Maatstaf. Jaargang 29

[p. 84]

Raphael Rudnik The high-wire act of Gam Klutier

Too many travellers, the neo-Nothing decor of Heathrow Airport full of us treadmilling the hours away because of overbooked flights. And I had another problem: in my usual frantic scrambling hassle to get out of New York, I'd taken too little extra money, and now found the London-Amsterdam part of the trip had gone up so much in price that I lacked the financial fuel to fly...!

I told my inconvenient little tale to an airline agent who gave me a double eyebrow-lift, and sending out very British voice-beautiful tones superior to everything that could not pass through his North-west nasal passage, he suggested I ‘see someone.’ The carefully pissy prissy pressure on that first word impressed me, as signal good advice. - What I needed to do, was really look at my fellow would-be passengers, see into them and find some spirit generous enough to lend me £15. But, who? Everyone looked undependable, blankish or strange, tired and annoyed. None in a giving mood. Each of us the other to the others. Or, was I just projecting my own gaudy circus of spleen onto everyone, because unable to ‘see someone’...?

He could! That flashy young hotshot with the thin cigar padding around and taking in every one of the crowd of crazy pilgrims going nowhere as they passed him, with a clear-eyed look. The wide light in the machine of his baby-blue eyes brightened as I floated up asking: ‘Excuse me, could I ask some help from you?’ I rehearsed my little catastrophe, and he at once agreed to loan me the money. But when we were sitting over our iodine-colored coffee and balsawood sandwiches, unpacking our bags of personal mythology, and I mentioned I liked to write poetry... the eyes invisibly darkened, yet looked light-pained in a Calvinist way. He mumbled he couldn't just give me the money, I'd have to tell him something. ‘See someone’... ‘tell something’ - hey, what was this, spiritual exercises? After flying for eight hours, and then walking around in this big stuffy box for four more? - No Sir, upon compulsion nothing! But he was already opening his big black portfolio, and what was on that sheet of paper he fished out was so armed with perfection and silence, I had to try to name it when he asked: ‘What would you call this?’

A square full of white moons, each equidistant from the others, but in no order of phases, their whitenesses and blacknesses looking random, and yet ordered by some underlying use the eye couldn't detect or intellect name. Or as the U.S. Patent Office says of this ‘decorative panel assembly’ now being sold in America (where Gam Klutier begins to sell his more commercial stuff, and show work in New York's Alan Stone gallery)---: ‘... a plurality of spheres loosely held hostage between the panels... such that they are each freely rotateable whereby visual patterns can be formed.’

‘Hey man, what should the name be...?’

As a child I used to stare at the last word in the S-section of the dictionary, loving its look and meaning: syzygy... Now, like one of those ticks which can hang onto a branch in New

[p. 85]

[p. 86]

[p. 87]

[p. 88]

[p. 89]

[p. 90]

[p. 91]

[p. 92]

[p. 93]

Guinea for up to 20 years, waiting for some passer-by's body heat to yank them off into the leap which is their life's one red-blooded chance, the strange-sounding word jumped out of me. Klutier: ‘What's that supposed to mean?’ ‘The constellar pull of heavenly bodies...’ He winced then blinked then winked. ‘Do you want another coffee?’

I did. But first we had to go ticket-hunting - and amazing! being pleasantly launched in new friendship proved lucky, we got sure seats on a flight to Amsterdam. Then over that coffee Gam showed me all sorts of his creations: slides of paintings, studies for mobile contraptions, plans for other magical things (like Syzygy) which somehow gained strength from being half in the commercial realm, and what seemed like hundreds of drawings and scribbles, in little notebooks tucked into the portfolio too - (‘I'm just doing it all, because I have to continuously move my hand... to find an energy, then it starts to make a language.’) There were also a few ancestors of the spooky furniture to be found in this issue of Maatstaf... In which I'll say some things about the three main categories of Klutier's art: paintings, constructions, and the cartoon-like mode the chairs are made in. But first some history, a few plain facts to introduce his story.

