editions and publications

• 1960-1980 :: wit is overdaad / wit = weiss
• 
  wit weiss (1967)
  the first book by herman de vries appeared in 1960. 'book' may be a big word for this small format booklet of a few sheets, bound with two staples and, surprisingly, without print. no title on the cover, it is blank too. on the colophon page only a few words are printed, in very pale ink and in four languages, like a poem: 'wit / wit is overdaad / blanc est surabondance / white is superabundance / weiss ist übermässig / wit / wit / wit is overdaad'. one might say that this book is at the same time an end and a beginning. it constitutes the end of the work of a scientist soon to renounce the study of nature and who has just announced this by renaming the offprints of a personal scientific publication 'manifest of castrated reality'. [2] it also marks the final point of his parallel work as a painter, related to the abstract movement 'zero'. from 1956 herman de vries has been making monochrome paintings and from 1959, white paintings.
• but wit is overdaad is above all a beginning. despite its spare appearance it is not an anti-book. on the contrary, it is the ultimate book. in fact, white refers to the positive emptiness in which all the great spiritualists from master eckhart to oriental sages have seen the essential condition of fulfilment. it is suzuki, whom herman de vries read between 1958 and 1960, [3] who first established the bridge between zen buddhism and the rhineland mystic. white represents opening, availability and receptivity to that which, in order to give itself, demands that we give up grasping it. that is why this book, devoid of words that would limit its content, is, just like white, 'superabundant'.
• this ultimate book is therefore not minimalist. it is rather a 'maximalist' book. in herman de vries' work there is not the search for the primary elements of painting or sculpture for their own sake, which inspired most of the formalist work of the zero group. just as his canvases are white in order to receive the world in all its aspects, his book is white in order to gather an infinity of meanings. this total book forms the basis of a hundred publications to come. [4]
• although 'total', it is not so in the sense dreamed of by mallarmé, who expressed "everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book", [5] a single book into which he proposed to enclose the essence of reality and that he would in vain attempt to write. wit is overdaad is the perfect antithesis. from the same premises, according to which words do not give us things, the two draw opposite conclusions. for mallarmé, the book should substitute the necessity of the word for the contingency of the world. in foregoing the complexity of reality in favour of the invention of a transparent order of verbal fictions, [6] mallarmé defines poetry as "an art dedicated to fictions" (un art consacré aux fictions)], his ambition is to create, in his book, what he calls, "a world of which i am the god" [7] consequently the 'implacably white' paper is the first obstacle to be overcome [8]: it embodies the abyss of nothingness, to which "[he has] come without knowing buddhism" [9], and over which the poet should throw a net of words, which he compares to either a spider-web or to lace. for herman de vries, white paper is quite the opposite, not a frightening abyss to cover up, but a liberated space, an 'open' surface. in a subsequent manifest 'an open language'. [10] herman de vries declares, not without provocation, that "an empty shed means more than a written one." a blank sheet ignores all limitations, above all those of words and syntax, which are at once those of our analytic thought and concepts; a blank sheet is a space offered up to the unknown, to chance, to the unexpected, to that "actuality" (he says in english) which eludes our intellectual grasp, be it by description or by science. such a position runs counter to the linguistic model of consciousness, in europe spread by structuralism, in the united states by logical positivism, which are, in their different but convergent ways, about to extend their empire to all of the humanities in maintaining that everything is language; that it is not thought that determines language, but that language determines thought and that, as a consequence, reality itself is nothing more than a conceptual construction, a result of our representations.
• in this respect the white book may be seen as a the opposite of a black book - in effect a simple sheet of light cardboard folded in half - published later, in 1981 and entitled concept [eschenau : the eschenau summer press & temporary travelling press publication 18 - CS]. this word, barely visible, is written almost in the colour of the paper, in grey pencil on black paper, otherwise blank. in this case nothingness is a negative, the dark wherein all cats are grey, where all differences are suppressed, dissolved in homogeneity, brought to sameness. contrary to wit is overdaad wherein white does not erase things but the language that screens things out. the whiteness of the sheet is not that which precedes writing, as in mallarmé. it is what succeeds it as its purification. so, white is not nothingness. it is the possibility of everything. everything? meaning reality as a totality, the world as a whole, in its diversity, in all its dimensions - perceptible and imperceptible, expressible and inexpressible, known and unknown, past and future, compatible and incompatible - that language distinguishes and contrasts. in his notes on five language manifests (1975), herman de vries remarked that his very first manifest on language was a text written to announce the publication of another version of wit is overdaad, entitled wit (1962). he wrote (in english) the following: "of this book, in which all contradictions have been omitted and which can be equally acceptable of contents for everyone, whereby all problems have been overcome and nothing is isolated from reality at the cost or in favour of one aspect, is to be said that it is a positive contribution to the synthesis of all." [11]
• the radical character of this first little book renews, in spite of its harmless appearance, the profound truths of iconoclasm: representing what is beyond us means to bring it to our human limits and in so doing confusing infinity with the poverty of our images and words. destroying representations is thus the first step toward reality. malevitch already foreshadowed this when he painted his white square on white ground (1918), a condition for entry into a multidimensional world, more true than the three dimensional world of figurative painting. but closer to the work of herman de vries at the time and above all in sensibility, it is 4'33 by john cage (1952) that must be mentioned. this piece of silence, inspired by rauschenberg's series of white paintings (1951), liberates music from composition and opens the way to indeterminate music, a music made not by the expressive will of the composer but by the world itself.
• after having been eliminated all at once in this little book, shapes, words and images will be progressively reintroduced but at the cost of an essential modification of their nature and their function. they are no longer signs of the artist's creative power to add them to the world but they try to be the messengers of the truth of the world itself. the artist thus transforms himself into a kind of translator who, in his imperfect language strives to convey with the utmost accuracy, fidelity and humility, a word that does not belong to him. this first book is thus, for herman de vries, like 4'33 for cage, as decisive as a conversion. because it delivers the book from that which prevents it from saying the essential, the absence of words is not a loss but a gain.
• top