articles, essays and papers

• Cees de Boer :: the world is my poetry
What a wonderful tree! And so old! it has survived so many centuries! How could it have become this thousand-year old tree? Well, because the tree was completely useless. Its wood was not suitable for making wagon wheels or furniture, not suitable for making charcoal to keep someone warm or cook food. And now that it is old, it is really not worth cutting down. It is a completely useless tree. (After Chuang Tzu)
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  During the preparations for the great retrospective of his work in 1980 at the Groninger Museum, herman de vries wrote to the then director Frans Haks, that he was looking forward to his first group exhibition. Haks observed de vries' ironic remark to be very meaningful: "the outer forms of de vries' work change, but it is clearly based on a number of principles." There is indeed a great diversity of forms in de vries' work: informal art, monochrome art, concrete art, concrete poetry, conceptual art and artist's books. Haks: "the drawback is that these are names which in fact bear on the external features of the work, which say nothing about the intention of its maker. the above-mentioned terms are therefore only illuminating for a short period of time: truly important artists do not repeat themselves but develop and renew themselves. This can particularly be said of herman de vries."
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  fig. 1 die wiese today (2011)
  Apart from a few cognoscenti (and the very few collectors in the Netherlands who incorporate a historic perspective in their collection), the name of herman de vries will chiefly bring to mind those works which present elements from the natural world such as the leaves of a phillyrea plant or deer droppings. An example of this is the journal de el hierro:. a journal of his stay on El Hierro (one of the Canary Islands) in the form of a series of 47 sheets with rubbings of earth samples from the island, photographs of cloud formations, ferns which are to be found there, leaves of trees and shrubs, and so-called artefacts, man-made objects which, for a time, have been taken up in the natural metabolism of the island.
• Nevertheless, this aspect should not determine one's image of his work, exactly because the themes of nature and ecology are at present so much at the centre of attention. A perspective of this kind very much misrepresents herman de vries' work. However strange this may seem, initially de vries' oeuvre does not involve these topical themes. The actuality of the oeuvre, and its relevance, is a different one.
• This has, among other things, to do with the character of the artist. In the 60s, herman de vries had already explicitly distanced himself from the groups and movements in art, to which he, for a time, had belonged or in which he had been classified by the outside world. This artist in distancing himself took a further step. He repeatedly stated that art is renewed from the borders of art and that it hardly makes sense to strive as an artist to be at the centre of such a social construct. Accordingly, de vries puts forward that he and susanne have lived since 1970 in the country, in the little village of Eschenau at the edge of the Steigerwald.
• This landscape is his studio, and at the edge of this forest, which is one of the few remaining large-scale areas covered by forest in Europe, lies one of his most important works: 'die wiese' - a meadow of about 4,000 m², which is tended by the artist and susanne. The meadow is a small holy of holies, a sanctuary where nature, surrounded by farmlands, can freely take her course; a part of the landscape but still clearly distinguishable from its surroundings.
• de vries claims that there are hardly any natural landscapes still left because nature has been occupied and cultivated by man. He considers parks to be:
  • culturally impoverished nature. the botanical garden, on the other hand, is art: elements from nature (plants, trees) which have been consciously gathered, which are very rich in sort and therefore in experience, but still unequivocally culture, for without tending by human hand the botanical garden cannot be maintained.
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