[Atelier] Interview with Jeanne Heeswijk

[Monica Narula]

Dear all

This is an interview with Jeanne Heeswijk, the artist i was talking 
about in the CM meeting. The interview is taken by Mirjam Westen, a 
curator.

best
M

Jeanne van Heeswijk: The Artist as Versatile Infiltrator of Public 
Space. Urban Curating in the 21st Century

Mirjam Westen

Jeanne van Heeswijk (1965 Schijndel, the Netherlands) is currently 
one of the most hotly debated artists in the Netherlands. Since 1993 
she has been working on socially committed art projects that take 
place in public spaces. She sees herself as a mediator, an 
intermediary between a situation, a space, a neighbourhood and the 
people connected to these. Acting, meeting and communicating are key 
concepts in her method of working. She generates "interspaces", 
contexts and crossovers within which new relations and connections 
can be established between groups of people, institutions and 
conceptual frameworks that are always different.  The connection 
itself is never her sole concern as Van Heeswijk belongs to a 
generation that propagates a new moral attitude moving away from the 
attitude where "anything goes" towards a committed and engaged 
approach which aspires to a higher aim of connecting communities. 
Often, her name as the initiator is missing from invitations to 
events that she has launched. Is this altruism? She feels it is more 
important to convey the content of the project than to have her name 
listed. Moreover, her projects always materialise through 
co-authorships, in collaboration with others. While staying in the 
guest studio at the New York's P.S.1 on a scholarship in 1998-1999, 
for example, she  decided to share her work space with people with 
whom she had previously collaborated. Together with Dorine de Vos, 
she transformed her studio into a genuine hotel room (of the famous 
New York Hotel in Rotterdam) and invited artists, researchers and 
critics to stay. Each Sunday afternoon for a whole year she organised 
an open house where any of her guests could present their work to the 
public. The focus was not on the artist herself, but rather on the 
work of the hotel guests. 
Van Heeswijk's projects are not contained by sound conceptual 
statements, attractive publications or visuals; they transcend the 
customary length of a performance or exhibition and extend beyond the 
boundaries of the autonomy of art. She is the type of artist some 
critics call "community worker", whereas others classify her work as 
'esthétique relationelle' or "the new commitment". She herself has 
coined the term "urban curating" for her interventions. In the sedate 
Dutch art world in which all taboos appear to have been broken, her 
work - uniquely - arouses fierce controversy. Often, this is linked 
to the question of whether her interventions belong to the realm of 
art and how she stretches and shapes her art practice/ artistic 
strategy and positions her seemingly idealistic approach in an era 
which considers itself liberated from both ideology and idealism. 
Yet, the bizarre fact is that although everyone in the art world has 
their own opinion of her work, only a handful of people (who, 
moreover, are not involved in her projects) have ever experienced her 
projects at close quarters - in spite of their long-term duration. No 
doubt, the location of her interventions - outside prestigious art 
institutions, on the fringes - plays an important role here, as well 
as her "low-profile" aim and preference of working both for and with 
people who generally fail to reap glory in the art world. A third and 
not insignificant reason why the contemporary art public does not 
actively relate to her work could be due to the fact that Van 
Heeswijk does not offer the public bite-size portions of her methods 
or embellish her projects with spectacular events. The artist, 
alongside the average art visitor, needs to make a considerable and 
above-average investment of time and energy to follow Van Heeswijk's 
projects in their full scope, let alone to contribute to them.

