herman de vries

informal

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• Between 1956 and 1959 de vries 'created' a number of collages trouvés whose beauty increases with the effects of time as it modifies them and distances them from their source. They are to be distinguished from the cubist and the surrealist forms of classical modernist collage, both of which were constrained by what might be described as syntactic or logical structures. In both those forms of collage, new meaning is generated by adding one thing to another to produce an implicit connection. In cubist collage this was a bringing together of familiar objects (represented by drawing or paint or by fragments of 'reality' - wallpaper, veneer, newspaper, etc.) which had multiple implications, to do with perception, art and life. In surrealist collage (and montage) it was the juxtaposition of objects and images from categorically different fields of meaning that created a super-reality and engendered the appropriate shock. Both types of collage depended on a logic of connection/disconnection.
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• de vries at this period created a number of 'found works', each with its own particular interest. In collage trouvé (1959), for instance, he preserved a discoloured filter paper from a laboratory experiment, containing traces of plant extract: seen against a dark background this abject object assumes the grandeur of a cosmic image, its stains and tears like the dark marks on the surface of the moon. A second collage trouvé of 1959 which includes leaves and foil anticipates (unconsciously) the many later works de vries created by the laying down and framed preservation of a bed of leaves found on the forest floor, or of bits of discarded 'rubbish' found in wild places.
• The signature piece of this series is what is rubbish? (1956), which asks directly the question they all pose implicitly. A tattered collage trouvé of layered sheets torn from a much flyposted wall, it is a fragment of the urban world redeemed by art. Rubbish has been defined as 'displaced matter': like the designation 'weed' it is not a description of a thing so much as an expression of an attitude towards it ('a weed is a plant growing in the wrong place'). Change the context, change the meaning. The question posed by what is rubbish? is both direct and rhetorical, both a general question and a challenge specific to the work itself. It recalls, in reverse, the essential Duchampian question, 'what is art?'
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• TEXT CREDITS
  Passage from Mel Gooding, herman de vries : chance and change (Thames and Hudson : London 2006).
  © Mel Gooding; courtesy Mel Gooding.
• IMAGE CREDITS
  

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