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FIG. 11 A blue-gray spectrum of single-colored ceramic blocks. Photo: Jacob van
der Beugel
FIG. 12 A less convincing spectrum using two blocks of each color, another
example of the spectrum illusion collapse. Photo: Jacob van der Beugel
JVDB It’s a good question. I think my answer centers around the
need to pull back the veil on some very human traits, in the hope that
we can build on them. I would always prefer to build on something
fallible, knowing that it is prone to quakes, as opposed to believing in
its infallibility. Boiling it down into layman’s terms, “If it sounds too
good to be true, it is.” This is the case when dealing with spectrums.
Ultimately, they are stunning human creations, regardless of how well
these models mirror the real world.
3
Backgrounding—Foregrounding
LK I would like to come back to the question of your stance or
position as an artist. I see some parallels between your artistic
approach and the philosophy of science. In philosophical work about
scientific research there is a value in being close to scientific practice
in order to get real insight into how the scientists are thinking, what
their assumptions are, how they design their experiments, how they
conduct them. One part of that approach is trying to find the language
to describe these processes. This raises a question about your own
agency in this process. As a philosopher of science, are you just
reproducing their ideology or do you have a more distant approach to
it? If you’re too distant, this might mean that you can say something
really interesting about your actors, but they might not identify with it
at all. So it might change your audience a lot, for the better or the
worse.
JVDB Exactly. There is a synergy here to artist residencies in
scientific institutes. I’ve done various artist residencies where you
embed yourself into an organization, much in the same way as you
describe your research. You have to wrestle with their research and
their modus operandi. The trap for artists—and you’ll have to answer
whether it’s the same for you—is to resist becoming dazzled by the
science, scientists, and the institutes. For an outsider, it’s all really
impressive. To retain a shred of neutrality is challenging, yet really
important. You can feel seduced and slip into their perspective,
especially when you talk to the leads of these institutes. They’re the
most articulate mouthpiece. So you very rapidly find yourself
becoming, not indoctrinated, but much more comfortable with their
perspective than with any other kind of opposing perspective. Do you
suffer from this? Well, no, probably not. Ultimately you have a
perspective that you want to articulate . . . tell me about that. How
easy do you find it to not fall into this trap?
LK I think it is a to-and-fro. It’s always a performative process that
you need to achieve, every time in a new way. At least it’s that way
with the kind of approach I’m adopting. I think it might be different if
you have a very rigid, fixed, methodological approach where you say,
this is always the perspective that I take on something. Then you can
keep more distance. But what I’m really interested in is understanding
how different people think, what they understand as knowledge, how
they create it, and revise it, and so on. So I need to have a quite
dialogical approach. I need to have all this openness. It’s a balance
between keeping your distance and being open. Because if you are
too distant, then perhaps you won’t get some really interesting details
that you need to understand their perspective. I think understanding in
that sense is also that you can slip into the perspective of your
interlocutors.
JVDB Have you ever felt like your research has been used in a way
that you didn’t intend it to be, on purpose or not, or maybe the
opposite, where you’ve been prejudiced prior to doing the research?
LK I guess both. The way I try to work with that is to be—try to be
—very explicit about the level on which I am operating. And mostly I
have different levels in one paper. On the one hand, I’m trying to
describe what others think, but then on the other, I want to make
explicit my view on a process. And also make explicit my own
positionality, because of course I, too, am changing over time. If I
look at some things that I’ve written in the past, I might later see how
at certain points in time I’ve been situated in debates—not just
scientific debates but also historical and philosophical debates that
informed me as well. That’s the point. You never stand outside. You
can stand somewhere else, but there’s no point of nowhere. That’s
my understanding of my positioning. I like to be challenged, to change
my perspective on something. Maybe this is also why I like to
coauthor papers, though it is sometimes really challenging. However,
being open is not well-hedged position. I try to make up for that by
always trying to also take a meta perspective on what I am doing.
But of course, I cannot see everything. I have my own blind spots.
