‘I cast a stone into a pool and watched the ripples fade’, writes the anonymous poet on a sheet of paper. The poet, writing in memory of his deceased father, left a statement on a bulletin board in presumably his own neighborhood; a paper/stone intervention in public space, causing ripples in the world, from an unknown to an unknown. His father ‘worked on pills’, we read, and he ‘cracked the parkinsons germ’.
The poet wrote his text with the help of an alphabet template; by now an antiquated device. If he had wanted to stay anonymous by not revealing his handwriting, this surprising choice betrays at least the outline of a personality. Yet as the poem unfolds, a voice seems to emancipate itself, as if becoming independent of its author. Gradually, the voice speaks bolder, with more authority. The voice says, ‘a true blue poet I am making waves’. He firmly declares in the final line, ‘Let there be no fuss’.
Words are like stones in a pool, they make waves, ripples. The note was found by artist Anna Van der Ploeg (Kaapstad, 1992), who is fascinated by flyers and posters stuck on public walls, street poles and convenience store bulletin boards. Despite the current predilection for online communication, these humble objects are still rife in many places, with different cities having their own timbres, flavors, colors. This particularity interests Van der Ploeg, who grew up in South Africa in the nineties, a period when the country was rapidly reinventing itself, while renegotiating the many different identities within its borders. Through the choir of ragged concrete poems on walls and boards, then, a public is speaking for itself, imagining itself as community, situated in the here and now, not in an abstract future, not conceived of by an external structure.
‘Let There Be No Fuss’, Anna Van der Ploeg’s residency presentation at M Leuven, is an artistic and material response to a growing collection of such objets trouvés. The posters and flyers in the artist’s personal archive are not exhibited or represented literally, but function as urtexts of sorts. They resonate like memories, fragmented, distorted. The sculptures, in a way, are the ripples or waves the poet dreamed to evoke by casting the stone of an emancipated voice.
Such a metaphor, however, obfuscates the process of intense working-through of which they are a result. These works are not predetermined, calculable physical reactions, but created by ongoing experimentation, by carefully carving wood, painting, curving. They testify to a constant exploration of methods and procedures, of thought through artistic labor. Often, the artist worked on several sculptures at once, moving between them as if they were a question to be answered.
Not all posters speak like the one quoted above. In fact, most of them are more direct, economical, communicating only the necessary information. There is a productive gap between the matter-of-factness of their language, the way they seem not to be aware of themselves, and the rich, complex lives of real people they are representing. As if these letters are portals to people, to ‘little great people’, as the Belarussian writer Svetlana Alexievich, from whom Van der Ploeg takes inspiration, once put it. They speak as use objects; their goal is to make ripples. ‘Language hangs between scarfs and coats’, Van der Ploeg observes in her notes. Who left the words there?
As with the posters on community boards and walls, in Van der Ploeg’s work, words seem to float in the air. Words unfold like curled sheets of paper, hanging between scarfs and coats. ‘Dust and ashes though I am, I sleep the sleep of angels’, one curly ribbon reads, a Saint Augustine line carved and sawn out of plywood. There are larger than life wooden panels, resembling posters with curled tear-off tabs. The words they carry are not always legible, because meaning is not the words’ primary essence; scribbles crawl and ripple over the plywood as if fueled by an autonomous drive. We don’t need to be able to read to truly encounter them; the drive itself is what is laid bare. A stone is cast into a pool with the desire to make ripples. The human urge to write is ancient.
Art, these objects tell us, has much in common with the posters. Like the disheveled poster, these artworks, carved from humble material, are interventions in public space. ‘For your attention’, is their metalanguage. They bear a voice of their own, disjointed from the artist’s voice. They curl, they ripple. They think.
Like the ‘ripples’ poem, they are aware of their own artificiality and materiality, too, for example in the way they comment on the medium of painting. Painting being Van der Ploeg’s first medium of artistic expression, these sculptural works are as much about painting as they are about the urge to write. They are experiments in working with figure and ground, probing sculptural expression on a flat surface. The coloring tries to bring out the white paper’s luminosity, as if the paper wants to shine through.
From a reflection on painting, then, the waves bring along the curly banner. In the collection storage of M Leuven, Van der Ploeg found a wooden banner, resembling a paper scroll, and included it in this presentation. The banner, whose message has eroded, is a decorative element. Sometimes called ‘cartouche’, they were frequent in Renaissance and Baroque art, bearing an inscription, name or title. This banner is carved out of wood, but they were often depicted in paintings, too. Their function reminds us of the posters. They are not a part of the scene on a painting, but add something from another reality, like a voice disjointed from a speaking subject. The banners, too, seem to float in the air.
The waves and ripples, the ribbons that unfold and curl – do we ever arrive anywhere? When have the ripples faded? When is the artwork finished? When will the voices agree to the point of no fuss?
Far from being final, this presentation is an invitation to a process. The worst fate of a drive is to find its point of satisfaction. All it wants is to be allowed to flow, to make ripples.
