zandbank art and disability series
My Child Could Do That
SKILL AND INABILITY IN POSTCONCEPTUAL ART
Michiel Teeuw in conversation with Dinnis van Dijken
This is the first part of an ongoing conversation about arts and disability as part of zandbank platform. It has some overlap with our own researches and our lived experiences. It is strongly inspired and informed by the reading group and publication I’ve been making with Kaiya Waerea of Sticky Fingers Publishing, as well as the parallel reading group I’ve hosted with Ísey Mous last year. It’s also informed by and continuous from the dinners I had with Dinnis and sometimes Ana, where we read crip theory to each other. The general focus of the series is to not meticulously prepare comprehensive academic work, but rather to informally talk, pursuing a mode of rapid publishing. To not thoroughly edit the text, but rather to publish a near transcript of the conversation and therefore leaving space for spontaneity. For a more intimate form of publishing that isn’t so glossed and perfected.
MT: I would like to structure this conversation around three recent and current presentations in different (more or less) “white cubes” in the North. So to start off, I would like to ask you about your contribution to Art Noord last year. Could you share a bit about what you presented, and what were the different responses from the audience?
DvD: Well, I don’t know. I presented a mishmash of several art pieces that all came from different years and different levels of experimentation.* One of them was Dinosaurus Krantz, which was a painting that featured a tiny doodle of a dinosaur by a friend of mine called Richard Krantz. He was really insecure about those sort of doodles and works, but I thought it was really nice. I used the work to showcase the drawing - to put my ego to the side, but also make use of my own ego. The work usually confuses people, because it is what it is. It’s just an enlarged piece of paper of a dinosaur.
Dinnis van Dijken, Dinnisaurus Krantz II, 2017
The work that caused the biggest riots at Art Noord was a painting I did of my favorite comic ever, a one-panel of Calvin and Hobbes. It’s very serious and existential, and very a lot of things at the same time that I really love. Those are qualities that I appreciate in art. I enlarged the panel as an ode to the comic, which weaves in existential dread in a very light manner.
This one person got extremely offended by that art work. They caused such a fuss that all sorts of people and the director were called in, and that they wanted the painting to be removed. They declared that it was violating copyright laws and all that sort of stuff. That’s a reaction I get quite a lot, which I find weird, because it’s usually very innocent, simple things, but it seems to kick against a certain set of romantic beliefs that people still seem to have very strongly. And I like to shake that romantic* bit out.
MT: A lot of your painting practice seems to be informed by a post-conceptual way of working. With that, you join what I see as an aesthetic turn that decenters bodily skill and “excellence”, in the same way that postmodern dance replaced the ballerina. I have the feeling, since (post)-conceptual practices are less focused on excellent bodily “performance”, they leave more space for ways of being / knowing that fall outside of compulsory able-bodiedness. To investigate this, I would like to bring forward Zoe Belinsky’s idea of the “I cannot” as a universal phenomenological experience. I cite:
Zoe Belinsky, Transgender and Disabled Bodies: Between Pain and the Imaginary, in Transgender Marxism, Jules Joanne Gleeson, and Elle O’Rourke, Pluto Press, 2021
DvD: A lot of this relates to the way I set up my practice. I paint in black and white a lot, because that way I can make a painting really quick. Not because it’s necessarily easy to do, like it takes some skill to get it done to a high quality in one go. But it’s an easy way if you only have one color. People get very annoyed over that because it strips away… It looks like a silkscreen, which has the idea of something quickly done. It takes away the labor of making art, which is so romantic: that someone worked on a painting for a year, and is a true artist.
MT: I think that relates a lot to a later part in Belinsky’s text, where they form a comparison to Jasbir Puar’s notion of Debility. Belinsky talks about the difficulties of “fully” working as a disabled person:
ibid
DvD: Lately, what I’ve been trying to do is involving a lot of personal stuff into the professional stuff, like the espresso machine I bought for my studio. I don’t see the professional art environment as suited for disabled people at all. It requires so much from a creative worker. It’s not really a feasible thing to do for disabled people. Many times you just don’t have the time and capabilities. Buying a coffee machine for myself is one way of shaping the art conditions in such a way that I could have some of that intact.
MT: I cite Belinsky further:
ibid
DvD: Why did you select these quotes as related to my art practice?
MT: I’m interested in the move away from physical skill in (post)conceptualism, and I want to explore-
DvD: Is my work (post)conceptual?
MT: I think so, cause it’s not rooted in physical skill
DvD: Isn’t it?
MT: I think a lot of audience doesn’t appreciate the work for the execution, which is an important part of it, as a carrier, but most of the works are carriers of ideas. You seem to use the medium of painting as a way of thinking through things, rather than focusing on the act of constructing an image itself. As you mentioned in an earlier conversation, painting a picture is similar to writing a text for you - just a different mode of thinking.
DvD: I very much agree with that. It’s also nice to hear someone else frame it, because I‘m tired and critical thinking takes lots of energy.