'Art has the capacity to contribute to life'
The moment I visit Jeanne Van Heeswijk in her living/working studio 
in Rotterdam is typical of the enthusiasm and boundless commitment 
which she has displayed for over ten years: she has two 
labour-intensive projects on the go simultaneously, De Strip in the 
Dutch town of Vlaardingen, and Langs de lijn van de toekomst (The 
Future from the Sidelines) in the town of Gorinchem. In addition, she 
is working on her presentation for the Dutch Pavilion at the Biennial 
of Venice.  Meanwhile she is preparing new interventions, gives 
lectures and interviews, and hardly finds the time to register that 
her project Face Your World, which took place in Columbus, Ohio, last 
summer, has just been nominated for a prize. Although it would be 
beyond the scope of this article to mention all her projects 
individually,  I would like to highlight a few to clarify her method 
of working and her views, but chiefly her motives.
In her lectures and publications Van Heeswijk expresses a remarkable 
optimism about the relationship between art and society. She feels 
that 'art has the capacity to contribute to life. (Š) in a time where 
specialization continues to increase, there is little space left to 
really connect things such as the communication between various 
disciplines and between various subcultures. It appears to be close 
to impossible to bridge the various social islands. No matter how 
beautifully subcultures exist within a generally praised 
multiformity, it remains poignant that nothing happens amongst those 
subcultures. I believe that the trouble is a lack of 
crosscommunication. At the same time, what is still communicated, 
namely how our current reality is portrayed and mediatized, remains 
basically very dominant and compulsory. It is a form of mass 
communication without much space for people's own manner of 
representation.' 

Mirjam Westen: Since the 1980s, the art establishment has regarded 
such optimism about art and society as naive positivism. How and at 
what time did you realise that you no longer wanted to make 
autonomous objects, but wanted to develop your artistic strategy in a 
different way?

Jeanne van Heeswijk: My first solo exhibition in 1991 was a 
confrontational experience in that respect.  I always wanted to 
become an artist. I wanted to tell stories and feel connected to my 
surroundings. My aim was to link my stories to a larger whole, to 
grand shapes. These became very complex silhouette images, 
self-portraits with videos. My search for a grand shape or gesture 
raised doubts and made me query whose story it was I wanted to tell 
and who would be waiting for it. During and after the solo exhibition 
it became clear to me that I couldn't and didn't want to grasp such 
complexity in one single well-defined image. That was a major 
disillusion. I threw everything away.

Mirjam Westen: You were not disheartened by this. How did you deal 
with your critical doubts?

Jeanne Van Heeswijk: Apart from my work as a seminar organiser I 
acted as a researcher/observer for a few years in order to refocus. 
At first, I organised small 'events' such as the series Het Avondeten 
(Evening Meal) (1993). I invited artists, designers and theoreticians 
to add their own interpretation to the evening and they could invite 
other people too. I retreated into the background; I was the butler, 
so to speak, but at the same time an observer, or a voyeur. Through 
"care" I tried to create situations in which other people could meet 
and energy would be released. Bigger projects such as State of Mind 
(1996) were developed later.

Mirjam Westen: What did you learn from these "care" events?

Jeanne Van Heeswijk: An incredible amount! Initiating these 
encounters gave me a great deal of experience. I also became aware 
what it meant to literally give "shape" to space by creating space, 
but also by breaking open spaces and the energy that is released if 
other people also contribute and people listen to each other. I 
learned a lot from the way in which each artist gave their own 
interpretation to the evening and the importance they and the other 
guests attached to it. For instance, Suchan Kinoshita had invited ten 
complete strangers. She had given them an invitation in the street 
earlier that day. Marcel Wanders asked all the guests who were all 
colleagues or competitors of his to make portraits of each other. 
What I remember most, apart from all the valuable memories, is Q.S 
Serafijn's evening: 'You have to be right in the middle of the world 
to do something with it, rather than cycle round it and have an 
opinion about it.'

Mirjam Westen: The latter is certainly typical of your commitment. 
Instead of keeping your distance you are right in the middle of 
things and feel involved from start to finish. How do you chose how 
to become involved and in which themes?

Jeanne Van Heeswijk: The ideas are often inspired by commissions and 
by current events. The work always exists in the here and now. As an 
artist I never process these topics literally, although it is of 
course not surprising that I am currently dealing with the issue of 
integration. What we see very clearly right now is a kind of 1950s 
rhetoric, a notion of compartmentalisation that is being applied to 
modern society. In my view that will not only lead to greater 
differentiation, but also to segregation and isolation. Ultimately, 
all that remains are floating cells - groups of people who live 
completely separately from each other. I never offer a solution in my 
work, I only visualise problems. I want to generate cultural models 
that do justice to, for instance, the complexity of the integration 
issue.


