Secret Boxes

'A temple existed in Alexandria before the libraries were destroyed. From the outside, it was just a box. Inside, they asked all the most important artists of the time to make art and decorations. When it was finished, they closed the entire building, put one man inside as caretaker and left a single hole for throwing away refuse and receiving food. No one was ever allowed to enter.'

In 1984, Niek Kemps made a black sculpture called Folie à deux. Shaped like a casket, it was grasped and held off the ground by four interlocking struts, two vertical, two horizontal, covered in black velvet. Securely locked, the box betrayed as little as possible. Finally, it became evident that the two longest sides bore inscriptions in the form of lists - The Town Hall in Marrakesh, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella in Spain, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the Sans-Souci Castle in Potsdam, the Kremlin in Moscow, the Basilica in Assisi, the Observatory at Jaipur, the Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa, the Empire State Building in New York, the Casino Deauville in France, the Temple of Kandy in Sri Lanka, the Loire Chateau Azay-le-Rideau, the Hoover Dam in Colorado, the Acropolis in Athens - all on two sides of a work which, it was assumed, had something to do with these places. Yet rather than competing, this tomb-like structure seemed to subsume them, and even commemorated that subsumption. For the viewer, the work remained an enigma, a distillation, even an annihilation of the history of world architecture, but above all, a three-dimensional version of a poetic conceit. Had visibility been summoned only to be annihilated? Had the whole of architecture been reduced to a structure resembling a black box - Or should the very concept of 'reduction' - like the 'minimal' element in Minimalism - be replaced by what Barthes (after Plato) called Cratylism: 'the relation between signifier and signified as motivated, the one copying the other and representing in its material form the essence of the thing (and not the thing itself)... [a] realism (in the scholastic sense of the word) which conceives of names as the "copy" of the ideas.' In turn, Paul de Man argued that Cratylism pervades Western aesthetic theory, which is its unfolding. 'It is a rhetorical rather than an aesthetic function of language,' he explained, 'an identifiable trope (paronomasis) that operates on the level of the signifier and contains no responsible pronouncement on the nature of the world - despite its powerful potential to create the opposite illusion.' In other words, Kemps was trying to stage an endless philosophical debate between two opponents. In paronomasia, two words bounce off each other endlessly, pointlessly. (In Folie à deux, the medical term for simultaneous madness, two people do the same.) That debate, or paronomasia, or Cratylism or play of meaning, may explain the title of Kemps' first retrospective in 1988. He called it Twee Two Deux.

'I'm very interested in Baroque. Not just because it's rich. I like the idea of complexity. I like the idea that it's never finished. And it's always hidden in a certain way, always somewhere in between. Even if it seems to be very clear, I'm never able to find out what's going on. It's just a working process, in fact.'

The study of optics lies at the heart of Dutch art and culture. Its concomitant is a national preoccupation with accurate visual measurement. In 1984, Kemps made a work called Mouches volantes (French for 'spots before the eyes'). Two years later he titled a work Cataract (a waterfall and a growth on the eyeball) and made a pair of lacquered screens called The Narrow Line between Sight and Seeing. By the time of his Rotterdam retrospective, his work was all polish, transparency and veiling. Here vision was blocked or frustrated by coloured screens and meshes hung one behind the other, partially obscuring quite arbitrary imagery. In Stella Ejecta of 1985, a set of tall, polished panels arranged in the shape of an infinity sign, revealed two enormous female faces, one with a veil. Gradually, metaphors became mixed, as pictures of nebulae mingled with faces, the closest things we see with those furthest away. Yet both seemed equally strange and somehow inaccurate, as one's grasp of detail and perspective loosened, and the ability to map reality was called into question. Furthermore, observers were positioned centre stage, as much part of the work as the work itself. As blind spots were noted or sightlines appeared, it might dawn on the viewer that regarding art was always like this: a far more specialised pursuit than watching baseball or tennis and that if scientists were exploring phenomena at the limits of our perception, then artists should be doing something similar. The appearance of a diagram of a black hole came as no surprise. As one element in a set of transparent, differently coloured, horizontal glass sheets suspended from the ceiling of the Theatrum Anatomicum in Amsterdam, in a work called Echo or the Fall of the Grand Tour in 1987, it indicated a new interest for Kemps. In the catalogue for Jan Hoet's Chambres d'amis he wrote: 'In science, which has been examining the different stars for a long time, the space between them now seems to be the goal of the explorers: black holes, densening mass that is disappearing. Not even light can escape.'

'The idea of closed information is very impor-tant now. I know that formally some of my works are quite boring, not extrovert at all. They are just dense; everything gets stuck, as it does in a black box from an aeroplane.'

