herman de vries

chance & change

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• Looking out of the window of a moving train, de vries writes in 1971:
  • chance and change situations out of a complicated chance and change structure. some observed situations from an infinite series: each time, each place, all. fields and drawings, trees and sculptures, sculptures and fields, there are no oppositions. chance is everywhere, which conditions determine. chance & change, i wrote in my notebook on july 4 1970 in teheran, on the way from arnhem to bombay and the seychelles, to buy together with friends an island and live there. the island was not bought, chance and change - change and chance [Note 24: to be (stuttgart 1995) 73]
• The programme that lies within the word pair 'chance & change' can be seen as a successor to the concept of 'random objectivations.' Already in 1957, de vries affirmed:
  • abstraction has only value for me, when it returns again to earthly reality. in other words: when it contributes to our relation to the world, in which we live (or can live). [Note 25: to be (stuttgart 1995) 22]
• For the artist, it was each time about the role an, the freedom of the one who absorbed this 'visual information.' In his concept of 'chance & change' de vries realizes, for the first time, the complete joining of his works with the natural and cultural reality of the world in which we live.
• He continues to make random objectivations until 1975; seen from the perspective of the concept of 'chance & change', each of these works is a realized choice, a possible image that transforms the silence of the 'white' into speech. I have already observed that these random objectivations can also be seen as cross-sections of a process. de vries also brings, through the concept of 'chance & change', this aspect more to the foreground. A crucial point is that de vries feels less and less the need to create [Note 26: In doing this, de vries takes a direction which is radically different to that of other movements in art in the 70s, which profess - or at least say they profess - social commitment, or which develop performances as forms of social sculpture] constellations of chances and processes, and more to choose this concrete tree in this landscape, to show how these leaves of this apple tree flutter down, to make this cutout from the landscape.
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  fig. 1 Under the Willow.
  The photograph, as a reproduction of reality, as a document which makes visible both the chance and the process of a specific moment of reality, occupies in this respect a special position within de vries' oeuvre. Some of his photo-projects seem to be travel documents, some a series of snapshots, but there is obviously more to it. de vries travels and photographs both far and near. First, an example of a faraway place. On one of his travels, the project l'exposition complète de luang-prabang is initiated. In 1975, de vries, using a series of photos and a simple poster, proclaimed the entire city of Luang Prabang to be the poetry of reality (in English, he has used the term 'actual poetry'). This work may seem entirely conceptual, but in the end de vries' statement is that the city or environment in which the spectator lives, is sculpture, is poetry and is a never-ending exhibition. An example of a place nearby (in this case, from Eschenau where de vries lives) is les très riches heures de herman de vries (1981). de vries read somewhere of the publication of a facsimile edition of Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, a book of hours and one of the most beautiful manuscripts from the late Middle Ages, which also owes it fame to its 134 miniatures. In a play of concepts such as miniature, richness, time, representation and the individual, from whom such a book or artwork gets its name, de vries developed his own très riches heures: during a day of meditation in an open space in the wood, he made 134 black and white photos of what struck or attracted him in his direct surroundings (the work in its entirety is still unpublished [published in 2004 - CS]). [Note 27: See for other examples of photo projects by de vries, Michael Fehr's interesting analysis, 'herman de vries. Artifex arboris inversae' , in exibition catalogue Jörg-Heiko Bruns (ed.), herman de vries. aus der wirklichkeit (Ulm : Stadthaus, 1998) 8-29.]
• herman de vries gives a new content and function to what is the essential modern visual document, the photograph, by energetically divesting it of its conventional meaning as a memento of something else which was reality somewhere else or at another time. Also in his photo-projects, the world appears as a document of itself.
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• TEXT CREDITS
  Passage from Cees de Boer, '"the world is my poetry". Some moments from life = work of herman de vries', in exhibition catalogue Oeuvreprijs 1998. Beeldende kunst : herman de vries (Stichting Fonds voor de beeldende kunsten, vormgeving en bouwkunst : Amsterdam 1998) 33, 37.
• IMAGE CREDITS
  Fig. 1.

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