"If you really want to think about and contribute towards a change in 
social structures you need time"
Stratification and length are characteristic of her projects. 
Examples are the Valley Vibes project, which has been ongoing since 
1998, and the De Strip project, which was launched in May 2002. 
Valley Vibes originated in response to an invitation from curator Amy 
Plant to take part in a project for residents of London's Holly 
Street Estate, a neighbourhood caught up in a process of urban 
renewal. Plant asked Van Heeswijk to develop a 'creative process' 
which could give people a say in the whole regeneration process and 
which would also enable the exchange of information. In Plant's 
experience local residents do not easily warm to abstract ideas. She 
was looking for something tangible that could be of immediate 
benefit. Van Heeswijk designed a tool that can be used to transfer 
information, for research as well as for entertainment: the Vibe 
Detector, a big silver-coloured trolley equipped with a professional 
sound system for playing CDs which could also amplify, broadcast and 
record voices or other sounds. Residents can have free use of the 
Vibe Detector for all kinds of events, activities, parties and 
meetings. The only favour required in return is that all music played 
and all speeches are recorded. Therefore, whenever someone uses the 
sound trolley they purposefully contribute towards an archive that is 
intended to record an impression of a neighbourhood as it is 
experienced by the locals at the time. In addition, residents are 
offered the opportunity to provide posters and invitations for 
events. For four years the Vibe Detector travelled from one 
neighbourhood to the other throughout the entire 'London Sector A' 
regeneration area. Florian Wüst called it a sculpture of accidental 
information because of the randomness of the information storage. He 
queried whether the Vibe Detector, in view of the entertainment 
function of most sound trolley bookings, in the end will turn out to 
be merely a party machine. Amy Plant, however, is very pleased. 'The 
Vibe Detector functions like a kind of magnet of energy, attracting 
people of all ages and cultures who want to do something, relate 
something, want to create things and want to make a contribution 
towards life. All these bookings have revealed a network of human 
relationships', says Plant. 

De Strip, commissioned by Vlaardingen town council, which is soon to 
celebrate its first anniversary, is part of the extensive long-term 
plan Until we meet again which Van Heeswijk began to present in 1995. 
Again, urban regeneration featured as an important argument. The 
commission at the time was to create a master plan for art in public 
spaces for the post-war neighbourhood of Westwijk. The project would 
run for ten years and involved renovation and a restructuring of the 
neighbourhood by adding single family dwellings, schools and car 
parks and by relocating shops. Instead of objects on plinths or 
murals that could serve as the crown jewels of the 'regeneration' or 
'to sweeten the pill', Van Heeswijk proposed to follow the entire 
ten-year process from the start.  Her plan involved a series of 
projects that could make a positive contribution towards community 
life precisely during the chaotic period of dug up streets, 
unoccupied houses and vandalism. It became a comprehensive project 
aimed at involving residents in all the changes and initiating 
"meetings" between residents, the housing association and council 
departments. Van Heeswijk set up a series of activities for which she 
commissioned artists, architects and residents.  In addition, for an 
eighteen-month period Van Heeswijk was given the use of a dilapidated 
shopping arcade in a block of flats, fulfilling an ambitious plan. 
Within two months, the seven empty shops were converted into a single 
zone of cultural production accommodating studios, a gallery, a 
museum, a council information desk and a video library. The 
programming is not just geared towards young people but also towards 
the various cultural identities within the neighbourhood. The 
Rotterdam MAMA gallery was asked to open a branch in the former 
supermarket and now organises youth workshops. Museum Boijmans Van 
Beuningen was offered the chance to equip the old vegetable shop as a 
branch, showcasing constantly changing exhibitions from their 
collections of applied art (e.g. Moroccan pottery as well as 
contemporary design in an exhibition of food and drink culture) and 
contemporary art (featuring topics such as language or, the recently 
opened Transcience). The museum café presents programmes organised by 
residents, and there is a video magazine where apart from a changing 
video programme residents can make their own videos. The two studios 
accommodate different artists, designers or producers who stay for 
work periods of three months. They can work there for free in 
exchange for two afternoons a week developing activities for 
residents. Would any urban regeneration area or indeed any other 
neighbourhood not be happy with such an exciting project?
There are many people in the Netherlands who are sceptical about the 
role that art can play in public spaces, particularly since the 1970s 
when art was deployed as a kind of compensation for urban failures. 
Van Heeswijk has long since left her scepticism behind. Through this 
project the artist demonstrates what it means to become a genuine 
part of urban life other than by contributing towards the look of an 
urban landscape.

