The Unwanted Self: Contemporary Photography in the Low Countries

The exhibition featured the work of five Dutch photographers – Frank van der Salm, Gert Jan Kocken, Marnix Goossens, Viviane Sassen and Martine Stig – and four Belgian photographers – Geert Goiris, Gert Jochems, Marie-Francois Plissart and Marc Trivier. The selection of these artists represented a mix of established and emerging talent and the work in the exhibition encompassed a range of photographic styles and genres. However, apart from the aim of bringing to the attention of a British audience a body of significant photographic work that unfortunately is hardly known in the UK, the exhibition – together with a publication of the same title and a one day conference organised to coincide with its opening - sought to question whether it is possible to define photography in terms of national cultural identity and, if so, whether there is any choice for the artist: thus the idea of “the unwanted self”.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which photography gained significant ground in the institutions of art, the notion of a national cultural identity and the importance of specific and distinctive kinds of cultural idioms and traditions were commonplace. Perhaps due to the increasingly negative connotations the terms “nation’ and “nationality” have acquired in recent years, or perhaps due to the forces of globalization, the idea of national cultural identity seems to have lost some of explicative power and to be somewhat ignored in favour of new distinctions such as Western versus postcolonial or local versus international. Yet the use of these new terms and categories does not fit entirely the current practices in photography, where the importance of national aspects and features cannot be underestimated.

Nonetheless, the notion of national cultural identity and how it might translate into an understanding of an artistic medium such as photography is not unproblematic and the approach to these issues in the organisation and selection of work for the exhibition necessarily remained tentative and exploratory. In this context the most important question was what do we mean by the notions of “nation” and “nationality”?
Secondly, to what extent (if at all) can the idea of distinctive national cultural differences be extended to the phenomenon of photography that has most often been thought of as a “universal” medium whereby the image transcends linguistic and cultural distinctions?

The approach taken to the exhibition, therefore was not to attempt to recreate a trans-historical vision of national cultures, deeply rooted in age-old traditions and mentalities but to recognize the historical specificity of the cultural institutions and traditions, the recurrent forms and themes, and other means of self-definition of a national cultural idiom in an international context. The importance of the “national” could be more precisely circumscribed along the three axes. Firstly, institutionally: how is photography “organized” in a certain context? What is the impact of these organizational matters on what is pictured and how? Secondly, historically: how does photography interact with the various and successive ideas that a national body has created in order to achieve its self-representation, and how does photography interact in this regard with the other arts? Thirdly, sociologically: what does it mean to be a “photographer” or “artist” in a given context, and how do these “habits” determine what kinds of photographs get made?

These are intricate and abstract questions and ones that are not easily dealt with through the discursive form of an exhibition. It was therefore important that the visual display of work was supplemented by the various short essays that were especially written for the publication and the papers that were presented at the conference. The topics covered by the individual contributions to the publication and the conference painted a complex picture of the ways in which the concept of national cultural identity might be considered with regard to contemporary photographic practices in Holland and Belgium. Ranging between the recent initiative by the Dutch government to identify a national cultural ‘canon’, the lasting legacy of Surrealism in Belgium contemporary art, the application of the Deleuzian concept of “minor literature” to the case of Belgian photography, not to mention the question of whether Belgium (let alone Belgian photography) might be said to exist, the publication and conference highlighted the intellectual challenges in conceptualising “Low Countries photography”.

The exhibition too posed its own questions. From Holland, Frank van der Salm showed three large images that explore contemporary architecture and urban space and that play on abstract visual effects of scale, colour, reflection and repetition; Marnix Goossen’s photographs struck a cool balance between nature and culture, the artificial and the real; Gert Jan Kocken referenced his country’s past through images that depicted the results of acts of iconoclasm; whilst Martine Stig and Viviane Sassen presented a frieze of photographs originally conceived as page spreads for ‘Dazed and Confused’ depicting young Muslim women in the streets of Amsterdam. From Belgium, Marc Trivier, perhaps most well known for his portraits included two of Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett amongst a suite of brooding black and white photographs; Marie-Françoise Plissart showed images from an ongoing series entitled ‘Dining’, which explores the various cultures of eating throughout the world and a set of six multi-image panels drawn for her last photographic novel’ Aujourd’hui’; Gert Jochems presented photographs of heterogeneous phenomena but bound together by casual composition and a deliberately anti-aesthetic style; and Geert Goiris’s showed his very recent series ‘Slow/Fast’ which invite the viewer to reflect upon the different temporalities his photographs evoke, juxtaposing as they do landscapes of the Faroe Isles with shots of land speed cars sitting on the surface of the Salt Lakes of Utah.

Whether the diverse range of photographic subjects and styles represented in the exhibition amounted to something that could be identified as “Low Countries” photography was a question that the viewer was invited to contemplate. There could be reasonable grounds for responding in the negative. On the other hand, for those attuned to the historical pictorial traditions of Dutch painting, or the Belgian tendencies
towards the bizarre and the uncanny as enshrined through the legacies of Surrealim, there was sufficient evidence of the persistence of national cultural idioms.

David Green is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Historical & Critical Studies. The Unwanted Self received financial support from the Faculty Research Support Fund (FRSF), the Mondriaan Foundation and Arts Council England.