Occupying a central position in Kemps' current retrospective at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven is Sevillanas, an offshoot of a project for the World's Fair. Extremely large glass plates, held at a distance from the wall by triangular metal brackets, display an image that cannot be grasped because the surface of the glass has been buffed. Visible instead is a complex of shapes, possibly women, pell-mell, in a grouping which could signify a battle or an orgy - in classic art the Fall of the Rebel Angels, in more modern painting the Storming of the Bastille. Colours have been as violently treated as the figures, it seems: wrenched inside out, like a photographic negative. Eventually, the temptation is overwhelming: since there is a large enough gap between wall and glass, every single visitor tries to look at the 'back' of the picture, which reveals lambent colours set inside deep, transparent glass. This is what viewers want and expect, and because brackets keep the glass at some distance from the wall, there is a hope of seeing it. Yet that hope is quickly dashed. Firstly, the shapes are too large. Secondly, a diversion appears. The eight brackets are mirrored in the polished surface of the glass. Doubling themselves, they create such a persuasive, symmetrical image that the eye is seduced. Unable to concentrate on the surface because of the lure of the complex reflection, it becomes impossible to situate the work in space, since now it has a (weakened) reality and a (more enchanting) phantom. Our search for content is happily postponed. The lure of surfaces continues throughout the exhibition, even in the first room, where Doublure from 1989 - a tripartite, floorbound, glass work - is reflected in one of the vast skylights, and the visitors in turn are reflected in the work as if it were a deep pool. Meanwhile, on the gallery walls, Kemps' Copyright works with their triple circular glass projections specify their own theoretical position with groups of repetitive phrases while the viewers look through one surface to the next to see photographs of people and buildings. Turning a corner into the next room, visitors are confronted by a body of work quite unlike any that Kemps has shown before.

N.K: When I made the Folie à deux in 1984, I had the idea of making a sculpture like a box full of information and I closed it off. But just closing it off is not enough. It's like what they did in medieval times. If the monks from the Christian Church wanted to go to Turkey to give money for the Holy War, they brought money in boxes and they were the most wonderful boxes you could ever see. There was one wagon for the boxes and a lot could happen to them because there was treasure inside. The reason they made the box so attractive and glossy was that no one would ever guess.

S.M: So what is inside?

N.K: I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell anyone.

And the problem is that if you open the case,

you lose the artwork.

On spindly metal legs stand rectilinear, sand-coloured canvas shapes, part open, part closed, relating to each other without interfering, looking like pieces of 50s furniture. The idea came from Giacometti, Kemps confesses. It has moved far from its source. Awkward, personal, elegant, these 'houses' are potent reminders of the body, felt from within. From this point onwards, the exhibition turns into a three-way debate between works like the Sevillanas, others like the boxes, called Entre deux boîtes qui sont des maisons, and a third type with the generic title Closed Circuits. In one category are the large, bulbous oval wallworks, one flesh-coloured and soft to the touch, the other black and velvety, both named Monos. And just as the black velvet of one revised element of Kemps' Chambre d'amis installation seemed to devour light, the dark Monos resembles a tangible absence, a hole in the wall as mysterious as another dimension, inserted into our own. The Sevillanas works are complemented by earlier standing sculptures with curved sheets of glass fixed back to back, distorting the viewer's body and making it necessary to invent rules for viewing. Similarly, visibility was restricted in Datavault, a series in which lacquered photographs were difficult to see between the pattern of squares made in shallow metal trays, while Les privilèges de la promenade, a room with rows of photographs of an ornamental garden, were framed in deep boxes, each covered in a different colour green velvet. Closed Circuits began in 1989 with arbitrary images mounted between trays of black tiles. In subsequent versions, the images disappeared, while the 'cabinets' were arranged first in rows (Closed Circuits II, 1990), then a long library with a double entrance cut through. Inside, the viewer faces undifferentiated rows of elements, like some kind of generating plant or vault. Meanwhile, problems of recognition are confronted as before, with Coup de foudre (1988) occupying one entire gallery and the Parenthesis series taking up another. Both employ the same principle: that the image is protected from viewing by as many means as possible. A set of steel bars stretching from floor to ceiling shields a line of glass sheets with a reflective pattern between which lines of photographs can just be seen: of houses, staircases, ceilings, balconies, roofs, dining-rooms... This play continues; the 'parenthesis' of the series that bears its name is a double set of curving bars making a pincer-like frame for an image which is already difficult to see. (One Parenthesis is mounted so low that even a child would have to bend to see it). Yet 'parenthesis' takes another form: gridded, buffed, yellow glass which occupies corners or makes two right-angled bends, conducting visitors from one room to the next.

