Jeroen van Dooren

In my VIVA examination exhibition I curated three of my fictional characters (so called heteronyms) namely Fred Robeson, Tom Singer and Kees van Lankveld. I wanted to explore the relations between the three fictional characters and to create narratives between them. The works are connected via three portraits of me pretending to be them. They are drawn in different styles and expressions relating to their characters. The exhibition was accompanied a ten minute performance as the three characters; Fred, Tom and Kees.

Fred Robeson has three works. The tree trunk, concrete canvas and steel sculpture and the two images of landscapes intertwined with architectural elements. The two images are image transfers based on giclée prints with acrylics and are transferred onto concrete canvas.

Tom Singer has two works. The chalkboard with chalk stating Am I wasting my time? And the little man with two chairs pointing at the text. The man is made of expanding foam, steel, fabric and plaster. The two chairs are made of steel.

Kees van Lankveld has one work consisting out of six Framed A3 prints.

In We Are Not Ourselves All of the Time and We Are Not All of Ourselves at Any Time I started experimenting with curating multiple characters in one performance. The scripted performance took thirty minutes and had a total of five performers in it. The characters Kees van Lankveld, Will Finch and Pasithea Knijnt participated. The performance was timed around Kees van Lankveld’s performance. Kees’s performance was me and him together. It was moving from him (Kees) to me (Jeroen) and back. The autobiographical stories based on my (Jeroen) own experiences were fictionalised into Kees’s biography. They were my (Jeroen) voice telling Kees’s life. On each side of the room one of Kees van Lankveld’s prints dealing with his obsession of counting cars hung from the ceiling. The performance took place in the space between the 2 prints.

​​​​​​​This performance was not only designed to deal with the curating of different performers it was also dealing with the expressions of the heteronyms' state of minds. The aim was to bring the work from a personal consideration to something understood as a more general or political interpretation.

Kees played by Jeroen van Dooren, told five biographical short stories in which he talked about his anxieties and mental health problems. He discussed what triggered these and how they influenced his life. Each short story was followed by orating forty-nine shades of a certain colour. He used these colours to organise the cars he counted whilst walking to work. The colours are divided into the red shades he counted on Mondays, the orange shades he counted on Tuesdays, the yellow shades he counted on Wednesdays, the green shades he counted on Thursdays and the blue shades he counted on Fridays. The two different narratives came together in the final biographical story. The prints and the articulation of colours were indirect ways of introducing Kees. 

Three performers, Hana Hallauer, Lisa Chang Lee and Nelson Holtz, were wearing masks and played a group of rabbits in order to embody the character of Pasithea Knijnt. The rabbits represent the constant struggle to try and create some kind of unity and silence in my mind. This group of rabbits exists in the space between a figment of my imagination and a hallucination. During the performance the three rabbits danced or jumped around or followed Kees.

Pasithea Knijnt in this performance was also a more general feel of distraction every one of us feel from day to day. Emails, social media, the news and anything on the internet are interrupting our daily lives more and more. Pasithea represented this and interrupted Kees’s performance. The performers came onto the stage at different times increasing the interruption to Kees and crowding the performance area. This to symbolise the increasing distractions in our lives.

The final heteronym in this performance was Will Finch, played by Jack Pryor. It was a five-minute long monologue based on an adaptation of part of the script of the film Network (1976). He started the performance as a member of the audience, this to make the audience feel they were part of the performance. The increasingly crowded stage added to the feeling of being overwhelmed. Will’s monologue dealt with our tendency to avoid contact with each other in public. Our hiding device called phone, help us to accomplish this. His speech became louder and louder towards the end. During this performance Kees and Pasithea left the stage leaving Will and his shouting, representing our mobile devices shouting for our attention, by themselves.

These images are taken at the exhibition Five Trillian Times at the China Academy of Art Hangzhou Museum curated by Lisa Chang Lee. It was part of the 2nd International Printmaking Triennial in 2018.

Kees van Lankveld character sketch

Kees is the obsessive me, from stepping on a crunchy leaf, which is fun to do but can become obsessive when you feel the need to step on every crunchy leaf, to counting everything or ordering everything I see. Kees is there when I deal with a lot of anxiety, and the counting or doing something in an obsessive way relaxes me, although it can be frustrating as well. I came up with his character and the counted cars as a result of counting and organising M&Ms into colours before eating them.

Kees van Lankveld loves regularity and control, and has a dry sense of humour. He works as an accountant at a firm in Erp, where he is very appreciated by his colleagues for his punctuality and accuracy. Kees leads a normal social life, has friends, occasionally goes to the pub with colleagues and visits his parents regularly. He engages in sports twice a week, and particularly enjoys swimming laps in the local pool. He collects stamps and stores and documents bits and pieces of his life, much like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Elijah Wood in the film Everything is Illuminated. Kees is a bit of an organised hoarder. He suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He is frustrated by it but it does help him in his job and there are some parts of the condition that he secretly likes. He loves to collect random data and organises this in spreadsheets.

In 2006, Kees decided to count cars. He determined the parameters beforehand and picked 249 different colours, different shades of five colours: red, orange, yellow, green and blue. To make the project manageable he chose to count the red shades on Mondays, the orange shades on Tuesday, the yellow shades on Wednesdays, the green shades on Thursdays and the blue shades on Fridays. In 2010 he started making different works showing the data he had collected from counting cars. 

Kees started with five works, which were the 49 different shades per colour. These works were the schedules of the next series of works. The first schedules were ordered alphabetically. The five different colours, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green and Blue, each have 49 different shades. These five schedules were ordered alphabetically. The colours were ordered alphabetically in weeks 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, 31, 36, 41, 46 and 51. That is how they are ordered. 

The name van Lankveld comes from my paternal grandmother’s maiden name.

The works in this container are made during a residency at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago de Chile. I worked and was in character as my heteronym Fred Robeson. The images are taken during my travels in The Netherlands, Spain and mostly Chile. One of my goals was to experiment with transferring images onto different materials.

Fred Robeson character sketch

Fred is loosely based on the characters Sol Robeson, a mathematician in the film Pi[1] and Fred Madison, a saxophonist in the film Lost Highway.[2] Fred Robeson is a former architect who was born in Pahrump in 1970. While working as an architect he mostly drew houses or parts of buildings. His inspirations are Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Liebeskind and Deconstructionism. He likes to work with glass, steel and concrete. In his free time, he visits exhibitions, concerts and movies. He is a welcoming and entertaining guest at the many parties he goes to. He is passionate, sophisticated, intelligent, restless, and a workaholic. He is inseparable from his daughter Lana. Fred Robeson started making art because, in addition to architecture, he was looking for a form in which his imagination, detached from the functionality and rules and regulations within architecture, could flourish. Fred wants to make art that appeals to many people and has a certain beauty.

Fred’s work focuses on the impact the economic and political climate has on our urban and natural surroundings. Cities and nature expand and shrink as a result of war, natural disasters and loss of cultures. More and more, though, cities and nature are being treated as currency in an explosive market for natural resources or real estate value, and their inhabitants are being disregarded. Refugee camps are turning into new (temporary) cities, cities are being gentrified and nature is still disappearing at an alarming rate. The fragmentary architectural and natural elements in the work refer to the different transformations our cities and environments are constantly undergoing – building, unbuilding and rebuilding our realm, creating a gentrified world. The works represent possible pasts or possible futures. Fred is slowly bringing sculptural elements into his work, often referring to nature or the materials he used in his work as an architect.

Fred’s work is closely related to where I go and what I do. His work represents landscapes and cityscapes of places where we have been: he is in the fictional realm; I am in the real world. I created him as a person or artist I would like to be. I like the idea of the romantic painter – painting every day in your studio and improving and experimenting through the making of paintings, images. I created his practice doing that. His work emerges through the process of making and not through a preconceived concept. At the same time, he likes the way I work and in particular, the constant development of new ideas and concepts. In a way Fred represents this duality of struggling with the idea of the romantic artist and the conceptual artist. Fred is me, but from his perspective.

[1] Pi, dir. Darren Aronofsky (New York City: Protozoa Pictures, 1998)

[2] David Lynch, Lost Highway (October films, 1997).

