Ger Van Elk: The Well Shaven Cactus, 1970
GAM, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Turin
Torino | ItalyGer van Elk (Amsterdam, 1941-2014), Dutch conceptual artist, took part in the important exhibition "Arte Povera + Poor Shares" Amalfi (1968), "Op Losse Schroeven" at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1969) and "When Attitudes Become Form "at the Kunsthalle in Bern (1969) that marked the horse artistic generation of the sixties and seventies. He spent many years in New York and Los Angeles, clasping a partnership with the artist Bas Jan Ader, who was also Dutch. Van Elk exposed in those years in the influential gallery Art & Project in Amsterdam, founded in 1968, along with artists such as Jan Dibbets, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Gilbert & George.
Ger van Elk investigating repetitive and seemingly trivial actions. He conducted his research by layering different media, stirring from time to time photography with painting, sculpture and film, in order to make it as clear as possible the pretense and artificiality of every artistic expression, convinced that an image is more realistic shows, the bigger the lie that it hides.
The VideotecaGAM , as part of its exhibition dedicated to the years between video art cycle sixties and seventies, is happy to present The Well Shaven Cactus , produced by Ger van Elk in 1970 (black and white, sound, 1 '25 " ) in cooperation with Gerry Schum, within the collection Identifications with which Schum made a first video collection of the most important international artists of the conceptual. The work of Van Elk is the film transposition of a photographic diptych by the artist composed the previous year, putting a picture of a cactus covered with shaving cream, one position in which the plant now appears shaved. The version video shows instead the artist's hand which drives an electric razor and shaves a small cactus plant on the balcony of the house. Ger van Elk would be back to shoot a video of the same action, using foam and razor again, in 1996.
The artist insist on three separate occasions on the same image can raise awareness of The Well Shaven Cactus is a paradigm in its path, capable of holding together the two most important aspects of his work: a distinct irony - used by ' artist as weapons sharper against the earnest aspiration to a purity that modernist poetry had set a goal of universal art - and a clear awareness that the illusory boundary between nature and art was a distinction created by the art historical tradition, an unreal distinction since everything in our Western idea of nature is nothing but artificial and constructed, as artificial and constructed is a landscape and a composition of flowers.
Shaving a cactus has the comic effect of a television sketch , but evokes the long history of a culture that attacks the environmental data: the satirical or miniaturized versions of draughtsmanship compulsion inherent in the art of topiary (shaping of trees and hedges), and is literal image as symbolic amputation bodies necessary to the survival of the plant, which is then 'carved' modernist sense, making it through the razor a clean and closed geometry, unable to breathe, and destined to wither.
Ger van Elk (Amsterdam, 1941-2014), Dutch conceptual artist, took part in the important exhibition "Arte Povera + Poor Shares" Amalfi (1968), "Op Losse Schroeven" at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1969) and "When Attitudes Become Form "at the Kunsthalle in Bern (1969) that marked the horse artistic generation of the sixties and seventies. He spent many years in New York and Los Angeles, clasping a partnership with the artist Bas Jan Ader, who was also Dutch. Van Elk exposed in those years in the influential gallery Art & Project in Amsterdam, founded in 1968, along with artists such as Jan Dibbets, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Gilbert & George.
Ger van Elk investigating repetitive and seemingly trivial actions. He conducted his research by layering different media, stirring from time to time photography with painting, sculpture and film, in order to make it as clear as possible the pretense and artificiality of every artistic expression, convinced that an image is more realistic shows, the bigger the lie that it hides.
The VideotecaGAM , as part of its exhibition dedicated to the years between video art cycle sixties and seventies, is happy to present The Well Shaven Cactus , produced by Ger van Elk in 1970 (black and white, sound, 1 '25 " ) in cooperation with Gerry Schum, within the collection Identifications with which Schum made a first video collection of the most important international artists of the conceptual. The work of Van Elk is the film transposition of a photographic diptych by the artist composed the previous year, putting a picture of a cactus covered with shaving cream, one position in which the plant now appears shaved. The version video shows instead the artist's hand which drives an electric razor and shaves a small cactus plant on the balcony of the house. Ger van Elk would be back to shoot a video of the same action, using foam and razor again, in 1996.
The artist insist on three separate occasions on the same image can raise awareness of The Well Shaven Cactus is a paradigm in its path, capable of holding together the two most important aspects of his work: a distinct irony - used by ' artist as weapons sharper against the earnest aspiration to a purity that modernist poetry had set a goal of universal art - and a clear awareness that the illusory boundary between nature and art was a distinction created by the art historical tradition, an unreal distinction since everything in our Western idea of nature is nothing but artificial and constructed, as artificial and constructed is a landscape and a composition of flowers.
Shaving a cactus has the comic effect of a television sketch , but evokes the long history of a culture that attacks the environmental data: the satirical or miniaturized versions of draughtsmanship compulsion inherent in the art of topiary (shaping of trees and hedges), and is literal image as symbolic amputation bodies necessary to the survival of the plant, which is then 'carved' modernist sense, making it through the razor a clean and closed geometry, unable to breathe, and destined to wither.
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