Frans van Lent vroeg me enige tijd geleden mee te doen aan een project van hem: The places where we are (or would like to be)
Hij heeft dat nu uitgewerkt in The places we were:
“On 24 July 2018, while walking in the Perigord, I had phone conversations with friends about the places we were at the moment: The places where we are (or would like to be). During these talks, we sent each other pictures of our surroundings. For me, this occasion connected the conversations to the specific places; they became inextricably linked. I cannot walk past these places now without thinking of the person I was talking to there, and of the conversation we had. Today, I revisited three places.”
De plek waar Frans was toen hij me sprak, nu in 2023
And this is the edition I made for l’Anniversaire de l’Art: Trace of Muse. You might remember the first appearance when I was having a beer during my residency in France in 2008. Or the search for her under water as a Malieveld-action off-site in France. During my research in the USA she also appeared in San Francisco at Montgomery. I even have a text on shard about her! These are stones taken from the Sorgue River on January 5, 2023. It is an edition of five footprints of the muse I keep encountering. The colour comes from pigment I got from Roussillon near the source of the Sorgue river:
Kees Koomen: Trace of Muse (edition of five) – 2023
I will participate in this with an edition of five prints of which I will show three:
Just a few more nights’ sleep and it’s Art’s birthday. HOK will be celebrating with a group exhibition! So put on a paper hat and join the fun. Just the Fluxus way.
To celebrate the 1,000,060th anniversary of art, HOK will transform into a FLUXUS gift shop for 60 minutes on Tuesday, January 17, at 8pm. Here the birthday art can be viewed, purchased, and taken home with you. With prices ranging from 6 to 60 euros. The 60-minute sound of the FLUXUS gift shop will be broadcast as noise on the “Art’s Birthday” network and will be heard from Tokyo to Vancouver.
Didn’t Yoko Ono present her little bulbs ball of air to the MOMA gift shop, for the visitors to take home something unforgettable? And what are we taking home from HOK this birthday? A genuine, unadulterated multiple by one of HOK’s ever increasing bunch of free-spirited artists and friends. That is: a signed and numbered piece of art, made in a small edition, at a friendly price. A print, a piece of ceramic, a button, a doll, a piece of fabric? Whatever the artists set their minds to. As long as it’s playful and not too serious.
You are totally invited for those 60 minutes, to share a slice of cake, fold a paper hat and stuff your bags. Bob Lens’ alarm clock concert has been silenced and with Willem de Ridder, Fluxus Northern Europe chapter has lost its chairman and mail order entrepreneur, but we are all still here to brew a party.
The multiples will remain on view and can be obtained in HOK even after the anniversary, the entire weekend of Friday 20, Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 January, in the afternoon from 1 to 5.
Somewhere before new years eve I was asked by Dutch artist Frans van Lent to participate in his Project Mingle 2. He was to call me 15.00 h, January 1st. He asked me to answer the phone and say nothing. After one minute he would end the connection. He asked me to put the phone on loudspeaker. All this I did. He asked a number of international artists to do the same.
Yesterday the project was published as a sound-piece, You can find it here!
Other participants are:
Frits Dijcks, Den Haag (NL) Ienke Kastelein, Utrecht (NL) Manuela Macco, Biella (IT) Annie Abrahams, Vollenhove (NL) Carron Little, Glasgow (UK) Myrna van Lent, Barendrecht (NL) Selma Boskailo, Berlin (DE) Thomas Meijerman, Rotterdam (NL) Pablo Lopez Jordan, Murcia (ES) Kees Koomen, Den Haag (NL) Josh Schwebel, Berlin (DE) Deirdre Macleod, Cramond Island (UK) Martine Viale, Perpignan (FR) Jello Reumer, Maumont (FR) Paul Henning, Wierre-Effroy (FR) Geerten Ten Bosch, Dordrecht (NL) Max Wyse, Perpignan (FR) Nico Parlevliet, Dordrecht (NL) Elia Torrecilla, Vigo (ES) Susana Mendes Silva, Lisbon (PT) Leonard Passchier, Paris (FR) Jos Deuss, Dordrecht (NL) John G. Boehme, Victoria BC (CA) Hautefort, France. 1 January 2023 14:00 – 16:00 CET.
Some weeks ago I finished the gouaches for which I used the diaries I kept during the Hybrid Art Fair. The fair asked EX-MÊKH to participate so we installed our work in the hotelroom which they assigned to us. Before and during the fair I made a number of walks. I visited the ARCO art fair and some museums and other art-venues. Each day I took a part of my notes of the day to make a “shard” on my hotelroom. It is a text I wrote with charcoal on torn, white washed packing paper. They resemble the ceramic shards of pots which pre-christian cultures used around the Mediterranean. They give only small pieces of information about life in those times. I added The pieces of paper with diary-text that I wrote daily to the EX-MÊKH installation Con alma.
After the fair I decided to make a gouache for each day I was in Madrid. I would like to show the texts and the gouaches together sometimes. Like pendants of a fading memory of the days that I was there.
