part of SIGN 1988-2018 (WIP)

The Evil Eye of Bart Nijstad

Joost Pollmann on Bart Nijstad's Muggen - 2014

I’ll start with a question: is it important for artists to know what their work is about? After thirty years of writing reviews and interviewing artists, I’m inclined to say: no. And since Bart Nijstad might not have a clue what his book ‘Muggen’ is about, I’m going to tell him right now.

First of all, ‘Muggen’ [Dutch for 'Mosquitos', ed.] isn’t about mosquitoes, but about crows. I’ve seen 33 drawings of crows throughout the book, and zero of mosquitoes. A cockatoo does appear twice, though. The crow is a bird of ill omen; it brings misfortune and makes ugly, screeching noises. In Bart’s book, the constant appearance of crows creates a sense of menace and also adds dynamism, because a flock of crows is not a boring thing to draw. On page 71, something essential happens: the boy and girl who play the leading roles are searching for the little dog Tobi and end up in a landscape of piles of sand. This is where crows have landed and are fighting over something. It turns out to be an eye, or more precisely: an eyeball with a tiny muscle still attached. There’s no sign of the dog, so perhaps this is a dog’s eye. The boy picks up the eyeball and puts it in his pocket.

According to the Dutch dictionary, the expression “to have one’s eyes in one’s pocket” means “not to see even the most obvious things.” The boy blinds the eye by putting it in his pocket. Are we not supposed to see something? When Bart signs his book ‘Muggen’, he invariably draws an eyeball with a string attached to it on the inside cover, so apparently this is an important clue.

In 1928, George Bataille wrote his infamous book ‘L'Histoire d’Oeil’, known to us as ‘Story of the Eye’, in which a long series of perversions is described. A corpse is desecrated, there is copious masturbation, urine is used creatively, and so on. For Bataille, the eye is an egg that you can crack open, but it is also a hole into which you can insert things, just like any other bodily orifice, and the eye is above all the decisive organ in eroticism, for to look is to undress, and to be looked at is to be dishonored.

Let’s take a look ourselves at page 53 of Bart’s book. [Note the red arrows!] Bataille would have been delighted with what we see here, because not only is there intense staring and sweating going on, but the gaze is also fixed on the private parts of a female dinosaur. It is often said that men are attracted to just about anything—“as long as it has a hole in it.” Well, that is illustrated loud and clear here. Bart’s drawing is based on an existing painting by Charles Robert Knight (1874–1953), in which the genitalia are, however, missing. Bart has therefore fantasized this cloaca into the picture himself to indicate that the young adolescent is actually preoccupied with only one thing. A prehistoric reptile as a pin-up!...

On page 105, we experience another perverse climax: here, the masseur disappears into the varicose vein of the disabled neighbor, who endures this penetration with a blissful expression. Her bulging eyes roll back, leaving only the whites visible. Eyes like eggs, Bataille would say. Because her pupils disappear beneath her eyelids, she is in fact looking inward, into her skull. All sorts of alchemical things are happening here, for on the next page, with that same vacant gaze, she vomits up a mountain of clay. The masseur has turned into clay, and from that clay grows another monster that will destroy the town of Muggen. Are you still following? Masseur transforms into female flesh, female flesh becomes clay, clay becomes a giant, the giant crushes the town, and finally, the crow has become a cockatoo. That is at least as bizarre as Ovid’s metamorphoses, in which a nymph turns into a laurel tree, a hunter into a hen, a princess into a star, and a nymph into a cow. The climax comes on page 125: one of the apocalyptic giants lifts the boy up and holds him upside down, causing the eye the crows were fighting over to fall out of his pocket. The giant catches the eye and squeezes it, after which a disproportionate amount of blood flows out. After this, the book gains momentum: the town is completely destroyed, the neighbor is sucked up and spat out, the little dog returns unscathed, and the boy and girl end up on a paradise island.
In Greek tragedy, this is called catharsis, the great cleansing necessary to move on with life. Bart Nijstad had to destroy the town of Muggen because it stands for Meppel, his provincial stomping ground. What he saw there, with his angry eye, is mediocrity and petty bourgeoisie, the misery of Drenthe that Peter Middendorp has also written about; but with this graphic novel, Bart Nijstad has definitively transcended mediocrity! The eye is blinded, Meppel is destroyed. Bart is free!

That’s what the book might mean, but if I’m completely off the mark, it doesn’t matter, because as Harma Heikens recently said after I wrote about her in de Volkskrant: the artist actually has nothing to do with interpretations of his or her work!

Thank you.