MT: I think there is a friction and a productive zone, by comparing critiques like “my child can do that” on conceptual art, with neoliberal views on disability because I think there’s some kind of overlap which hasn’t been fully made explicit. I want to look into Belinsky’s critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the “I Can”.
ibid
DvD: That makes me think about my graduation work at Konstfack. I showed a series of paintings that were 220 to 120 wide, and all used different strategies to come to a certain image. They all played around the essence of time and labor and bodies. A lot of people were very taken aback by those paintings, and felt like they were presented with something dominant. People felt intimidated by the works that I presented there: that they couldn’t win; that there wasn’t any space for them to be there without me; that I was being very alpha-masculine in that space. I thought this was really peculiar, because for me it was all actually about vulnerability and about existential things and stuff that was way softer. But the visual language had something that is more of an able bodied male that was very dominant, big things and stuff. And I thought it was weird that the most criticism I heard was that it was so dominating and overwhelming.
Dinnis van Dijken, CAN I WIN? A TALE OF HARD CODED ROMANCE, 2017
MT: How do you look back on that?
DvD: I still don’t fully understand it. I mean, I do, because I think it’s also kind of reflective of the way I am or something. The aesthetic is also a convenient way to work. It makes me really calm, because it makes the concept shine, and it allows me to think very clearly. I find that there’s a lot of white noise in painting, like when an able-bodied person goes out and does all this ballet stuff. I find that really distracting. And it doesn’t get to the core of the subject.
MT: In this context, I’m interested in your opinion on Shannon Finnegan’s work. They make a lot of work about/from accessibility. I would like to start with this “self-portrait”.
Shannon Finnegan, Self-Portrait, 2016-2018
DvD: Aesthetically, that’s a strategy I use a lot, in the sense that it’s words on a thing which makes a painting or a visual thing. I don’t really like the aesthetics of it, it’s so soft, you know, the squiggly blue bits on the background. That’s like so much work and labor. It’s very strenuous. Pencil drawings are very tedious. I wouldn’t do that. I would get a brush that’s 30 centimeters wide, and be way more effective, and it would look tighter than this. I don’t like the fuzziness of it: it softens the message down a bit for me. Whereas with me I like it to be very hard and clear.
MT: And how about this clock, which is more graphic and hard-edge?
Shannon Finnegan, Have you ever fallen in love with a clock?, 2021
DvD: Aesthetic-wise, I like it. I also like using black and white, cause it’s kind of a faux pas. When straight white males put together anything, it’s just black and white or chrome. There’s no actual character behind it, in the sense that they haven’t made a choice in what color they like and that sort of stuff. *points to really basic smartphone in black phone case* So I also mean like, this is my phone. It’s a lack of character, but sometimes I find it nice because you’re so tired and stuff. You just don’t want to fiddle with everything that makes everything complicated.
Shannon Finnegan, The only thing I like about stairs is that they can be used as a place to sit in a pinch, 2021
I do like the stairs a lot. I have all sorts of problems because I have two diseases. One of them is really affecting me in the sense that I’m physically uncomfortable all the time. My back has grown in weird ways, so I get a lot of back pain. A lot of museum benches don’t have back support, and that’s really fucking annoying, because sometimes we want to see an art piece for a very long time, but it gives me back pain. And I use stairs quite a lot to sit on, so that makes me really happy. In the work you showed at het resort, It was the first work where I ever got to lay down. I normally get really stressed, but I had a certain amount of minutes for myself which made me really calm. It was the first time that I actually felt comfortable to lie and watch the piece. This is also sort of what I’m trying to integrate. I was thinking that I would just bring my corner sofa into the exhibition, so that many people could just be extremely comfortable there, with me included, and just be selfish about it.
MT: So you recently presented a performance at WEP, as part of ARCADE, the art criticism platform you’re part of. You showed your new coffee machine, talked about making coffee, wealth and artists’ position in society. Could you tell more about this performance?
DvD: I graduated from Minerva in 2014. Ever since, it’s always been like struggling, always working with limited space and limited comfort. Especially in the North, this idea is integrated into our mindset, because it appeals to that sort of romanticism and pragmatism at the same time. And I kind of got annoyed by it. And so I decided to make everything as comfortable as I can, even if that would mean I would have to compensate on other things. So I moved a sofa into my studio, which takes half of my studio, but I think it’s worth it. And the coffee machine - it’s a luxury I haven’t seen in any studio in the North of the Netherlands, even though I’ve interviewed over 60 contemporary artists working here. This just baffled me. That was a catalyst for me to start thinking about comfort, about underpaid artists and quality of life. What counts as business expenses? If I would include a coffee machine in my Kunstraad or Mondriaan proposal, I’m really sure they would reject it because they don’t find it essential. That art piece was just a way for me to open up about it and present it in a personal way. I like to be giving, to give stuff to people. If someone were to tap my shoulder and say “Hey, I want a coffee”, that was my prompt to make them a coffee no matter where I was in my performance. Coffee for me is very important because without it I’m usually too tired to formulate a single sentence or to understand what someone would
be saying.