In 1997 I went to Jerusalem with my wife because she had to attend a congres. During the daytime, when my wife would be present at lectures and discussions on ancient languages, I made walks in the city. I walked along the ancient wall and visited some of the gates of Jerusalem. The thing that most impressed me was life in East-Jerusalem. The Israeli part of the city made me think of the US, the west coast. In the eastern part of the old city I felt I could experience life in the middle east. I made a series of drawings in my sketchbook. Looking forward to another visit to Israel, I thought it might be interesting to publish some from my 1997 sketchbook.
The text on the first sketch says: This sketching book starts in Jerusalem on August 5, 1997. It concerns only some small details that I noticed, that entered my eye and it mingles with what is already there. The choice of subjects is probably decided by what preceded our journey. I saw the eye in an advert in East Jerusalem, a nice start for a series of sketches.
EX-MÊKH, Ellen Rodenberg, Maarten Schepers and Kees Koomen, participated in Platforms Project 2022. It was the tenth edition after two years of improvisation on the internet and a somewhat improvised edition in the fall of 2021. Ellen Rodenberg, Maarten Schepers and I liked the video we made for the internet edition in 2021: we built a booth with the usual measurements in the studio, and we filmed how we built an installation in the way we usually work. Platform Projects showed the video on the internet under the name Stage Arousal. Later it was shown in Paris on the front of EP7, a multidisciplinary building with 17 screens on the Avenue de France, near La Grande Bibliothèque.
This time we decided to build another booth with a different context. Not a white cube, but it had a wooden floor and walls. Moreover, we built it in the open air in the woods and the back side (the second wall) stayed open. As a result, it became a sculpture in itself. We started to work there, improvising and experimenting. Eventually it resulted in the provisional video Scenes from a Wormhole which we showed in the fair together with an installation which was made from material we had used in the video.
I decided that I wanted to make work on the basis of reinterpretation of some of my older work. The Paintings Ira la cual manda fuoco(1998) and La figura, con paura, storna (1997) came to my mind, from the project I did on the poem Donna me prega of the Italian renaissance-poet Guido Cavalcanti. Referring to the first painting I did a performance for the video in which I burned publications made about my visual work. This act shows the artistic practice of reconsidering your own work, burning older meanings and making it new. As to the second painting: I painted a self-portrait, naked with a burning match in my hand, turning away from the result of another performance I did for the video: a sheet of paper on which I breathed out, thereby spitting some chewed-on smarties on the sheet (Janus – breathing in-breathing out). The naked figure is the artist who is looking at his work before he goes to sleep. Or he thinks about his work awake in bed and goes down to the studio, in the nude as he sleeps, to see his work and to be struck by the power of what he did turning his head away in awe. It is a well-known effect, later to be surprised by what you did after having ended the day in the studio very unsure of it. The fact that the figure is naked has en extra layer, because Diogenes walked the streets of Athens naked with a lamp in his hand to look for virtue, another theme from my earlier works. With this some pictures of what EX-MÊKH showed in Athens:
A cabin in the woods (model)
EX-MÊKH: Wormhole (installation) – 2022
Links: Janus (breathing in breathing out), rechts: In Awe
Links – Ellen Rodenberg: Actor, rechts – Kees Koomen: Janus (breathing in – breathing out)
Kees Koomen: Janus (breathing in) – videostill
Kees Koomen: Janus (breathing out) – videostill
Kees Koomen: Janus (breathing in – breathing out)
Kees Koomen – In fuoco (videostill)
Kees Koomen: Grid
Maarten Schepers: Booth – Ellen Rodenberg: The actor is leaving
To keep up a well-established Fluxus tradition, HOK commissioned their neighbourhood carpenter to make a HOK FluxBox, to be filled with contributions by their own gang of HOK artists and Fluxus people they admire. They made sure to have all the submitted pieces of art juxtaposed in the HOK FluxBox to a neat disarray of objects, cards, materials, and components. This unpremeditated assemblage has resulted in a tangible poetics and non-linear narrative as it was meant to.
Last week, HOK’s artist in residence Lula Valletta personally delivered the HOK FluxBox at the Museum FLUXUS+ in Potsdam Berlin. The HOK FluxBox, hand crafted by Bram Massaar, and filled to the brim with art works by Philip Corner, Jeff Perkins, Nico Lootsma, Dana LaMonda, Jordan Herregraven, Leonor Faber-Jonker, Counter Culture Chronicles, Ronin, Hans Köning, Weronika Trojanska, Lula Valletta, René van der Voort, Bobbi Oskam, Gaye Black, Mr. Pelham, Gavin Jay, Erwin de Hart, Harold de Bree, Kees Koomen, and our sadly missed Bob Lens, is now part of the Museum FLUXUS+ collection.
Fluxzeug (I used to make this kind of airplanes as a kid, using only material from the match box)
From September 9 untill 18, 2022 an exhibition will take place with a presentation of the Artist’s Magazine RUW! This will happen in Hilbertsraum in Berlin. Artists from Berlin and from in and around Den Haag who contributed to the magazine will show their work along with all the contributions to the recent German and Dutch editions of RUW! The opening will take place on September 9th and I will show some work, though I will not be present!
EX-MÊKH is going to participate in the coming Platforms Project. For my contribution I would like to use earlier material to add to our installation and video. I came upon this sketch that I made for the Cavalcanti project where the artist stands in awe in front of his newly painted work at night:
