date.

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Maypole (2000) was displayed in London inthe Royal Academy exhibition Apocalypse.

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is one of the most interesting and largest of his

recent paintings with all the elements of hisstyle. We see a group of men, painted withbarely sufficient detail to suggest that they maybe wearing traditional Bavarian peasantcostume, shorts or lederhosen, who areerecting a maypole. There is also what couldbe a group of men in the distance with whatcould be banners. The maypole is a symbol ofancient

pagan custom, a symbolic festival in Germanywhen a large tree (and trees and forests arethemselves immensely significant in theGerman psyche), was brought to the villageand decorated with ribbons and evensausages. The figures erecting the maypoleare viewed from the back. And Tuymans has

spoken of the 'fear you have when you seesomeone you don't know from behind.

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The image may be drawn from a reproductionin the Nazi magazine Signal.

13Moreover, the

Nazis expressly used the imagery of themaypole and May Day as part of theirpropaganda. Historians such as GeorgeMosse have shown how they utilised existingfestivals in creating their own mass culture.

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In 1933 they held a May Day march, a massrally of workers and the next day replaced theexisting trade unions with a Party organisation.One of the most spectacular Nazi ceremonies

was held in the Lustgarten, Berlin on May Day1936 with a speech by Hitler. As an integralpart of this highly choreographed event, alarge maypole was erected, decorated withswastikas and fir branches. lain Boyd Whyteprovides a fascinating account of this use ofthe maypole as part of Nazi propaganda in Artand Power: Europe under the Dictators. Hewrites: What better symbol ... than themaypole, the traditional symbol throughoutNorthern Europe of the end of winter and ofthe reawakening of nature, the focus ofcommunal games and feasts'. Such images hewrites, quoting Saul Friedlnder, were a

significant part of the Nazis' kitsch aesthetic':On the one side are invoked the tranquilforces of moral values, while on the other sideare flickering the fires of extermination.

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In this context, Tuymans' painting becomesimmensely sinister, inevitably linked to theNazis' use of mystic Teutonic and mediaevallegend, and of symbols drawn from pagantimes. This was particularly true for the SS, thebrotherhood of Nordic men whose masculineethos was fortified by pagan ceremonies,devised by Himmler. This painting, of course,also shows men working together, abrotherhood specifically excluding women and

suggesting the disturbing conformity frequentlyassociated with worlds of men constructed tobe exclusionist for reasons of sex, or ethnicityor ideology. Conformity and complicity with evilon a mass scale is suggested by this painting.

In his art Tuymans escapes the trap ofbelieving that art can be an adequateresponse in the face of horror. Instead ofexplicit horror he explores the psychological

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dimension of our collective memories of horror.But this is not as straightforward as merelyconfronting the past so that its evils may notbe repeated. He states he does not take amoral stance yet, despite his claim ofdetachment, the content is not detached. Theartist notes, in relation to the war in the former

Yugoslavia, the immediate fear of people thatit', meaning the wars, ideologies, ethniccleansing' of Europe's past, might behappening again.

16In so doing, he draws on

disillusionment in Europe and elsewhere andthe growing belief that it is now impossible tobelieve that 'it' will not happen again. He hasconnected this disillusionment to the failure ofpainting: 'Every art has failed. How we fail isanother matter.'

17In this sense Tuymans' work

is an uncanny prediction of the growingparanoia and fear characterising the world atthe beginning of the twenty first century and, atthe same time, a chilling premonition of the

future.

Dr Caroline Turner is Deputy Director of theHumanities Research Centre, AustralianNational University.

1Lawrence Rinder quoting Tuymans in interview with

Josef Helfensteinwww.bamfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/tuymans/ 1997website of Berkeley Museum of Art (May 2003).2

Luc Tuymans interview with Juan Vicente Aliaga in

Ulrich Loock, Juan Vicente Aliaga, Nancy Spector, LucTuymans, Phaidon, London, 1996, this edition 2001, p.16.3

Ibid, p. 20; p. 25.4

Ibid, p. 25.5

Ibid, p. 26.6

Richard Tyler, www.wsws.org/articles/may 1999 WorldSocialist web site; Barry James, November 2002,International Herald Tribune, www.iht.com (June 2003).7

www.davidzwirner.com/press/11212000 (October2002);www.labiennaledivenezia.net/it/artistsive (May 2003).8

Tuymans interview with Aliaga op.cit., p. 31.9

www.davidzwirner.com/press/082001996 (May 2003).10

www.davidzwirner.com/press/04032003LT (May2003).11

Norman Rosenthal, Apocalypse, Royal Academy of

Arts, London, 2000. Interestingly Michael Archer in theessay on Tuymans does not connect the maypole toNazi symbols p. 81.12

Luc Tuymans, 'Artist Writings' in Loock, Aliaga,Spector, Luc Tuymans, op. cit., p. 129.13

Frank Demaegd, communication to author:'Describing his use of photography in the cataloguePremonitions, Kunstmuseum Bern 1997, p. 110 LucTuymans writes the following: "Here I used a pagetaken from a German propaganda magazine called'Signal'; During World War II this magazine wastranslated into Flemish, and I was able to purchase the

issues covering several years from a second-handbookseller. What fascinated me about the colourphotographs was how picturesque they were. That, ofcourse, was a result of printing technique, in whichvarious layers are printed on top of each other..."14

"I am grateful to Paul Pickering, Glen St J. Barclayand Harry Wise for help with the references on Nazism

and their use of the image of the maypole and pagansymbols. George Mosse, The Nationalization of theMasses. Political Symbolism and Mass Movements inGermany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the ThirdReich, New York, H.Fertig,1975.15

Ian Boyd Whyte 'Berlin, 1 May 1936' in Dawn Ades,Tim Benton, David Elliott, lain Boyd Whyte, Art andPower: Europe under the Dictators 1930-45, Thamesand Hudson, London, 1995, pp. 4356; Boyd Whyte p.46. quotes Saul Friedlander Kitsch und Tod derWiderschein des Nazismus, Munich,1986.16

Tuymans interview with Aliaga, op.cit., p. 26.17

Quoted in Burkhard Riemschneider and UtaGrosenick, (eds.), Art at the Turn of the Millennium,Taschen, n.d., p. 514.