Urban curating
Mirjam Westen: How do you generate a process that establishes the 
conditions for connections and contacts between people?

Jeanne Van Heeswijk: From within the realm of art I try to create 
platforms where people can meet. It may seem easy to intervene in 
this way, but during my career I have discovered how difficult it can 
be to achieve this in collaboration with the community you focus on. 
It is vital that I am inside the community, become a part of it, and 
develop the ability to "listen". I want to encourage people to take 
an active part in what I see as the starting point of processes that 
may continue, which will ultimately give them more control over their 
environment. That can be a long-term and sometimes painful process, 
as we have to get used to each other's different ideas and views.
Urban curating to me means maximising the potential for open 
dialogue, communication and acting communally within communities. The 
key to this is creating and implementing an infrastructure or network 
which can maintain such a dialogue and can establish the conditions 
for a critical discourse that clarifies the possibilities for social 
change. To achieve this you constantly need to go back, need to 
listen time and time again and make it clear that public space in 
essence means shared space, where everyone's contribution is 
important.

Mirjam Westen: How do you feel about criticisms of being a community worker?

Jeanne Van Heeswijk: Such comments don't just display an arrogant 
attitude towards other professions but also contempt for an artist's 
strategy. As if an artist could simply put on a different coat, adopt 
a different role. That's not how it works. To me it's not about 
working in a different discipline but about working together with 
other people, in order to connect different areas of their lives/ or 
specialisations within disciplines. This is part of my work concept. 
Incidentally, I specifically don't see it as the artist's duty to 
relieve social distress. I strive to generate positive energy, which 
is within my means.

Mirjam Westen: Ine Gevers called you a political artist without being 
politically correct.   What do you see as the political aspect of 
your work?

Jeanne Van Heeswijk: I'm not saying that everyone should be an 
artist. I rather tend to support the aim that art and knowledge 
should be disseminated. Thresholds should be levelled and everybody 
should be invited to take part in art and culture. I want to forge 
links in order to make the complexity of our society transparent. The 
interesting thing about the visual arts is that they are still in a 
relatively autonomous position with space to develop new ideas. From 
this position I hand people tools with which they can influence their 
own surroundings. Giving people access to cultural capital, that is 
what I call politics.

Mirjam Westen: How do you explain your boundless commitment and involvement?

Jeanne Van Heeswijk: I'm genuinely interested in people - that in 
itself keeps me going - that's how I achieve collaboration. When you 
take the other seriously you engage yourself with the other. This is 
never without obligations, by the way. Although I don't aim for a 
preconceived end result I do sometimes call it 'contemplation with 
dirty hands'. Sometimes I am too directly involved and unable to 
distance myself. Because you are right in the middle of things some 
people use you for their own purposes without you realising.

Mirjam Westen: Have any of your projects ever failed?

