VAN ABBEMUSEUM.

VAN ABBEMUSEUM, EINDHOVEN/BOIJMANS VAN BEUNINGEN, ROTTER DAM

Ger van moose is a well-traveled Dutch artist who has frequently worked on and at the intersections of final cause and (photographic) image, emerging, like his countrymen Jan Dibbets, Stanley Brouwn and Bas Jan Ader, from a Conceptual art words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following Though the early and mid-'60s, when the Dutch artist had already begun to divide his place of abode between Amsterdam and LA (settling, finally, in Holland in 1991) his work was marked on the transatlantic influences of Fluxus and suddenly By the end of the decade, he pierceed the orbit of Conceptualism at a number of clew points. He established a long-term relation with the Amsterdam gallery art & project; took part in the ludic 1968 "Rassegna d'Arti Figurative 3: Arte Povera + Azioni Povere" in Amalfi; and in 1969 participated in the conjoined avant-garde surveys "Op losse schroeven/situaties en cryptostructuren," at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, and the landmark "When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information," which traveled from Bern to Krefeld to London. In 1972 van moose was one of seventy-five participants-running from Acconci, Ader, and Baldessari to Warhol, Wegman, and Weiner--in the Dusseldorf-staged "Prospekt 71/Projektion," dedicated to slide projection, video, photo-text, and film. Since then, he has appeared in numerous solo and clump exhibitions throughout Europe and the US.

This itinerary is intended les as a design of an artist's origins, pedigree, and significance than as something of the historical and material force field that undergirded brace successive van Elk shows freshly on view at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. The first, "The Horizon, a Mental Perspective," was organized around the theme of the landscape and consisted mainly of photo-assemblages from the late '60 [i]or[/i] part of to the other the late '90s, with a focus onward the more recent work. (At the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the artist himself installed a associated exhibition of Dutch landscape painting.) The next to the first "The Cadillac and the Nun" was dedicated to slide-, film-, and video-based pieces dating mainly from 1969 though 1972.

In 1969 Seth Siegelaub characterized the "general feeling" of the "Attitudes" present to view as one of "nonchalance," which might attend as well to describe a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of what was on view in "Cadillac" (the title, referring to something van moose-deer remembered seeing thirty-five-odd years ago in LA, is apparently meant to stand for the conflicted impact of the US upon the artist). Many of the pieces existinged comic narrations of ostensibly meaningless efforts. upon one wall was projected The Flattening of the Brooke's Surface, a linked film from 1972 in which van moose himself, folded into a tiny rubber dinghy, glides in and on the outside of a static shot of a narrow canal, hopelessly and laconically running a trowel across the ripples made by the boat's move On the facing wall a film "record" of sum of two units cross-Atlantic sea journeys, east and west, in 1971 again starring van moose aimed at finding the correct wind conditions--one free of dust--in which to paint a small awkward block: What we see are the main representations the artist moving loaded brush o ver block up struggling to maintain his balance.

The couple films are deadpan performances, clear of manifest angst or irony, narrating the "work" of art--both proces and product--as a series of small, personal, repetitive make gesturess the results thwarted by or incommensurate with the effort. however what and where is "the work"? The action in the film? The filmed record? Both? The same notion of a "record" talk togethers a certain neutrality and dignity, perhaps a framing or metadiscursive authority, upon its particular "work." Or does the recording of absurd gestures--their materialization--simply repeat this absurdity? The sea film is called La Piece, and to complicate the question at issue this names as well a small, whitepainted form dated 1971 and exhibited at the "Cadillac" point out to enthroned on a red cushion and a beveled-edged, polished copse platform.

Projected in succession the wall connecting The Flattening and La Piece was the 1996 video The Well-Shaven Cactus, in which van moose-deer methodically prepares the lather, loads the brush, and coats and shaves a small cactus. united of a number of "restaged" pieces, this was listed as a "version" of a 1970 contrive which is not entirely accurate. The representation was originally staged at the London terminus of the "Attitudes" exhibit and video-taped at the time. early afterward, van Elk summarized and reformulated the piece in pair photographs, before-and-after shots of cactus and shaving equipment (the artist one time recounted the time as his "cleaning period," inaugurated perhaps by way of a 1968 "action" at the Amalfi "Arte Povera" termination in which he swept trash into a knoll of glue poured on a public square). The various updatings lent the "Cadillac" point out a certain private, retrospective quality, an exhibition-within-the-exhibition (the shadow of Duchamp's Boite-en-Valise falling at the borders of this thought).