MT: ARCADE member Maartje Terpstra, who performed before you, said it was boring. I said it was crip mundanity. What do you think?
DvD: I don’t care if it’s boring or not, it’s not about entertainment. Maartje and I really differ on opinion on this piece, because I also used it to make fun of myself and all of the millennials. Coffee is such a standard thing for straight white men in their thirties to have and to do and to dedicate their disposable income and life to, their entire Instagram or something. Maartje hates that, for good reason. I think it was kind of meant to be boring. Maartje’s performance was on a really high energy, playing with aggression and anger, which was very real. And I wanted to provide an opposite and calm in that.
MT: I think the work, and your practice at large, through its existential mundanity, offers critical responses to hegemonic gazes and ideas about disability. And I kind of want to draw this triad of three prevalent models of understanding disability, which your works are at odds with.
At first we have the Supercrip, characterized as disabled people “overcoming” their disabilities by learning to drive, having romantic relationships or engaging in sports. As Eli Clare notes, they reinforce the superiority of the nondisabled body and mind [and] turn individual disabled people, who are simply leading their lives, into symbols of inspiration.* Specifically I want to point attention to the supercrips who exceed extremely high expectations: disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention**, as Alison Kafer describes.
This idea of the supercrip is a kind of extension of the medical model of disability, most succinctly summarised by Arthur W. Frank:
Because of this medical model, Eli Clare mentions, there is no focus on the conditions that make it so difficult for people with Down syndrome to have romantic partners, for blind people to have adventures, for disabled kids to play sports. I don’t mean medical conditions. I mean material, social, legal conditions. I mean lack of access, lack of employment, lack of education, lack of personal attendant services. I mean stereotypes and attitudes. I mean oppression. The dominant story about disability should be about ableism, not the inspirational supercrip crap, the believe-it-or-not disability story.****
Lastly, both of these are placed in an economic model. As described by Ellen Samuels in their essay Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time:
* Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, Duke University Press, 1999
** Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, Indiana University Press, 2013
*** Arthur W Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, The University of Chicago Press, 1997
**** Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, Duke University Press, 1999
***** Ellen Samuels, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, in Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37 No. 3, 2017
How do you relate to these different frameworks? Could you expand on the role of the mundane and the daily in your practice? You have these recipes, you play games with your loved ones, you have your coffee machine: I see them as little peeks into your daily life as well. In terms of narratives around disability, I think it challenges all three of these narratives, like just being at home and being comfortable and cooking or enjoying coffee.
DvD: I find it so weird all the time because, especially as a disabled person, you’re not allowed to enjoy life as much as you would. People get very upset if you’re actually living a comfortable life. If someone gets the Wajong or something, manages to do very well financially, surrounds themselves with nice things, and has a nice home, thefirst reaction you get is that it’s not fair. As a disabled person, it’s extra hard to create a very nice domestic situation. So for me, this is something I try to defend as much as possible. Having a nice home is a provocative thing as a disabled person, I don’t know why that is.
I don’t want to pat myself on the back or something, but it’s a clever way to work. I’m really restricted in time and in labor, so the best thing I can do is to overlap these things as nicely as possible. I don’t want my art to just be my life up for examination. Influencers sometimes overly exploit their lives for example, so that it becomes super professional, you know, that there’s no separation. But sometimes things like developing bread suddenly become something that can aid me in my professional work as an artist. All of these things suddenly become extra effective. I revel in it. I just like boring, and normcore, all these sort of self-indulgent things as well.
MT: I’d like to take a look at some images from the exhibition Hintertür (2021) by Carolyn Lazard at Kunstverein Braunschweig. Part of the exhibition took the form of very pragmatic spatial interventions, like the installation of a ramp, entry signs and a stone that keeps the door open. I’m interested in how these works conflate the accommodation and comfort of self and others with the artistic gestures of the artist in the space, similar to the interventions you describe.
Carolyn Lazard, Remise signs, 2021
Carolyn Lazard, Remise stone (Tuesday-Sunday 11 am-5pm, Thursday 11 am-8pm), 2021
Carolyn Lazard, Remise ramp, 2021
DvD: I just love these works because I love that sense of pragmatism. Using art to make something happen that is positive for everyone, while also developing new artistic practices at the same time. It’s like just a win win win win win situation and that is just so nice. It feels so simple, generous and clever. A lot of art, especially painting, is all about ego, and I don’t like that. So I appreciate it when people find ways within their art to help other people. All this self and self-centered stuff is really annoying to read and see.
MT: What do you think about this other work by Carolyn Lazard, CRIP TIME?
DvD: I don’t know about that. I don’t relate to it so much, because I don’t ingest that many pills. I eat one calcium tablet per day, and it’s not particularly like my world is going to come crashing down if I don’t eat it, which happens regularly. It actually bothers me, because pills are one of the most stereotypical ways that people see disability or illness. Whereas usually, it’s mostly other things. Being disabled is so much more complicated than organizing your pills. I break bones all the time right? So I’ve broken my leg. And even old people refuse to get up for me on the bus. And I actually fell on the bus because like the bus drives away already because you’re supposed to sit down quickly as they’re supposed to do other things. It’s a different thing.
