Learning from Art - A QUESTION OF PERCEPTION
Interview with Jan van der Veer, visual artist and curator of de Horst Estate in Driebergen, one of de Baak's training facilities.
By Petra Baars Good art is the source of many tales
According to Jan van der Veer, art is a kind of fitness training in seeing and listening, and connecting and relating things.“It exercises and refines perception. The sensual experience of art conveys other knowledge in addition to rational and scientific knowledge. Much of what we see and experience simply cannot be expressed in concepts.” According to van der Veer, there is a persisting tendency to try and pin down the meaning of words, concepts and images in plain English.“Yet a good work of art is the source of many tales because it’s hard to describe exactly what a work of art is about. It’s the mysterious things that force us to think before we speak that enable us to interpret our experiences differently. People should deliberately seek out the contradictions and allow themselves to enjoy free associations and new perspectives, and even the ‘fortunate accidents’ created more by chance than design.”
Autonomy in thinking and acting
With his art and his exhibitions at the Estate, van der Veer aspires to seduce visitors into thinking about the above.“Art enables human conditions to be represented freely and without the pressure of underlying psychosocial, politico-religious, and economic interests. It also gives them shape and meaning. An artist is a relative loner who tries to break loose from conventions. He or she strives to find a different way of thinking and acting that can change a viewer’s perception. This is art’s way of prompting critical awareness. My, possibly romantic, opinion, is that you can learn to experience reality with more nuance and more sensitivity by contemplating art (seeing, listening, and understanding).
Human existence is vast and endless in each and every of its variations.”
Preservation means loss, losing means innovating
A lot of companies sponsor art, but do they learn from it? Does it lead anywhere?“Managers and other professionals may find other contexts important to shift perceptions. Creativity is not autonomous: it springs from a specific context of non-traditional thinking that can range from old to modern art, or simply be a visit to a heart surgeon. It’s about stepping outside your own thought patterns and discovering a new solution. Steering toward innovation. It increases the realization that one and the same thing can be seen in many different ways, and that every idea can be re-thought.”
Inspiration for change
“I try to combine different worlds and language areas. Managers and other professionals work with their company’s tools. Artists work with artistic tools, which they organize and then try to arrange in a hierarchy. Artists have a tradition of trying to break free from conventions and putting them into perspective. They use their creativity to do this. It would be wonderful if corporate professionals could find inspiration in this philosophy of life and work so that cross-fertilization could take place. But these processes take time. Literature has taught me that mankind is a strange combination of sublime characteristics and embarrassing weaknesses. In his struggle with good and bad, beautiful and ugly, pure and impure, true and false, mankind is adamantly searching for truth and meaning. Art is a valid instrument for this. It’s simply a question of time.”
Leading others
“Two things cannot be measured – the universe and the shortsightedness of mankind – said the philosopher Bertrand Russell.‘Themes’ irritate me, although I occasionally participate in theme exhibitions. The first thing I do, though, is throw the objectives to the wind. Contradiction enables you to experience reality differently. I prefer orientation through disorientation - thinking outside of the box ..., which isn’t as easy as it sounds! The leitmotif in my independent work is the poetic context in which I use alienation to give space to the loneliness in humans. Combining the above-mentioned concepts can result in ‘autistic’ inward-looking images. Poetry is my main source of inspiration. I’m not really interested in things as much as I am in the relationships between them. The unsolvable paradox of alienation, metaphors for the things that move us.”
Van der Veen explains that the same things do not apply to the work he does as curator for de Baak at the de Horst Estate and his independent work.“The main reason why people come to a dynamic institution such as de Baak is to follow a training course. In this context, the implementation of art is about creating a learning experience. I look for artistic expressions in artists whose work challenges me to look at it differently. Everyone is free to interpret a work of art as they wish. This is art's way of teaching you how to create a personal repertoire. It is from this personal library that you perceive reality.”
Jan van der Veer (1954) lives and works in Arnhem. His work is regularly exhibited inside and outside of the art scene, and is part of numerous private collections in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and corporate collections including those held by AKZO Nobel Art Foundation, Interpolis, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and OHRA. Jan was/is also involved in a number of different projects. He is curator of the art center De Gele Rijder in Arnhem and co-initiator of the reading cycle “Art is pathetic, art is dead.” During Sonsbeek 2001 and until recently, he was advisor/curator of the Melksalon in Arnhem. His work is represented in the Netherlands by Galerie Goncourt in The Hague.