Jeanne Van Heeswijk: Of course there are disappointments. The 
starting signal of the project Until we meet again was a Dahlia Race 
Show, a project of Jan Hein van Melis, a kind of fraternization 
sculpture involving teams racing miniature cars. We had hoped to 
bring people from the housing association, council departments, 
residents' organisation and local residents together through this 
show. However, three days before the event we found out that the 
teams that had been entered for the show were fake. In no time, we 
then drummed up everyone we knew. I view the project both as a 
failure and as a success because it suddenly made the intermingling 
of interests so painfully visible. What we were faced with was 
competition between council departments and organisations. Even 
though officially we no longer have a compartmentalized society, 
there are still an awful lot of cliques or interest groups with very 
few exchanges that take place between them.

Every fibre of local subjects contains international issues.
Another project Van Heeswijk is working on this year is called Langs 
de Lijn van de toekomst (The Future from the Sidelines).  In order to 
bring people from different cultures in contact with each other she 
developed a sports event in the Dutch town of Gorinchem. She 
transformed a dressing room at one of the sports fields into a radio 
station from where weekly radio broadcasts were made about the role 
of sports and games in modern culture over a period of two months. 
Interviewees discussed questions such as the games that are played by 
different cultures, the rules they have and the importance of 
nationality in sports. The highlight of the event was to be a 
"multicultural" heptathlon at the end of May 2003, with games that 
have emerged from stories by Gorinchem residents, such as a game 
based on breakdancing and hopscotch, or a BMX bike variation of the 
Afghan game of Buzkashi in which traditionally goats are dragged off. 
The outcome is uncertain and failure or success depends on the 
participants. Risky?

Jeanne Van Heeswijk: With every project I run the risk of little 
response despite all my efforts....Maybe that risk is inevitable if 
you aim to break open spaces and investigate boundaries. Often, 
people cannot believe I could bring together groups of different 
nationalities to organise a sports event together. I don't care about 
such preconceptions. During the preparations some extraordinary 
things can happen. For instance, under the supervision of Akkiz 
Colkusu, Turkish women organised the international day of the child 
on the sports field and together with 'Gorinchem beweegt' (Gorinchem 
in Motion) we worked on a number of afternoons of sports and games. 
Because we worked with games from all cultures people suddenly got 
the idea of sending a coach to collect all the children from the 
asylum seekers centre so they could take part in the event.

In Columbus, Ohio, in 2002 Jeanne van Heeswijk undertook another 
extensive project with a two-year preparation period. She created a 
platform for the Wexner Center that had invited her, the COTA bus 
company and the 'Children of the Future' programme of the Greater 
Columbus Arts Council which resulted in the Face Your World project 
for city children. She had a local bus converted into a digital 
laboratory where children aged between 5 and 12 were able to 
transform their own surroundings using an interactive computer 
programme. Called Interactor, it was developed in collaboration with 
the multimedia collective V2 and Maaike Engelen. The Van Lieshout 
Studio was asked to situate three anthropomorphic bus stops with 
monitors in the city centre on which the public could follow the 
games and the input of the children. The game could be played by six 
children simultaneously. Although they were allowed to change the 
destinations of a certain neighbourhood, they had to realise how 
their interventions could thwart the plans of other children. The 
result was much debate, many negotiations and a lot of fun. The 
children were also provided with digital cameras so that during the 
bus trip they could take pictures at different locations in town 
which could be added to the existing archives of images. Or, as 
expressed so aptly by curator Carlos Basualdo: 'The project is an 
invitation to act, but to act through images, to produce images that 
act.'  
It was a highly successful project in which many children took part. 
But Van Heeswijk did run up against the boundaries of established art 
institutions. It took a lot of effort to convince them of the 
importance of the project. In the introduction of the catalogue the 
director clearly expresses her initial doubts: 'Yet another young 
artist, confident, earnest, and fiercely committed to a social ideal 
that would elude her. But I was very wrong.'