MT: Can you tell us what’s currently the idea for the show?
DvD: I have made about six new paintings, most of which are going to be there. The recipe paintings are going to be there for sure. I made a painting of a jelly that I’ll mount on a SONOS speaker from Ikea. I took the thing off, prepped it with gesso, and painted it. It’s nicely mundane, you know? I don’t know if it’s weird, but I struggle with my life choices sometimes, because on the one side I’m an educated white male that could’ve studied medicine or something. A friend of mine is a software engineer. It generates quite some wealth. They’ve bought a house of half a million or something. These sort of things sometimes enter my mind. I look quite healthy-ish and normal, you don’t see that I’m disabled. I would love to be normal. It’s a longing, and this SONOS speaker is a way to address that. On the speaker, I’ve painted a jelly with a ball inside of it. This comes from Jello theory, which is a way to relief anxiety about flying. A lot of this show is about common existential fears of death. I’ve been confronted with death so many times, and it’s sometimes still in the back of my head, and it’s interwoven with everyday life. And that’s why I find it nice to mix and match supernormality with existentialism. Baking bread is a way to raise my quality of life, but it’s also just a hobby which makes me calm. If I’m really stressed, I bake bread and that’s just a way for me to really calm down because you can’t rush it. So the whole show is sort of a mismatch, a mix of very light and very serious things, in a language which is as light as possible.
MT: In the context of this incongruous conglomerate of existential threat, longing for normalcy and being excluded, I have to think of the term Dis/humanism, as popularized by Daniel Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole. In their essay Becoming dishuman, they share that [dis/human studies] simultaneously acknowledges the possibilities offered by disability to trouble, reshape and re-fashion the human (crip ambitions) while at the same time asserting disabled people’s humanity (normative desires). Thinking about this brought me to an entry in the Encyclopedia of Disability on “the good life”, which might be interesting to discuss?
The authors were too exhausted to finish transcribing and processing
the rest of this conversation. Maybe next time they will have energy again.
ADDENDUM: ON THE RECIPE PAINTINGS
DvD: Well, it started from the fact that I really wanted to bring art into my life, to bring art as close to life as possible. And I mean, it also relates to the fact that a friend of mine sold her first art piece when I was doing my masters and they hung it in the kitchen next to the gas stove. And I think that is very typical: most paintings will hang in unsuitable domestic places. The original thought that I had was: I work in painting and that’s a very dead medium. I thought, how can I use it in new ways? For example, the recipe paintings function in a multitude of ways. First of all, they’re a reflection of me spending time and effort to develop these recipes personally. But on the other hand, they talk about copyright, which is a thing, especially within painting in the way that I paint. Recipes are the only texts that can’t be copyrighted, because they’re meant to be passed down and onwards. Since someone at Art Noord really was going on about copyright, I thought: what could I create, that would be completely free of copyright, that could be appropriated? I thought that if people thought my show sucked, they could at least come away with nice recipes. Which are kind of like a boring thing, but also something which us millennials would apparently get very excited about. I think this mundanity and normality is a provocative thing.
MT: It reminds me of Fluxus scores, which often were partially formed with the aim to dissolve privatized ownership and bring the works into the commons. For example, Alison Knowles’ score Proposition #1: Make a Salad is executed by following the title. I find this fascinating!! You can also execute it in a number of ways. So there is a lot of agency with the viewer to appropriate that and to build something off of that. Is that also something you would like to have people just be like, this sounds really delicious, I’m going to take a picture of it?
DvD: Yeah, that would be great. I think the best response I could ever get is if someone actually made the recipe. That’s the only thing I want the show to be.
MT: I would like to structure this conversation around three recent and current presentations in different (more or less) “white cubes” in the North. So to start off, I would like to ask you about your contribution to Art Noord last year. Could you share a bit about what you presented, and what were the different responses from the audience?
DvD: Well, I don’t know. I presented a mishmash of several art pieces that all came from different years and different levels of experimentation.* One of them was Dinosaurus Krantz, which was a painting that featured a tiny doodle of a dinosaur by a friend of mine called Richard Krantz. He was really insecure about those sort of doodles and works, but I thought it was really nice. I used the work to showcase the drawing - to put my ego to the side, but also make use of my own ego. The work usually confuses people, because it is what it is. It’s just an enlarged piece of paper of a dinosaur.
* DvD: like from the last five years, maybe something like that
Dinnis van Dijken, Dinnisaurus Krantz II, 2017
The work that caused the biggest riots at Art Noord was a painting I did of my favorite comic ever, a one-panel of Calvin and Hobbes. It’s very serious and existential, and very a lot of things at the same time that I really love. Those are qualities that I appreciate in art. I enlarged the panel as an ode to the comic, which weaves in existential dread in a very light manner.
