2002.03: Toine Horvers: 25 years as a visual artist

Guus Vreeburg (ed.)Toine Horvers: 25 years as a visual artist
verschenen in: [brochure]. Rotterdam, Toine Horners, 2002

Statement
As an artist I make performance-related sound-sculptures, text-displays, as well as ‘written drawings’, on both paper and onto architectural elements. I often start from ‘ready made’ textual or visual material that I process through strictly defined procedures, which are objectified as much as possible. In this way vibrating clusters of image and/or sound come into being. I consider myself as an heir of Performance Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art.

1977-1997
In 1977, after being educated as a teacher in handicrafts, drawing and drama, plus some years of classical ballet, I started to develop concentrated physical movements; I named them ‘trans-form-ations’. I was fascinated by the fact that by changing my body posture as slowly and gradually as I could, all sorts of interesting things occured during this journey from A to B. Extended time-lapses brought out the essence of a movement. Soon after, I started to link these movements with the surrounding architectonical space, my body being the pivotal energy. Through these sequences of movements – minimalistic in form, yet very extreme for the body – I dealt with the relationship of time and space; I named them ‘sculptures of movement’.
As of 1984, wishing to make the experience of sensing a concentrated spatial movement accessible to other people than just myself, I started to invite outsiders to participate in my performances. Soon I even started to encourage participants to contribute ‘mono’-tone vocal sounds to the formation of a composite abstract sound-cluster. Sometimes these performances only existed as long as the audience was willing to participate. I named these works ‘sculptures of movement and sound’. As of 1986 I extended my tonal vocabulary to the rolling of drums over extended periods of time. The drum-roll – in essence a collection of sequential beats – fascinated me by its ability to completely fill up a space, or on the contrary – when volume decreases – to drain it. By rolling drumsticks on charcoal paper over extended periods of time, I generated ‘drawings’.
All these works were based on a highly objectified internal logic. I developed sets of rules, that are on the one hand strict and clear enough to be univocal (eg. to move along circles or straight lines only; to use the elapse of daylight, or on the contrary the precise clocking of a time-period – ‘one hour’, ‘two minutes’, etc – as chronological boundaries; to give directions like ‘as loud / as soft / as high / … as possible’; etc). Yet the results generated by these very rules are always unpredictable (for instance, the positioning of actions in spatial distance and in time, and thus the speed of them can only be estimated, as is the case with changes in volume or in the intensity of (day-)light; likewise, factors like the degree of audience-participation are highly coincidental). Thus, the procedures for gradual change that I designed – eg. ‘from very soft to extremely loud’, ‘from bright to dark’, ‘from slow to fast’ – always produce fuzzy, cloud-like shapes.
Reading Octavio Paz’ collection of historical essays Tiempo nublado (‘cloudy times’) made me realize that my cloudy movements could be considered as metaphors of History. I started making drawings by writing texts from history books, layer upon layer, thus producing cloud-like shapes. Ever since, my work – both visual and auditory – is constructed from texts, pieces of text and textual data on phenomena like the weather, water-levels, the movements of ships, and the names on maps of countries, cities and the human body. To me, these texts are ‘compressed energies’. The work adopts its shape from the way these fields of energy were mapped in the first place; my job it is to develop strict systems by which all these data are to be superimposed in layers, thus forming a new image. Textual material – superimposed in either written or spoken form – manifests itself either as ‘image’ or as ‘sound’; apart from that, written or spoken words always carry a ‘meaning’. Layering the material as I do affects the degree to which the texts may or may not be deciphered or perceived, and understood; this causes an interesting tension.
From 1990 onwards I apply this concept of gathering and reproducing data also to works for buildings and public space, using sound systems and electronic displays. As usual, I try to achieve a balance between text as ‘image’/’sound’ and as ‘information’. The works always refer to the pre-existing architecture to which they are applied; both formally and content-wise, these are works ‘in situ’.
The ‘written drawings’ were made at first by copying texts and data from books, using a pencil. Later on, I started writing on transparent paper, tracing maps from topographical and anatomical atlases, on top of a light-box. Discovering that these maps use colour to convey information, I started using coloured pencils. Later yet, I started to copy my source material on slides; copying the projection of this image directly onto a wall even permits the ‘written drawings’ to establish a link with three-dimensional space – the same space that was originally abstracted into the data and maps that my drawings are based upon.

At present
Remotely related to my early performances are theatrical works in which several actors or vocalists simultaneously recite collections of words – the work’s duration being based on the number of words used –` while the elements to which the words refer are being made visible (cfr. ‘Names, The Head’; Performance St. John’s Chapel, Cambridge, U.K.; 1997).
Apart from drawings on paper I also combine sets of drawings into spatial installations in two and sometimes even three dimensions (cfr. Names, The Head: coronal and sagittal sections’; Wall drawing Tilburg, NL; 1997). Recently, I started using slides with realistic imagery (eg. landscapes or passers-by in the street) as source material. In stead of the ‘ready made’ descriptions of maps and textbooks, I now have to invent by myself words or sentences that give the most accurate description of all elements of an image, and of their exact position in it, their exact direction, their exact shape, size and colour.
In recent projects and workshops I invited participants to simultaneously observe and make notes, during a given stretch of time, of all ’occurrences’, for instance the sounds in a given space, the winds in a specific location, or people passing through a space – always exactly stating the hour of each occurrence by using a time-bar and a clock. Afterwards, guided by these time-bars, the written observations are read aloud simultaneously. This procedure generates quite literally a ‘verbal reconstruction’ of a given time/space situation (cfr. ‘Paysage sonore’; Sound sculpture Plateau de Millevaches, Fr; 1999).

The three modes of expression in my work – ‘written drawings’, sound sculptures and electronic displays – are closely related conceptually, and they continually and reciprocally influence each other. Procedures are as precisely and hermetically structured as ever: the final image emerges from the ‘un-precision’ that creeps out of the crevices in my systems. Pushing my ‘self’ out of sight as far as I can, my role is limited to defining the rules and supervising the final processes – nowadays mostly carried out by third parties – that generate the image/the work.
Both in my early performances of abstract sounds as well as in the present text-related works, I was and still am fascinated by the tension between on the one hand the down-to-earth way of my sources to convey information, and on the other hand the abstract and ritualistic character of the processes involved – both by which these data were collected originally, as well as by which they are now being re-presented through my works.

Rotterdam, March 28 2002