This work was and still is a reaction to the refugee crisis. This comes to expression in the materiality of the work. The work looks like a rudimentary tent with soft curves this to express the temporality of living as a refugee. The tent is in fact made of concrete canvas with a rebar (steel) structure which gives it a permanent character referring to the refugee crisis being a more permanent settlement.

Fred Robeson character sketch

Fred is loosely based on the characters Sol Robeson, a mathematician in the film Pi[1] and Fred Madison, a saxophonist in the film Lost Highway.[2] Fred Robeson is a former architect who was born in Pahrump in 1970. While working as an architect he mostly drew houses or parts of buildings. His inspirations are Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Liebeskind and Deconstructionism. He likes to work with glass, steel and concrete. In his free time, he visits exhibitions, concerts and movies. He is a welcoming and entertaining guest at the many parties he goes to. He is passionate, sophisticated, intelligent, restless, and a workaholic. He is inseparable from his daughter Lana. Fred Robeson started making art because, in addition to architecture, he was looking for a form in which his imagination, detached from the functionality and rules and regulations within architecture, could flourish. Fred wants to make art that appeals to many people and has a certain beauty.

Fred’s work focuses on the impact the economic and political climate has on our urban and natural surroundings. Cities and nature expand and shrink as a result of war, natural disasters and loss of cultures. More and more, though, cities and nature are being treated as currency in an explosive market for natural resources or real estate value, and their inhabitants are disregarded. Refugee camps are turning into new (temporary) cities, cities are being gentrified and nature is still disappearing at an alarming rate. The fragmentary architectural and natural elements in the work refer to the different transformations our cities and environments are constantly undergoing – building, unbuilding and rebuilding our realm, creating a gentrified world. The works represent possible pasts or possible futures. Fred is slowly bringing sculptural elements into his work, often referring to nature or the materials he used in his work as an architect.

Fred’s work is closely related to where I go and what I do. His work represents landscapes and cityscapes of places where we have been: he is in the fictional realm; I am in the real world. I created him as a person or artist I would like to be. I like the idea of the romantic painter – painting every day in your studio and improving and experimenting through the making of paintings, images. I created his practice doing that. His work emerges through the process of making and not through a preconceived concept. At the same time, he likes the way I work and in particular, the constant development of new ideas and concepts. In a way Fred represents this duality of struggling with the idea of the romantic artist and the conceptual artist. Fred is me, but from his perspective.

[1] Pi, dir. Darren Aronofsky (New York City: Protozoa Pictures, 1998)

[2] David Lynch, Lost Highway (October films, 1997).

Some experiments with different materials to print on. Flatbed prints on brushed aluminium and image transfer on different substrates.

Fred Robeson character sketch

Fred is loosely based on the characters Sol Robeson, a mathematician in the film Pi[1] and Fred Madison, a saxophonist in the film Lost Highway.[2] Fred Robeson is a former architect who was born in Pahrump in 1970. While working as an architect he mostly drew houses or parts of buildings. His inspirations are Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Liebeskind and Deconstructionism. He likes to work with glass, steel and concrete. In his free time, he visits exhibitions, concerts and movies. He is a welcoming and entertaining guest at the many parties he goes to. He is passionate, sophisticated, intelligent, restless, and a workaholic. He is inseparable from his daughter Lana. Fred Robeson started making art because, in addition to architecture, he was looking for a form in which his imagination, detached from the functionality and rules and regulations within architecture, could flourish. Fred wants to make art that appeals to many people and has a certain beauty.

Fred’s work focuses on the impact the economic and political climate has on our urban and natural surroundings. Cities and nature expand and shrink as a result of war, natural disasters and loss of cultures. More and more, though, cities and nature are being treated as currency in an explosive market for natural resources or real estate value, and their inhabitants are disregarded. Refugee camps are turning into new (temporary) cities, cities are being gentrified and nature is still disappearing at an alarming rate. The fragmentary architectural and natural elements in the work refer to the different transformations our cities and environments are constantly undergoing – building, unbuilding and rebuilding our realm, creating a gentrified world. The works represent possible pasts or possible futures. Fred is slowly bringing sculptural elements into his work, often referring to nature or the materials he used in his work as an architect.