JVDB That’s so interesting, isn’t it? But in terms of wanting to remain
neutral in order to understand an organization or a disease, from my
perspective, neutrality is quite important. It might not be the most
ideologically dynamic artwork or piece, but the neutrality is almost a
pointer toward an openness to something else. I find it really
interesting how there are artworks that are ideologically incredibly
assertive. There is a very immediate and probably quite visceral
response to that; it’s almost like the viewer hasn’t done the heavy
lifting in order to get into a certain ideological position. So, a
vagueness and a neutrality to subject matter that takes in lots of
different perspectives, I ultimately find a more convincing approach.
LK And can you say how you understand vagueness in this respect?
JVDB I see vagueness as an openness and not an obfuscation. A
vagueness that allows for latency and dynamism, where there is an
opportunity to journey to a viewpoint, and backtrack if necessary.
LK That reminds me of the Wittgensteinian idea that sometimes it’s
more helpful to have blurred boundaries (Wittgenstein 1953, esp.
§71). Wittgenstein’s example says pointing toward a space doesn’t
describe a concrete bordered place, an exact spot, but just
somewhere out there, and that vagueness might be more meaningful.
And so, that’s maybe what you connect with the openness, right? At
first sight, it seems to be the clear task of art or also critical
humanities to be the aggressive counter discourse, but that can also
be a false cliché in a way. Just as there might be a false precision if
you try to point somewhere in that region, and you are misunderstood
as referring to an exact place. The exact place seems more precise,
but it is just not right. The precise would not be better in that case,
because it’s not fitting for what you intend to show. Sometimes you
can grasp the kernel of a problem better, if you are not setting up two
conflicting sides from the beginning, but instead you have an
openness that is not so strict about where your boundaries end and
where the boundaries of another person or another discipline begin.
You are also dealing with this issue in your artwork. How are you
making this epistemic situation aesthetically apprehensible?
JVDB By overtly structuring the installation as a literal translation of
the objectives of the institute, something we touched upon earlier,
there is an ironic position that the art adopts. I think that is the best
way to describe it aesthetically. It is ironic because it describes the
ambitions that also describe its limitations. It isn’t in-your-face irony,
rather it quietly points towards a more nuanced perspective. I am
intrigued by how you feel it is achieved.
7
LK I certainly read it that way! But as you said, it is not in-your-face
irony, and I think that is fair enough. Because why should we be so
sure that one or the other is better? How do we know which of the
ambitions exactly will fail?
JVDB It has been said that the sciences have a tendency towards
reductionism and materialism. I intuitively empathize with this
inclination. It seems entirely logical to keep going one degree deeper
with ever increasing granularity. I created some prototype works for a
piece yet to be completed that explores this phenomenon. I
must add that I have worked with cancer epidemiologists who seem
to embrace the opposite, which was very refreshing indeed. These
works take the shape of mini-microarrays, akin to arrays for gene
expressions.
FIG. 13 Jacob van der Beugel, Microarray (prototype), 2023, concrete and mixed
aggregates, 30 × 20 × 2.5 cm. Photo: Jacob van der Beugel
I wanted to create a spectrum of clarity. The left side of the little
panel is a gray cocktail of aggregates with assortments of color. This
was created using recycled aggregates: crushed bricks, road
planings, plastics, anything and everything that can be reused for
creating a substructure in construction. Protruding from the
background are little circular inserts. (In the array these would be
wells opposed to protrusions.) As the array moves across, it loses its
agglomeration and becomes a monoculture of color, whilst the
protrusions become more intense in color. To me, this represents the
FIG . 13
amazing quality of reducing and refining until there is a distillation; a
clarity in one’s research, let’s say. Yet there is also the converse, a
loss of the meta-grounding or background. Clarity is only achieved
through filtering and moving through levels of resolution. Meta-
perspectives are only visible when the granularity is blended.
LK I love your descriptions of meta-grounding and monocultures of
color. Your zooming-in on the background and dealing with its
components and incoherencies before and after what you call the
filtering process is, to me, the engagement with the methods and
assumptions of historiography and philosophy. I don’t just want to
apply a universal, mono-colored background to the scientific
phenomena that I am trying to understand. The background, the
mixing, testing, and reflecting on methods, is my field of
experimentation. Distancing and disentangling bring epistemic profit,
like clarity, but there is also an epistemic cost to these filtering
processes. While the methods might differ, I think this Janus-faced
epistemic situation is shared in the sciences and humanities.
JVDB Paradoxically you might only be able to achieve a meta-
perspective because you are building a larger picture with detailed
resolution, perhaps like the Human Brain Project or the Human
Genome Project. Yet, I still feel like the metaphor is apt, because in
building these large-scale maps you need to make increasingly large
assumptions. The more I entangle myself in this subject matter, the
more I am unable to disentangle anything. How can one ever have
both at the same time, everything, everywhere, all at once! Help me,
Lara!
LK I am not sure that it is desirable to have it all at once. The
interesting moment is when the perspective shifts, when you become
aware of foregrounding and backgrounding, of knowing the
ambivalence without reducing it to a single way of seeing. However,
even if you evoke shifts in perspective, you won’t have the full picture.
If you think back to our starting point, Matter in Grey, we were just
looking at different ways of understanding the scientific
representations of the course of Alzheimer’s disease. There are so
many other highly heterogeneous perspectives that can form and
inform how and what we do and don’t see: the perspectives of people
who get such a diagnosis, of people who suffer from symptoms of
dementia, the relatives who care for those patients, the sociocultural
8
imagination of people with Alzheimer’s who have lost their autonomy,
the economic exploitation of the associated fears . . . Even the most
integrated, multi-perspectival approach to a phenomenon won’t be
complete, won’t be able to accommodate every possible experience
and aspect. To me, these limitations, which have been a key subject
of philosophical discourse, imply both the necessity of modesty and
the possibility of creativity.
JVDB That is so beautifully put and it answers your “why” question
from earlier as well; finding or being mindful of fallibility is a form of
modesty that allows for a space in which to create. This tussle
between foreground and background is also the subject of a piece I
completed for a recent show, called Wherever the Two Shall Meet.
FIG. 14 Jacob van der Beugel, Wherever the Two Shall Meet, 2023, ceramics,
1.8 × 1.3 m. Private collection, United States. Photo: New Art Centre
This piece describes, broadly, how we haven’t finished our
evolutionary journey, and that our culture can impact the ways we
adapt. The genes I depict in the work are from two different groups
of people who both have adapted to increase their ability to absorb
oxygen: one due to living in higher altitudes, the other due to deep
sea diving. The format of the piece is derived directly from an older
Sanger-style genetic sequencing technique that required a more
FIG . 14
analog and manual procedural technique that conceptually aligns with
my way of constructing a piece. On the surface the title asks,
“Where will we find ourselves on this spectrum?” But there is
something else going on as well. Foreground and background cross
over each other due to their color gradation, almost to the point
where they are indistinguishable from each other. Whilst this is me
physically recreating the debate about nature/nurture and suggesting
the impossibility of teasing them apart, it also highlights the gray
areas once again. Where things fall apart and lose clarity. This is the
meeting point the title alludes to. It is the area that needs more
resolution, more research: the interesting area. In effect you have
multiple spectrums colliding and overlapping. There are areas in the
work where elements are visually compelling and easy on the eye
and then the messy confusing parts, where the colors double up and
are unresolved. To me now, this work has become about the nature
of working with spectrums.
FIG. 15 Sanger sequencing technique that enables nucleotide visualization.
“Sanger Sequencing – Let’s Talk Science,” August 17, 2020, https://letstalkscience.
ca/educational-resources/backgrounders/sanger-sequencing (Accessed: October
30, 2024)
LK You are absolutely right that we see an increasing interest from
the biomedical sciences in taking more factors into account. The gray
areas are not necessarily the marginal, they are key fields of
research. And the spectrum is probably the icon of this research
paradigm.
