Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

60 Mark Manders, in The Absence
of Mark Manders, Kunstverein
Hannover, Bergen Kunsthall,
S.M.A.K. Ghent, Kunsthaus Zürich,
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 2007),
p. 53.
61 Ibid., p. 22.
62 Ibid., p. 120.
recessed displays in natural history museums, Dzama’s dioramas are showcases for
Dantesque and Kafkaquese rituals of social ordeal. Dzama’s Pip (2004) is yet another
assemblage, composed of the grotesque figure of a (human) animal, dressed in an elegant
if not pedantic suit of felt and fake fur, wire mash, paper maché, plastic foam and
rubber, and accompanied by drawings and watercolours that apparently represent the
hero’s (bureaucratic) credo (including messages such as “we will disappear” or “lost in
endless time,”, as well as Pip’s biography). Here too, we are in the realm of burlesque,
or on the stage of a marionette theatre, which evokes the memory of high school
performances based upon the haunted house experience of an uneasy, traumatic childhood.
Simultaneously strange and familiar, Dzama’s imagery depicts the world upside
down, on the constant desperate search for its own renewal and recovery. His hyperlong
drawing in three sections, Ulysses, (2009) as well as series of collages (2008-
2009) are diaries of civilization, inhabited by infamous ghosts of former eras and
shadow-like characters from old silent movies, engaged in the perverse practices of
violence and pornography. This neodadaist theatrics of acute anxiety is the dehumanized
world of today – tormented by wars and terrors, suffering of moral decay and ethical
collapse. Dzama’s anti-glamorous heroes: male or female warriors, overexposing
their white weapons or self-made guns, commedia dell’arte-like victims of atrocities
and cruelties with their mutilated or dismembered bodies and injured psychos, hopeless
terrorists and impotent opressors, always inhabiting the in-between of animal
and human worlds - are ridiculous and miserable actors of performance of power which
turns into spectacle of horror. In his devastating, perhaps too cynical, investigations of
contemporary evil, Dzama orchestrates a storyboard of society’s failure to empathise.
He depicts the precarious world of interrupted intimacy and violated innocence. Values
are cancelled, virtues are invalid and the sacred is absent. But – no fear! We are in the
pleasure dome of an adult dreamscape. Wake up!
The sculptural and installative work of the Dutch artist, Mark Manders is an anatomy
of self and a pursuit of the absence of the artist who defines himself as follows: “The
artist Mark Manders is a fictional person. He is a character who lives in a logically
designed and constructed world, which consists of thoughts that are congealed at
their moment of greatest intensity. It is someone who disappears into his actions. He
lives in a building that he continually abandons; the building is uninhabited, in fact.”60
As the poetic self-portrait of an individual, torn by a desire to belong and an urge to
escape the confines of communal idioms and a landscape of an inner world, Manders’
poignant oeuvre reflects humanity in a state of profound fragmentation, on the
threshold of a possible and necessary new beginning. A séance of psychotic catharsis,
it carries the promise of a rejuvenated subject, freed of the cocoon of social routine,
constructing its corporeal and mental architecture as a “monument in ruins” and a
lament over civilization’s collapse. “After all, what am I? A human being who unfolds
into a horrifying amount of language and material by means of very precise conceptual
constructions,”61 confesses the author of Self-portrait as a Building an on-going conceptual
project, a sort of manifesto of a life-time, conducted by Manders since 1986,
initialy planned as an oeuvre of literature, eventually focused on the spatial unfolding
of the artist’s psychological self. Obsessively pursued as the investigation of a thought
and the process of thinking, it develops an idea of selfhood as an architecture and
a composition in space. The building is the prototype of the self in process, a living
organism, a laborartory of identity production: “The building is like a gigantic set
frozen in time with lots of rooms that all seem as if they have just been abandoned
(…) Like an encyclopedia, the building is always ready, even though it keeps on changing
and growing or shrinking.”62 Andrea Wiarda identifies Manders’ Self-portrait as a
Building as “the mythical container of his attempt to understand his position in the