images in the work of Anet van de Elzen

The work she produces does not stand for Anet van de Elzen. ‘It won’t give you a glimpse of the identity of the artist’, says one of the authors of this book, Brian Catling. The work stands for the viewer. There is nothing in between, not even Anet van de Elzen. In fact she goes one step further: she dissolves in her work. For her it is simply the natural thing to do. Everything Anet van de Elzen is not in daily life, she is in her work. ‘What it is not is an everyday thing’, she writes in this publication. You will recognize it as how you, the onlooker, experience her work. It is not an experience that can be shared with others; you can talk about it, perhaps, but you cannot share the other’s feelings. Whatever you see has a different meaning than what another sees in it. You need to look for the significance of this work in yourself, not in the artist. When she talks about it, she talks about the manifestation of the image and how it came into being, about the physical form it has taken, but not about the effect it produces: that you can only experience as an onlooker. And yet Van de Elzen is forthright in what she commits to paper. She is completely candid about her calling as an artist, how the awareness of this came over her, how she develops it.

The work of Anet van de Elzen is always entirely at the mercy of the situation. It is in a dimension that may be very concrete – a physical form in a well-defined space – but that may also be extremely rarefied and volatile – a song emanating from a living source. And sometimes it is a combination of the two. Everything that seems to us intangible and impalpable takes on a concrete form, as if the massive weight of our consciousness is vibrating and trembling in the air. In this book, Denys Blacker writes primarily about sound, the invisible force in Anet van de Elzen’s work. Blacker shows us that a good way to experience Van de Elzen’s work is by gently letting drop a plumb line in your mind’s eye. Any work by Anet van de Elzen – whether it is a static bronze object, a photograph, a drawing or a performance – you take in with great reticence. The image signifies much more than you thought possible – you are immediately aware of this. The question is whether you want to seize the opportunities offered by the image, or whether you prefer to sidestep it. Although this is always an option, it simply has too much presence for that. You cannot regard it with detachment: you encounter it; it hits you in the face. Of course you recognize it, but you never knew – never wanted to know – that it could be visible. Anet van de Elzen makes visible what we would keep to ourselves, things we would prefer even not to think about, but that always keep our subconscious alert somehow. Van de Elzen brings this to the fore, whether we want to see it or not. As often as we walk around it uneasily we are drawn to it with fascination, only to recoil again from what seemed to have won us over completely.

The work of Anet van de Elzen is made with enormous skill. No-one exhibits such great mastery of the material as she does. The material is not the bronze, the photographic medium or the skill of the performer – all of which she uses with great competence – but the most important material that Van de Elzen has in an intrinsic sense: the thoughts that go through her mind, and the matter with which these thoughts are fed; physical experiences and knowledge as well as feelings and involuntary, unconscious and unreasoned reactions to the world around her. The work of Anet van de Elzen is the result of the internal processes that she must carry out in order to manifest herself in the world. She isolates and immobilizes these processes. It is work that you, the spectator, respond to intuitively, based equally on a sense of unease and of complete fascination, in the same way you cannot keep your eyes off something that you never saw before and that instils both fear and joy into you.To Anet van de Elzen, the unusual is completely ordinary. She shows us images that we experience as intense and emotional. Her work is about all-encompassing feelings: life and death and everything in between that impassions us – love, anger, joy, violence, emotion and cerebrality. If the images do not disturb you, you can spend a long and fruitless time thinking about it. That is the safest way. You can also ask yourself how you can become receptive to this, so that the images tap sources inside you. As Brian Catling writes in his essay about her in this book: her images materialize ‘the loneliness of which we are made.’

You can avoid Anet van de Elzen and her images, refusing to surrender yourself, keeping an appropriate distance – you can even reject them totally. But you cannot deny that the images of Anet van de Elzen surrender themselves to you completely.

This quality in her work is the reason that the jury of the Chappin-Van den Udenhout Cultural Fund in ’s-Hertogenbosch awarded her this biannual prize in 2003.

Alex de Vries

Chairman of the jury for the Chappin-Van den Udenhout Cultural Fund Prize 2003, 22 December 2003