Yet, throughout the series, another type of ‘sculpture’ provides the staging with a twist. Included among the photographs of the eroded and the deposited desert forms are portrayals of lumpy, accumulated, abounding objects that are clearly of an artificial nature. The entire process of their development may not have been controlled—they appear to be too unstructured for this. But because something protrudes here and there—photographs of a pair of eyes or a hand, or part of an arm—it is clear that chance has been a deliberate choice, an act. Despite this, they have a dubious character as art objects. With the introduction of some paint and pasted-on photographs, the immensely whimsical quality of the forms from the desert remains unattainable to the sculptures; but for that matter, it is uncertain whether that was their intent. Their character is also contradicted by their casual placement on a bookshelf, causing them to lead an existence that hovers between the status of an improvised bookend and a forgotten souvenir.
The last element in this series is a peculiar collection of things. Its basis consists of a Plexiglas photo cube, one side showing a vacation snapshot and the top bearing a few nameless objects, perhaps memories of a trip to a distant country. Only this small construction has been photographed separately, as though it has been placed in a display case. On the same page we also see the last of the desert sculptures, but, in the meantime, the effect of the selection has undergone a reversal. Due to the combination of the photographs in the series, the mixing of categories, the alternation of the hand that shows with the hands that are pasted onto the sculptures, the distinction between natural coincidence and coincidental construction has disappeared. And suddenly the lack of context no longer refers back to the maker, the photographer: these objects look at us independently on the basis of an absolute necessity.
The complex relationship between the maker and the autonomous object is developed further in the following series. In Stars and Sky the curiosity aroused by the ‘independent things’ from the previous series is promptly undermined. Slips of paper, jabbed with holes or stitched with thread, are held up to the light or simply laid out for us like a child’s representation of sky with a hazy sun. Here the somewhat careless and elusive existence of the lumpy sculptures is replaced by a thin layer of almost nothing that seems intent on ridding itself of any imposed meaning by hiding behind a simple method and an instantly definable result. But even that simplicity is deceptive; even that is not handed to us. Reproduced here (in A Prior) the three-dimensionality of the method has been flattened by the photographic rendering; the holes and the threads remain at a distance, and that lack of footing slowly but surely determines the essence of this series. As is often the case in her work, Mannaerts dissociates herself from the ‘handwriting,’ which is emphatically present at the same time. She prefers not to show the object itself, not the drawing or the sculpture, but a photograph; and sometimes that, in turn, is reproduced. While many artworks barely survive reproduction in a magazine, Mannaerts’ work does not suffer from this. The vulnerable sheets of paper perforated with tiny holes can be observed from a very close proximity, but they display a twofold absence. The threads connect points that are not there, and the concentrated cluster of holes in the middle ultimately portrays a mere void.
These images are demonstratively shown to us once again: in the first of the series, the paper is held up by a hand, while in the last images two hands are holding the papers up to the sky in order to show us the tangibility of emptiness. The series thereby suggests a completion, which is only partly the case. For the slips of paper have, in fact, appeared before in the work. During the 2003 Venice Biennial, Mannaerts had already shown a video in which she allowed a ‘perforated sun’ to shine in a similar manner. Because of this, the work increasingly assumes the character of research. Although, at the beginning of the series, it is probably her hand showing us the effect of light passing through paper, her concern, as becomes evident at the end of the series, is her own gaze. It is her eyes that attempt to comprehend the sky and the stars in this way; it is her hands that attempt to grasp this incomprehensible vastness with simple means. Only afterwards does she show them to us.
Strangers in the Night, the subsequent series, consists of works that also date from 2005 and is a congealed counterpart to the ethereal search from the previous series. The lumpy structure of the figures is somewhat reminiscent of the objects from Desert and Bookshelves, but because this series precedes the latter in time, and has been placed after it in the book, two types of interpretations arise. The inert and coincidental, squat shapes seem to be a preliminary study for the sculptural forms on the bookshelves, but are much more emphatically sculptural due to evident traces of the process by which they were made and due to their vitrine-like presentation. But the ephemeral quality of the Sky and Stars series can be found in the Strangers as well. Their autonomy is threatening, because we now know that it is imbued with absence, or at least something that we cannot grasp. The hands, which as always have a prominent presence in Mannaerts’ work, have also left their marks here; but just as in the previous series, they have mainly wrought holes in the material. The thumbprint has taken the shape of an eye socket; the hand has pressed an anthropomorphic cavity in the clay and thereby ‘kneads a hole’ in the meaning of the material. These Strangers in the Night are sinister; the sharply pointed, flashing forms that also crop up in the series, like the remnants of a crashed airplane, underscore the danger. The Strangers in the Night series also involves a deviation. Once again, we are confronted with an object that seems to reflect personal life and household existence. This distinctly autobiographical element corresponds to the tradition of unbridled production in art. It seems to underline the fact that all spontaneous and undirected creations are the expressions of the maker’s subconscious; they are meant to show the artist’s fears and wishes, desires and dreams. But, just as in the first series, the personal aspect becomes lost in the succession and the profusion of the series. The personal object does not turn the other forms into symbols of the hidden self; rather, the ghost-like globs of clay draw the autobiographical object into their intangible world. Even the little things with which we surround ourselves and console ourselves are ultimately not ours.
The cumulative shapes from the first series surface again in the last one, Pedestals and Rooms. Placed solemnly on pedestals, they appear to be sculptures gone awry. Their rampant growth covers the point of origin; they devour their immediate surroundings like carnivorous plants and slowly penetrate, in the subsequent drawings, to the interior of the room. At the end of the series, their strangeness seems to have been brought under control; they have vanished. What remain are sketches of the artist’s daily environment, depicting the conditions in which the work has been made. Here the eyes and the hands seem to fall into place: they are the classical indication of the disegno, the discipline by which the artist converts what she sees, by way of the hand, into the artwork. The series in their entirety thereby ends with control and mastery. Nothing is left to chance anymore; everything is arranged. But then, one more time, we return to Strangers in the Night, and from there we page further back; and suddenly a different type of order, a different urgency emerges.
The series has been used frequently in visual art. It can display the development of a theme, or be intended as an account of a search. It can show the persistence with which the artist appropriates a motif, but in those cases the eye and the hand are constantly present in the background. There are also series, however, which attempt to deny the very existence of authorship: series that attempt to join in the sterile existence of today’s mass production, or which intend to show that everything is already determined without the artist’s intervention. These are series wherein traces of the personal are avoided as much as possible. In all of her work, Mannaerts plays with both forms. The personal seems to be prominent, but time and again it is negated. However, the work does not automatically take the side of industrial production or treat us to a taxonomy of things. The work does, in fact, come about by way of the artist, but it is not about her.
Pedestals and Rooms does not begin with artistry’s tools, but ends with them. This says two things: the nameless forms that have dominated the greater part of the series have not disappeared, but lie hidden in the objects that surround us from day to day; they are part of all that we do; but also that making of art is the discovery of that intangible world which is there and which needs to be found somewhere beneath the surface. In that endeavour, the artist has only herself, her own world: eye and hand. But that private world merely serves the need to fathom all that lies beyond it.
Translated from the Dutch by Beth O’Brien