Fred’s work is closely related to where I go and what I do. His work represents landscapes and cityscapes of places where we have been: he is in the fictional realm; I am in the real world. I created him as a person or artist I would like to be. I like the idea of the romantic painter – painting every day in your studio and improving and experimenting through the making of paintings, images. I created his practice doing that. His work emerges through the process of making and not through a preconceived concept. At the same time, he likes the way I work and in particular, the constant development of new ideas and concepts. In a way Fred represents this duality of struggling with the idea of the romantic artist and the conceptual artist. Fred is me, but from his perspective.

[1] Pi, dir. Darren Aronofsky (New York City: Protozoa Pictures, 1998)

[2] David Lynch, Lost Highway (October films, 1997).

Performance in Sensei Gallery

In Presentation Alphabetical Order, a six-hour performance about Kees van Lankveld, I wanted to introduce biographical elements, talk about his work and show his obsessive behaviour. Kees starts out by describing who he is, where he was born, where he works. The performance moves on by explaining that he had a few failed attempts to count things whilst walking to work: he tried to count cats and birds, for example. He explained why they failed. Subsequently he explained how he came up with his idea for the work Counting Cars (2010-2019). The remaining four hours involves a repetitive performance in which he repeats a version of the following:

Week 16

17^th of April 2006, it was a nice spring day

I left at one to eight and I arrived at thirty-one past eight at work

I counted one chestnut-coloured car[1]

This was repeated 12,740 times (fifty-two weeks times two-hundred and forty five colours). He interacted with the audience in the first two hours to make sure everyone understood his project. From time to time these interactions became conversations about obsessions. Although it was advertised as being a performance by one of my – Jeroen van Dooren’s – fictional characters, the conversation was being held in our reality. In Continuation of idée fixe; 17^th of April 2006 Kees van Lankveld’s repetitive thinking came to expression as a result of the confidence he got from talking to audience members dealing with similar problems. This feeling of belonging to a certain group made him decide to start using repetitious forms in his writing.

[1] Kees had explained the whole project before he started the repetitive part of the performance. This meant the audience knew that because Alizarin Crimson is a red shade it was counted on Mondays.

Fred Robeson explains why he invented Jeroen van Dooren

Fred Robeson’s life and mine move in similar directions. Of all of the heteronyms, Fred and I are the most connected. He goes where I go, and vice versa. In the work Fred Robeson (2017), I wanted to emphasize this blending of our lives. Robeson’s work is about the constant flux of the environment we live in. He makes mostly land- and cityscapes. I made the video performance Fred Robeson, in which he explains that he is in fact the real person, and I am the heteronym. Robeson, who is an architect, discloses that he invented Jeroen van Dooren so that he could work under different guises and explore different art forms which at the time might not have been accepted by his former employers.

With this work I am looking into how I can communicate with the heteronyms. This is important to my research and to find a solution for the gap between reality and fiction, between me and them. The work Fred Robeson is doing exactly that. Fred is turning Jeroen into a heteronym. This transformation is a role created by a heteronym for me, Jeroen van Dooren. The namesake is in fact an orthonym created by me through Fred Robeson. It is this fictionalisation of me that gives me the ability to speak with the heteronyms in the same realm as them. This role I am playing is the artist me, the artist Jeroen van Dooren.

I am investigating Mikhail Bakhtin’s Toward a Philosophy of the Act. where he divided the human psyche into three components: I-for-myself, I-for-the-other, and other-for-me. In this theory I found the divide between the others and me and why they are me and not me at the same time. I am playing with the I-for-the-other. I am imagining how someone can potentially only see one of my masks, one part of my persona. This one specific mask becomes a heteronym. It is me because it is a part of me and not me at the same time because it is not a complete me. It is not my complete set of masks. The performance is an investigation into the relationship between me and the others. Fred is a possible I-for-the-other. A possible artist I could be. The work investigates what role I play as an artist in relation to the heteronyms.

Work in progress of my fictional character Kees van Lankveld explaining his project Alphabetical Order Counting Cars. It is a project that I started 2 years ago. I will take fragments over the coming years adding to the project culminating in a half an hour fictional documentary about his life and work.