Born in Delft in 1945, as Gerard Kluiters... worked in an X-ray apparatus factory from the age of 14-17, by choice (‘to see how to make things work and be independent’) one day hearing his present name above all the noise, promising some future perception of mind and a mastery over matter more passionate than the machines rising up and tumbling down around him... went for four years study of graphic design at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten at Breda; then marrying a fellow-student gat two quick ‘hostages to fortune’ who made him go into advertising where he zoomed up fast enough for a big Amsterdam agency to send him to New York and London for two years grooming before installing him as head of their operation; and then the big step by which he became a self-deposed young prince in the realms of cash: - Kluiters quit, and Gam Klutier appeared.

Having escaped factory and agency, he gave his best energy to his art, working a few well-paid days a week in advertising to satisfy the dirty tremolo of the cash-register, and moving to a farmhouse in the East of Holland partly because his pieces were growing so large and numerous.

His art is basically happy, but who knows about its claim upon Klutier's life? I'm reminded of that momentously imaginary bird which suddenly became the wheel of a car he was driving several years ago, waving in its plumes the various light that pulled him through the sheer grace and dangerous grandeur of a vision. Maybe the emotional firebird which drives his art so fast will be seen in Peru this year, where Klutier's life is taking him. Or, it will prove to have risen phoenix-like from the ashes of the fire he made in Roswinkel last year, out of several years’ work - including the wire and wood constructions which dominated his first show.

Someone in the Aemstelle Expositie Centrum named these De Speelse Wereld van Gerard Kluiters, and that seemed at least superficially correct when one entered and saw: oddly crib-shaped cars upon a wire stretched between two points, made of wire themselves, outlines really... riding on single-file wheels which had painted paper circles stuck in them, color-wheels turning the colors of the spectrum... and all sorts of shapes, circles, triangles, earthworm-squiggles so loosely constellated they seemed unattached... and also hovering around the cars were frumpy white wooden figures, with great flying speed outlined in their hair and clothing bright as the lowest-common-denominator neons of Times Square. (These middle-aged angels were joined by even brighter balloons in the watercolors, supplying flying-power for the now sky-bound vehicles...) So yes, at first glance Speelse Wereld did indeed give the impression of the fond dreamy

[p. 94]

enchantments we associate with childhood. (On opening night, some of the chariots which could actually be tugged back and forth on their wires were worked so hard by several children present it seemed that Klutier's pieces might be forced into imitating Tanguy's self-destructing sculpture.)

But despite all this gay charm, when one looked a little longer much of the show could have seemed careless and naive, a joke made for children, or a sort of hokum to steel Klutier's artistic nerves. For, the easiest thing to see about the strange carts was that they were so cumbersome. What were those awkward-looking things doing up there on those wires with a clutter of circles and squares around them going nowhere...? And yet, for all the spirit of contradiction that crept in, the pieces held their space and our interest, because peril was somehow equally at work with play in them. Some article of artistic faith was holding Klutier's high-wire act up...:

‘...for a while I gave names to the shapes to talk my work together. They were imaginary situations, with relations, moods, etc. This was a misleading statement to fool myself. They are still keys, to me, those shapes and colors...’ Klutier tried to ‘talk’ this work together with a whole code of names he gave to simple basic things and forms: square = intellect, circle = constancy, earthworm-squiggle = earth, rainbow = pleasure etc. Abstract words can have a power of attraction over an artist which can make a writer want to reach for an aspirin. Sometimes Gam talked as if his simple symbols themselves actually amounted to discrete, independent truths. But, mostly he is daring and shrewd in the way he trusts his sensibility to be fooled by these abstractions, ‘misled’ into richness.

The startling thing about Speelse Wereld is that Klutier used the circus-situation implied by the wire to dramatize his basic artistic stance and struggle. He surrounded those cars with his symbols in a situation where they could not possibly perform the ‘imaginary situations, with relations, moods etc.’ which they promised for him. This viewer got a mixed reaction... the peril of a fall into sterile freakish obscurity, and an evocation of the courage and enchantment art needs. It was as if a man had walked out on a high-wire and just stood there, juggling his symbols.