4
Polishing the Aesthetic, Polishing the Concrete
FIG . 15
LK Let’s return to the concrete. You mentioned the similarity
between your artistic practice of slicing up blocks of concrete and the
medical practice of autopsy—slicing up a dead person to examine
their bodily structures. Is it just a nice coincidence that the English
word “concrete” has different meanings that relate, for one, to your
material and, for another, to the concrete in contrast to the abstract,
or does this polysemy of “concrete” have a deeper impact on your
artwork?
JVDB I love the dualism that comes from presenting something in
concrete. Because the word “concrete” brings to mind the factual, a
concrete reality, whilst life is so nuanced and so contextually different.
We like to see things presented to us as concrete facts: easily
digestible, compartmentalized, convincing. Reality is anything but. In
Matter in Grey there is an extra level of irony. Not only is its
materiality synonymous with the factual and assertively definitive, but
the whole layout lends itself to being read in this way due to its
seductive construct of the abstract.
LK There’s another interesting point about working with concrete in
artworks on scientific representations of disease, because there’s
this abstract idea of a “disease entity.” You were referring to that in
the beginning: Is there a “normal person”? Are there instances that
prototypically represent the course of Alzheimer’s disease, normal
aging, an ideal course after treatment? If we think that there are
instances of this, then it’s clear that they have to be concrete people.
We have concreteness again. We have individuals in their concrete
context-rich life in which so many other things beyond their disease or
illness happen as well. Things happen in the physicality of their
specific bodies, in the environments that they inhabit. I think in putting
the concreteness up front, this can also be understood as a comment
on the tension between the specific and the general, the concrete and
abstract, the individual person, and general theories of disease,
aging, progression, etc. You have the concreteness that is simply
there. And then you have some categories or theories, and there
needs to be some connection between the specific and the general. If
you did the exact same piece again, of course it would look different.
JVDB Exactly. As a person, you have to be able to relate to
someone else’s model, when you get shoved into that sausage
factory. Theirs is the model or process that you will be put in relation
to and that will be used on you. And yet, invariably, you fall through its
cracks. You probably exist within its boundaries, but still that is the
model that gets used. Is that what you were alluding to? But that’s
just using the word concrete and riffing off it, isn’t it. Concrete is
amazing. And yet it is also used for things that kind of destroy
meaning or have no meaning, for example, in war memorials where it
seems to obliterate meaning. It’s justifiably got a bad reputation in
terms of its environmental footprint, which I think is interesting in itself
by the way. That’s why I love to use it, because one can’t escape our
imprint upon the world. I get quite riled by people who say, “well, you
shouldn’t be using that material because it’s bad.” That’s an incredibly
simplistic perspective, because it is one of the materials that is
totemic in terms of our footprint on the planet. So perhaps, when
discussing the human condition, the use of concrete is incredibly apt.
LK Absolutely. I actually think that concrete encapsulates this idea
or underlying emotion, that you can create through your artwork,
which shows how you cannot have pure things. You cannot have art
that is just beautiful. Something comes with it, which you might not
want to have. And the same is true with the striving for perfect health.
I mean, what should that be? So it’s . . .
JVDB . . . the trade-offs.
LK I think it’s even more complicated than a trade-off because you
cannot even think of one thing without the other. You can upcycle
aggregates of construction work like you have done in Microarray,
you can make an aesthetically appealing mural out of it, but you
cannot do away with the ambivalence that you just outlined so
pointedly: the ugly, devastating, destructive side of concrete, and thus
of past and present human action.
You are a trained potter, so you have a lot of experience working
with clay. How do the different material properties of concrete and
clay influence your artistic practice?
JVDB I used to feel that they were similar materials when I first
started using concrete. I felt they were materials that were about
permanence in stone. This was very naive. There are many things
that are different. To me, clay now has an element of freezing human
action and then baking it into permanence. There is a unity of
movement and immobility. Both things all at once. As a potter you
learn to work on the inside and outside of an object simultaneously;
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