"Art can generate a different dimension"
Van Heeswijk has strong views about the role that art can play in 
society. 'Art has not just aesthetic but also communicative 
qualities. In our fragmented, overspecialised society the latter is 
particularly important, I feel: art can generate a different 
dimension. I truly believe that. In that respect I'm an idealist.' 
She could represent the ideal image of the type of artist championed 
by Suzi Gablik in her book The Reenchantment of Art (1991). Over the 
next few decades we will be seeing art that is 'essentially social 
and purposeful, art that rejects the myths of neutrality and 
autonomy,' Gablik optimistically predicted in 1991. Artists (herself 
included) will no longer be able to distance themselves from 
ecological and social issues, the author claims. Her aim was 
therefore to foster a 'socially engaged art'. Gablik's plea for a 
responsible art, an art that is concerned about social problems and 
that centres around communication seems to become a reality with 
Jeanne van Heeswijk's attitude and interventions.
In the Netherlands Van Heeswijk's projects have so far received 
fierce criticism or have been completely ignored. Thus, the art 
historian Jeroen Boomgaard in a long article about engagement in art 
(1999) was able to evaluate and criticise the interventions of 
contemporary artists without discussing Van Heeswijk's works. He 
feels that nowadays ideals are lacking, in contrast to the actionism 
of the 1960s.  Present-day interventions may have a certain degree of 
openness but he was unable to discover any form of engagement in the 
traditional sense. Boomgaard typified these as a 'form of 
insouciance', as an adolescent dream world and dismissed it as 'new 
naivism'. He believes that the 'art of today involves itself in the 
world, purely because it takes place there and consequently is just 
as real as any other phenomenon.'
In more recent discussions about art in public spaces many people 
have voiced their fear that art will lose its autonomy, having 
already turned into a policymaker's tool. Another thorn in the 
critics' side is that in terms of art in public spaces only its 
practical use and applicability are ever discussed.   The plea in 
contemporary art discourse for more crossovers between disciplines 
and the debate on the autonomy of art may inevitably involve the fear 
of loss of certainties, reactions that are connected with any process 
of change. Perhaps this is equally inevitable for those who still 
think in terms of art as "contributing to" rather than as "being part 
of". Van Heeswijk, who takes an active part in such debates as shown 
by her numerous contributions to conferences and seminars, considers 
these issues irrelevant for her interventions. She exploits the 
autonomy of art in order to create a new space that is literally 
"rooted", interwoven, with the social here and now. She has an 
aversion to being an eminent exception. In fact, she regards the 
benefit and the effect of her interventions as valuable.

What's more, she has repeatedly spoken about the importance of a new 
moral attitude in art. 'I do not believe in an aesthetics without 
ethics. Ultimately it has always been one of the jobs of visual art 
to demand matters such as responsibility and solicitude. Therefore I 
feel the need to redefine the artist's space as a mental space where 
a new moral attitude might be formulated. I believe that today's 
aesthetics has isolated art by separating the image from reality, 
while shifting presentation to representation. Because of that, 
isolated images have emerged without any connection to reality. In my 
work I try to create contexts for images and their different 
possibilities so that images have the capacity to reconnect in a 
meaningful way their environment.'

On the subject of crossing boundaries, this does not rule out the 
occasional need for drawing boundaries. At the 2003 Venice Biennale 
Van Heeswijk will exhibit her video documentary of the Langs de Lijn 
van de Toekomst project as well as the installation Draw a Line 
(2000), which was made in collaboration with Rolf Engelen. This is a 
mutation of the traditional Dutch territorial game of Landje Pik 
(Land Grab/ Land Control) which used to be popular in the countryside 
but has become forgotten. It involves a piece of land where players 
can claim land from their opponents using a pocket knife that is 
thrown into the ground from above. 'The installation draws a line 
both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. I am very tired of all 
those discussions on how boundaries fade away. Precisely in the 
communication with the other there is a clear dearth of people who 
dare to draw a line by simply saying "I think that this is going much 
too far". Biennales have traditionally been a contest between 
countries which continue to revolve around competitions and award 
ceremonies. A typically Dutch game involving capturing land and 
marking boundaries fits in very well', the artist said.



-- 
Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective]
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net