But in several other pieces, Klutier broke free of his symbolic high-wire situation, soaring high above himself, as in this one: a forest of flat white wooden shapes softly rounded at the shoulders, suspended on their thin white steel stalks... they're built all leaning northeast, their brightly colored tips tending in that direction too... the slightest touch sets them swaying into and from side to side of each other, sometimes touching with a gentle clatter, becoming visible again as they dodge free from each other... an Aeolian harp of motion and color, and that nice sound. I named the beautiful piece Cloud Bumpers, but actually it is gaiety which has no name.

Klutier has done a lot of painting in the last two years, hundreds of oils and watercolors... and in them the whole process of trusting his own sensibility by taking risks bends inward. Or, to have him put it in somewhat more painterly terms: ‘There has been a drastic change in the past few years. I've asked myself and investigated and worked in questions like: shape or no shape, line or no line. The impact of color. The inner ritual: tried to beat my censors by working very fast to make coincidences occur etc. I'm still in the midst of that. Although I sometimes understand why my pictures change. It's nice that I don't need excuses to make the space I want to create. Color, shape, space on the edge of a razorblade.’

Here's a staircase climbing up itself, one step at a time, the way staircases usually do. But a pipe poking through right in the middle is dripping big drops... and it looks like an ego has sprung a leak.

Here's a scrap of paper with a tired knife... somehow it lets us know it is weary from some

[p. 95]

gigantic domesticity more important than anything which it might do at one of our meals.

And what is going on here?----: a rock covered by a white handkerchief-like cloth with a square cut out on top so that some bald spot of rock shows through right where the crown of a human head would be, watched eyelessly by something labelled ‘scalp-knife’ which is in turn attended by a dark small empty bottle. I don't know why this drawing looks so sinister, exultant, and funny. Or, maybe I do. It's as if things in themselves were acting out our human drama without us... and in so doing somehow went beyond the understanding of that notorious groveller and grasper, The Self. At no point in this portfolio are the chairs less eerily human than when one reaches out in an overtly human gesture and grabs the leg of another. Personification in no way accounts for the magic and dread of Klutier's cartoon-like creations. These chairs are simply like the furniture of our world, but with a life of their own. A part of, yet apart from ours.

We share a fate with them, because after all we are things. In the sense that we order ourselves so much by our many uses of things that they become part of us. But the main metaphor released by these drawings is a lost self, (dramatized by the fact that people are totally missing)... staring front-face out of every one of them at us, as if the chairs were thrones for that mobile vacuum. And somehow, because of this absence, the chairs seem able to do things and know things. In a series of crazy moral reversals and feats of non-caring or chair-caring, they seem to be making superior connections with the same forces which are at work upon us in this strange familiar world in which everything is given and nothing is known. Paradoxically, the chairs also seem to possess some communal solidarity issuing from a fundamental rule: have nothing to do with people!

On page 8: the scene has a murder-mystery look, mostly because of that bullet-hole. But of course, the chair is not drawn in evidence of some missing human-being's final drama, it is the body. Note that that broken-off slab of chairback looks suspiciously like the last truncated slab of the diminished staircase. They are linked by that visual pun, and both are also obviously going nowhere... if for different reasons. The bullet-hole is a false clue, no damage has been done in the scene we see because of it, (that broken chairback couldn't have been shot off) so the bullet has passed through everything unimpeded toward the human onlooker (us) with all the liberated energy of an ego-missile... and the window-glass never even gets to cobweb around its hole, instead swinging up free in one angelic line of rise.

The staircase did it! But as we have seen, the murdered chair may well have done it to itself to be a stair, to be ...to be!

Or, is accident the revenge of the Impossible? Klutier can't tell us right now. He's gone to Peru to meet that harsh, overmastering great colored bird of his, in a world of light. I hope, happily.

Have a seat.