N.K: In Montpelier there is a very small museum in which there are boxes, piled high and locked. The curator opens one and inside there are drawings behind glass panels. The problem is that you can't look at them for very long because the woman is standing behind you as if to say "haven't you finished yet?" My idea is to make a space like a museum but hidden underground. There would be a small entrance and people would walk through a system of tunnels, coming up in a different spots where artists had made works. Because there would be a single entrance and you would have to ask a specific person in order to enter, it would take a great effort to get in. It's still in the planning stage but the museum at Eindhoven are interested in making it, although the earliest it could open is 1995.

S.M: So it is a secret museum.

N.K: A secret museum which is, of course, not secret.

If a discussion is instigated between works that are fleshy and easily assimilated and the Closed Circuits, the theme is the type and quality of information they supply. Here different kinds of conversations are begun, with the teasing, half-open Sevillanas and Parenthesis works somewhere in between. Closed Circuits refers to data-banks, libraries, generators, even atomic piles, yet in confronting them we feel we lack a key. Surrounded, excluded and more than a little threatened, observers tire of their manic repetition and teasing, inverted format, so at odds with a museum and what it can offer. In opposition, the flesh-like works seem warm and attractive. Full rather than empty, they describe instead of simply drawing, inviting proximity, touch and pressure, while the 'parentheses' seem to gather power by means of concealment, like contemporary experiments in making sacred images, traditionally protected and inviolate. Between the three types, problems of 'content', texture and availability are broached. We are made to realise that the eye is subject to focus and height, for example; images alter as we see them and are dependent on our own point of view. In his early work, Kemps frequently used scientific data which seemed to provoke questions of language - what is a photograph of a different galaxy but a plan, readable in terms of the questions we choose to ask it? In contrast, skin means everything or nothing; it is the shelter in which we reside or the armour that shields others or ourselves, defining us as separate beings, however fractional we may feel. Confronted with these, language collapses, works of art come to resemble transitional objects, talismanic presences or carcasses we imbue with significance. They exist outside language, in a realm of warmth and physical comfort for which cues can be provided but which no surrogate can supply. The essential duality of vision, looking at something outside oneself, is most fully at play here, as is the feeling of being independent. Between flesh and mechanisation, one kind of power and another, the eye sees what we want it to see, no matter what restrictions are placed on it. It so often does nothing more than give the brain enough clues to leap to conclusions which are non-sequiturs, conclusions to which questions of accuracy do not apply and never did.

All that is hidden begins to take shape in Kemps' work, first as an overlay of images and information, then as a set of lures (size, reversals of colour and placement, partial vision), then, in the encroaching darkness as more and more overlays are applied, as progressively more unreadable images with higher quantities of information. And just as information from distant stars takes longer to reach us, so does the result of Kemps' deep indigoes and blacks, by no means negative but full, pervasive, rich and self-regarding. No point of view matters now; the virtues of being mobile are of no account and size, focus, detail and legibility seem irrelevant. Gradually, as in a detective story, the entire pattern has become evident. Walking from one vast room to another, in a vague circle, has been a meditational exercise, as the architect van Abbe, keener on designing monasteries than anything else, would have realised. In this space Kemps, a subtle and precise thinker, has orchestrated his own career (and it is becoming a career in which every exhibition is a retrospective) allowing new kinds of interplay between the constituents, so that we double back when given our cues, reconsidering the initial meaning of work which Kemps, his own stage manager, has changed subtly or presented in altered contexts. The varying elements of the work can be regarded as conceptual, visceral or belonging to the world at large. No matter, as long as they interact. Univalent meaning, even temporary polyvalent meaning, comes under fire, as second thoughts are constantly allowed to make a new context for older, known forms. Is this complexity or indecisiveness? Or is it a third thing? In the room where the Sevillanas are on show, a tall sculpture stands, not in the centre - Kemps abhors centres - but towards the far corner, lined up with Folie à deux. In fact, it is Folie à deux II, a work shown here for the first time, not horizontal but vertical, as if a figure could be standing inside. Made immediately after Folie à deux I, it was kept secret until now. What was the motive for bringing it to light? Clarity can be ruled out. So can completeness. Perversity, some would say. Perhaps the answer is permanently unavailable, or in a state of constant change. Or perhaps we return to Cratylism and find that making art is an elegant tautology. Or - and here Kemps would be bound to agree - that it is about keeping secrets, and even though the details of the secret must remain a mystery, the gesture has a meaning, a meaning about meaning, of its own.