This one person got extremely offended by that art work. They caused such a fuss that all sorts of people and the director were called in, and that they wanted the painting to be removed. They declared that it was violating copyright laws and all that sort of stuff. That’s a reaction I get quite a lot, which I find weird, because it’s usually very innocent, simple things, but it seems to kick against a certain set of romantic beliefs that people still seem to have very strongly. And I like to shake that romantic* bit out.
* DvD: when it comes to art in general, people like to see art that is dense in labor. This is especially true for painting. The “done-quick” vibes my paintings give, it offends people, even though I mostly use it to keep a direct relationship with the subjectmatter at hand. The quickness of the workingprocess helps with that. It is like photography in that sense, in the way that I like to minimise the interference of painting making itself present in relation to the depicted subjectmatter. This way of working avoids that distracting conversation of the brushstroke or “handwriting” of the painter, where people just endlessly talk about the way the material is handled, and sometimes forget about the other functions that painting can have.
MT: A lot of your painting practice seems to be informed by a post-conceptual way of working. With that, you join what I see as an aesthetic turn that decenters bodily skill and “excellence”, in the same way that postmodern dance replaced the ballerina. I have the feeling, since (post)-conceptual practices are less focused on excellent bodily “performance”, they leave more space for ways of being / knowing that fall outside of compulsory able-bodiedness. To investigate this, I would like to bring forward Zoe Belinsky’s idea of the “I cannot” as a universal phenomenological experience. I cite:
The ‘I cannot’ is the jarring, all-too-human awareness of our bodies and their limitations that we all encounter. We must come to terms with the ‘I cannot’, in various forms and degrees, throughout our lives. Pain and the imaginary are the central loci of the transition from the ‘I cannot’ to the ‘I can’. It’s our experience of pain – hunger, thirst, misery – that occasions the body to work, which is a function of the imaginary. We realise plans conceived in the mind in concrete form through physical labour. We imagine a future state of affairs – and by labouring, we make it so. By working, the person experiencing pain overcomes that pain. They create the means to alleviate pain in the future through the products of their labour, whatever they may be.
Zoe Belinsky, Transgender and Disabled Bodies: Between Pain and the Imaginary, in Transgender Marxism, Jules Joanne Gleeson, and Elle O’Rourke, Pluto Press, 2021
DvD: A lot of this relates to the way I set up my practice. I paint in black and white a lot, because that way I can make a painting really quick. Not because it’s necessarily easy to do, like it takes some skill to get it done to a high quality in one go. But it’s an easy way if you only have one color. People get very annoyed over that because it strips away… It looks like a silkscreen, which has the idea of something quickly done. It takes away the labor of making art, which is so romantic: that someone worked on a painting for a year, and is a true artist.
MT: I think that relates a lot to a later part in Belinsky’s text, where they form a comparison to Jasbir Puar’s notion of Debility. Belinsky talks about the difficulties of “fully” working as a disabled person:
We simply do not have the time or resources to care for ourselves, care for our families and those around us, and then return to work with our phenomenological capacities fully intact.
ibid
DvD: Lately, what I’ve been trying to do is involving a lot of personal stuff into the professional stuff, like the espresso machine I bought for my studio. I don’t see the professional art environment as suited for disabled people at all. It requires so much from a creative worker. It’s not really a feasible thing to do for disabled people. Many times you just don’t have the time and capabilities. Buying a coffee machine for myself is one way of shaping the art conditions in such a way that I could have some of that intact.
* DvD: Even though disabled people are usually encouraged to engage or consider the creative practices as a profession by institutions, since there is the idea that it is low effort, it would give them a place to express their “pain” and doesn’t take a lot of “real work. Which comes down to a lack of understanding on many many layers
MT: I cite Belinsky further:
The debilitating conditions faced by both disabled and transgender people brings the ‘I cannot’ to continually invade our phenomenological capacities in otherwise capacitating circumstances. We struggle with reproducing ourselves as labourers in a society that deprives us of the primary means of doing so, and that is continually stripping away its own apparatus for the maintenance of proletarian survival.
ibid
DvD: Why did you select these quotes as related to my art practice?
MT: I’m interested in the move away from physical skill in (post)conceptualism, and I want to explore-
DvD: Is my work (post)conceptual?
MT: I think so, cause it’s not rooted in physical skill
DvD: Isn’t it?
MT: I think a lot of audience doesn’t appreciate the work for the execution, which is an important part of it, as a carrier, but most of the works are carriers of ideas. You seem to use the medium of painting as a way of thinking through things, rather than focusing on the act of constructing an image itself. As you mentioned in an earlier conversation, painting a picture is similar to writing a text for you - just a different mode of thinking.
DvD: I very much agree with that. It’s also nice to hear someone else frame it, because I‘m tired and critical thinking takes lots of energy.
MT: I think there is a friction and a productive zone, by comparing critiques like “my child can do that” on conceptual art, with neoliberal views on disability because I think there’s some kind of overlap which hasn’t been fully made explicit. I want to look into Belinsky’s critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the “I Can”.
The ‘I cannot’ is the primordial phenomenological experience without foundation. The hostile society in which we live constantly threatens to reduce us to this experience. Society constantly forces us to rescue ourselves from falling into the ‘I cannot’ which shatters our expansive capacities and renders us incapable (...) Merleau-Ponty’s ‘I can’ assumes an already capacitated, able-bodied, and adult male subject who can impose his will on the world with confidence. He does not reckon with a subject whose incapacities haunt the perceptual horizon through which they appraise their sense of their own bodily possibilities.
ibid
DvD: That makes me think about my graduation work at Konstfack. I showed a series of paintings that were 220 to 120 wide, and all used different strategies to come to a certain image. They all played around the essence of time and labor and bodies. A lot of people were very taken aback by those paintings, and felt like they were presented with something dominant. People felt intimidated by the works that I presented there: that they couldn’t win; that there wasn’t any space for them to be there without me; that I was being very alpha-masculine in that space. I thought this was really peculiar, because for me it was all actually about vulnerability and about existential things and stuff that was way softer. But the visual language had something that is more of an able bodied male that was very dominant, big things and stuff. And I thought it was weird that the most criticism I heard was that it was so dominating and overwhelming.
Dinnis van Dijken, CAN I WIN? A TALE OF HARD CODED ROMANCE, 2017
MT: How do you look back on that?
DvD: I still don’t fully understand it. I mean, I do, because I think it’s also kind of reflective of the way I am or something. The aesthetic is also a convenient way to work. It makes me really calm, because it makes the concept shine, and it allows me to think very clearly. I find that there’s a lot of white noise in painting, like when an able-bodied person goes out and does all this ballet stuff. I find that really distracting. And it doesn’t get to the core of the subject.
MT: In this context, I’m interested in your opinion on Shannon Finnegan’s work. They make a lot of work about/from accessibility. I would like to start with this “self-portrait”.
Shannon Finnegan, Self-Portrait, 2016-2018
DvD: Aesthetically, that’s a strategy I use a lot, in the sense that it’s words on a thing which makes a painting or a visual thing. I don’t really like the aesthetics of it, it’s so soft, you know, the squiggly blue bits on the background. That’s like so much work and labor. It’s very strenuous. Pencil drawings are very tedious. I wouldn’t do that. I would get a brush that’s 30 centimeters wide, and be way more effective, and it would look tighter than this. I don’t like the fuzziness of it: it softens the message down a bit for me. Whereas with me I like it to be very hard and clear.
MT: And how about this clock, which is more graphic and hard-edge?
Shannon Finnegan, Have you ever fallen in love with a clock?, 2021
DvD: Aesthetic-wise, I like it. I also like using black and white, cause it’s kind of a faux pas. When straight white males put together anything, it’s just black and white or chrome. There’s no actual character behind it, in the sense that they haven’t made a choice in what color they like and that sort of stuff. *points to really basic smartphone in black phone case* So I also mean like, this is my phone. It’s a lack of character, but sometimes I find it nice because you’re so tired and stuff. You just don’t want to fiddle with everything that makes everything complicated.
Shannon Finnegan, The only thing I like about stairs is that they can be used as a place to sit in a pinch, 2021
I do like the stairs a lot. I have all sorts of problems because I have two diseases. One of them is really affecting me in the sense that I’m physically uncomfortable all the time. My back has grown in weird ways, so I get a lot of back pain. A lot of museum benches don’t have back support, and that’s really fucking annoying, because sometimes we want to see an art piece for a very long time, but it gives me back pain. And I use stairs quite a lot to sit on, so that makes me really happy. In the work you showed at het resort, It was the first work where I ever got to lay down. I normally get really stressed, but I had a certain amount of minutes for myself which made me really calm. It was the first time that I actually felt comfortable to lie and watch the piece. This is also sort of what I’m trying to integrate. I was thinking that I would just bring my corner sofa into the exhibition, so that many people could just be extremely comfortable there, with me included, and just be selfish about it.
MT: So you recently presented a performance at WEP, as part of ARCADE, the art criticism platform you’re part of. You showed your new coffee machine, talked about making coffee, wealth and artists’ position in society. Could you tell more about this performance?
DvD: I graduated from Minerva in 2014. Ever since, it’s always been like struggling, always working with limited space and limited comfort. Especially in the North, this idea is integrated into our mindset, because it appeals to that sort of romanticism and pragmatism at the same time. And I kind of got annoyed by it. And so I decided to make everything as comfortable as I can, even if that would mean I would have to compensate on other things. So I moved a sofa into my studio, which takes half of my studio, but I think it’s worth it. And the coffee machine - it’s a luxury I haven’t seen in any studio in the North of the Netherlands, even though I’ve interviewed over 60 contemporary artists working here. This just baffled me. That was a catalyst for me to start thinking about comfort, about underpaid artists and quality of life. What counts as business expenses? If I would include a coffee machine in my Kunstraad or Mondriaan proposal, I’m really sure they would reject it because they don’t find it essential. That art piece was just a way for me to open up about it and present it in a personal way. I like to be giving, to give stuff to people. If someone were to tap my shoulder and say “Hey, I want a coffee”, that was my prompt to make them a coffee no matter where I was in my performance. Coffee for me is very important because without it I’m usually too tired to formulate a single sentence or to understand what someone would
be saying.
MT: ARCADE member Maartje Terpstra, who performed before you, said it was boring. I said it was crip mundanity. What do you think?
DvD: I don’t care if it’s boring or not, it’s not about entertainment. Maartje and I really differ on opinion on this piece, because I also used it to make fun of myself and all of the millennials. Coffee is such a standard thing for straight white men in their thirties to have and to do and to dedicate their disposable income and life to, their entire Instagram or something. Maartje hates that, for good reason. I think it was kind of meant to be boring. Maartje’s performance was on a really high energy, playing with aggression and anger, which was very real. And I wanted to provide an opposite and calm in that.
MT: I think the work, and your practice at large, through its existential mundanity, offers critical responses to hegemonic gazes and ideas about disability. And I kind of want to draw this triad of three prevalent models of understanding disability, which your works are at odds with.
At first we have the Supercrip, characterized as disabled people “overcoming” their disabilities by learning to drive, having romantic relationships or engaging in sports. As Eli Clare notes, they reinforce the superiority of the nondisabled body and mind [and] turn individual disabled people, who are simply leading their lives, into symbols of inspiration.* Specifically I want to point attention to the supercrips who exceed extremely high expectations: disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention**, as Alison Kafer describes.
This idea of the supercrip is a kind of extension of the medical model of disability, most succinctly summarised by Arthur W. Frank:
The [medical] chart becomes the official story of the illness. (...) Ill people tell family and friends versions of what the doctor said (...) illness becomes a circulation of stories, professional and lay, but not all stories are equal. (...) The story of illness that trumps all others in the modern period is the medical narrative. The story told by the physician becomes the one against which others are ultimately judged true or false, useful or not. (...) The physician becomes the spokesperson for the disease, and the ill person’s stories come to depend heavily on repetition of what the physician has said.***
Because of this medical model, Eli Clare mentions, there is no focus on the conditions that make it so difficult for people with Down syndrome to have romantic partners, for blind people to have adventures, for disabled kids to play sports. I don’t mean medical conditions. I mean material, social, legal conditions. I mean lack of access, lack of employment, lack of education, lack of personal attendant services. I mean stereotypes and attitudes. I mean oppression. The dominant story about disability should be about ableism, not the inspirational supercrip crap, the believe-it-or-not disability story.****
Lastly, both of these are placed in an economic model. As described by Ellen Samuels in their essay Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time:
If you work a 9-5, 40-hour-a-week job, what is defined as full-time work in the United States, then (if you’re lucky) you accumulate a certain number of sick days. There is always a strange arithmetic to this process: maybe for every eight hours you work, you accrue one sick hour. Or maybe one for every twenty work hours, or every forty. It’s never a one-to-one ratio: you have to work hard to earn the time to be sick. The assumption, of course, is that we will not be too sick too often.*****
* Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, Duke University Press, 1999
** Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, Indiana University Press, 2013
*** Arthur W Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, The University of Chicago Press, 1997
**** Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, Duke University Press, 1999
***** Ellen Samuels, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, in Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37 No. 3, 2017
How do you relate to these different frameworks? Could you expand on the role of the mundane and the daily in your practice? You have these recipes, you play games with your loved ones, you have your coffee machine: I see them as little peeks into your daily life as well. In terms of narratives around disability, I think it challenges all three of these narratives, like just being at home and being comfortable and cooking or enjoying coffee.
DvD: I find it so weird all the time because, especially as a disabled person, you’re not allowed to enjoy life as much as you would. People get very upset if you’re actually living a comfortable life. If someone gets the Wajong or something, manages to do very well financially, surrounds themselves with nice things, and has a nice home, thefirst reaction you get is that it’s not fair. As a disabled person, it’s extra hard to create a very nice domestic situation. So for me, this is something I try to defend as much as possible. Having a nice home is a provocative thing as a disabled person, I don’t know why that is.
I don’t want to pat myself on the back or something, but it’s a clever way to work. I’m really restricted in time and in labor, so the best thing I can do is to overlap these things as nicely as possible. I don’t want my art to just be my life up for examination. Influencers sometimes overly exploit their lives for example, so that it becomes super professional, you know, that there’s no separation. But sometimes things like developing bread suddenly become something that can aid me in my professional work as an artist. All of these things suddenly become extra effective. I revel in it. I just like boring, and normcore, all these sort of self-indulgent things as well.
MT: I’d like to take a look at some images from the exhibition Hintertür (2021) by Carolyn Lazard at Kunstverein Braunschweig. Part of the exhibition took the form of very pragmatic spatial interventions, like the installation of a ramp, entry signs and a stone that keeps the door open. I’m interested in how these works conflate the accommodation and comfort of self and others with the artistic gestures of the artist in the space, similar to the interventions you describe.
Carolyn Lazard, Remise signs, 2021
Carolyn Lazard, Remise stone (Tuesday-Sunday 11 am-5pm, Thursday 11 am-8pm), 2021
Carolyn Lazard, Remise ramp, 2021
DvD: I just love these works because I love that sense of pragmatism. Using art to make something happen that is positive for everyone, while also developing new artistic practices at the same time. It’s like just a win win win win win situation and that is just so nice. It feels so simple, generous and clever. A lot of art, especially painting, is all about ego, and I don’t like that. So I appreciate it when people find ways within their art to help other people. All this self and self-centered stuff is really annoying to read and see.
MT: What do you think about this other work by Carolyn Lazard, CRIP TIME?
DvD: I don’t know about that. I don’t relate to it so much, because I don’t ingest that many pills. I eat one calcium tablet per day, and it’s not particularly like my world is going to come crashing down if I don’t eat it, which happens regularly. It actually bothers me, because pills are one of the most stereotypical ways that people see disability or illness. Whereas usually, it’s mostly other things. Being disabled is so much more complicated than organizing your pills. I break bones all the time right? So I’ve broken my leg. And even old people refuse to get up for me on the bus. And I actually fell on the bus because like the bus drives away already because you’re supposed to sit down quickly as they’re supposed to do other things. It’s a different thing.
MT: Can you tell us what’s currently the idea for the show?
DvD: I have made about six new paintings, most of which are going to be there. The recipe paintings are going to be there for sure. I made a painting of a jelly that I’ll mount on a SONOS speaker from Ikea. I took the thing off, prepped it with gesso, and painted it. It’s nicely mundane, you know? I don’t know if it’s weird, but I struggle with my life choices sometimes, because on the one side I’m an educated white male that could’ve studied medicine or something. A friend of mine is a software engineer. It generates quite some wealth. They’ve bought a house of half a million or something. These sort of things sometimes enter my mind. I look quite healthy-ish and normal, you don’t see that I’m disabled. I would love to be normal. It’s a longing, and this SONOS speaker is a way to address that. On the speaker, I’ve painted a jelly with a ball inside of it. This comes from Jello theory, which is a way to relief anxiety about flying. A lot of this show is about common existential fears of death. I’ve been confronted with death so many times, and it’s sometimes still in the back of my head, and it’s interwoven with everyday life. And that’s why I find it nice to mix and match supernormality with existentialism. Baking bread is a way to raise my quality of life, but it’s also just a hobby which makes me calm. If I’m really stressed, I bake bread and that’s just a way for me to really calm down because you can’t rush it. So the whole show is sort of a mismatch, a mix of very light and very serious things, in a language which is as light as possible.
MT: In the context of this incongruous conglomerate of existential threat, longing for normalcy and being excluded, I have to think of the term Dis/humanism, as popularized by Daniel Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole. In their essay Becoming dishuman, they share that [dis/human studies] simultaneously acknowledges the possibilities offered by disability to trouble, reshape and re-fashion the human (crip ambitions) while at the same time asserting disabled people’s humanity (normative desires). Thinking about this brought me to an entry in the Encyclopedia of Disability on “the good life”, which might be interesting to discuss?
The authors were too exhausted to finish transcribing and processing
the rest of this conversation. Maybe next time they will have energy again.
ADDENDUM: ON THE RECIPE PAINTINGS
DvD: Well, it started from the fact that I really wanted to bring art into my life, to bring art as close to life as possible. And I mean, it also relates to the fact that a friend of mine sold her first art piece when I was doing my masters and they hung it in the kitchen next to the gas stove. And I think that is very typical: most paintings will hang in unsuitable domestic places. The original thought that I had was: I work in painting and that’s a very dead medium. I thought, how can I use it in new ways? For example, the recipe paintings function in a multitude of ways. First of all, they’re a reflection of me spending time and effort to develop these recipes personally. But on the other hand, they talk about copyright, which is a thing, especially within painting in the way that I paint. Recipes are the only texts that can’t be copyrighted, because they’re meant to be passed down and onwards. Since someone at Art Noord really was going on about copyright, I thought: what could I create, that would be completely free of copyright, that could be appropriated? I thought that if people thought my show sucked, they could at least come away with nice recipes. Which are kind of like a boring thing, but also something which us millennials would apparently get very excited about. I think this mundanity and normality is a provocative thing.
MT: It reminds me of Fluxus scores, which often were partially formed with the aim to dissolve privatized ownership and bring the works into the commons. For example, Alison Knowles’ score Proposition #1: Make a Salad is executed by following the title. I find this fascinating!! You can also execute it in a number of ways. So there is a lot of agency with the viewer to appropriate that and to build something off of that. Is that also something you would like to have people just be like, this sounds really delicious, I’m going to take a picture of it?
DvD: Yeah, that would be great. I think the best response I could ever get is if someone actually made the recipe. That’s the only thing I want the show to be.