Cover Page
The handle
http://hdl.handle.net/1887/36549
holds various files of this Leiden University
dissertation
Author: Noorda, Ruchama
Title:
℞
eForm
ŔeFo
rm
Ruchama N
oo
rd
ŔeForm
Proefschrift
ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden, op gezag van Rector Magnificus prof. mr. C. J. J. M. Stolker volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op 9 December 2015, klokke 13.45 uur. door Ruchama Noorda, geboren te Leiden (NL) in 1979
ŔeFo
Promotor
prof. dr. Kitty Zijlmans Copromotor
dr. Janneke Wesseling (Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten PhDArts/Universiteit Leiden)
Promotiecommissie
prof. dr. Yra van Dijk prof. Frans de Ruiter
dr. Michel van Doortmont (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen/ Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden)
Jean-Bernard Koeman (Gerrit Rietveld Academie/ Jan van Eyck Akademie Maastricht)
Book design: Paul Gangloff
Printed on an Espresso Book Machine at the American Book Center, Amsterdam. Dust cover printed by Pure Print, UK Unless otherwise specified, all translations into English are by the author
ŔeFo
rm
6 Contents
10 Artist Positioning 16 Introduction
36 Chapter 1 ŔeForm SUBCONSCIOUS
(Muddled Thinking)
Internal Colonization Unrealistic Dreamer American Walden (Sub-)Consciousness Enclosed Garden
Asocialen – Private Prophesy – Detox
Dirt
64 Chapter 2 ŔeForm BODY
— HYGIENE-PRANA-PRAXIS:
The Lebensreform Legacy
Lebensreform Hill of Truth Ecology
Spiritual Evolution Anthroposophy
Static Monument to Progress Nature Prophets
Live Earth, Idols and Embodied Landscape Occult Dunghill
120 Chapter 3 ŔeForm COLLECTIVE:
Countering (Individual) Culture
Civic Virtue
The Gewebe Project: Weaving/Worpswede The Collapse of Civic Virtue
Full Immersion, Co-Knowledge and Hydrotherapy
Redemption Value
A Note On The Colour Orange
168 Chapter 4 ŔeForm Land(scape)
Rhizome
Pearblossom Highway
Diopharma
Earth Works and Non Sites Compressed Landscape Land Development
Co
ŔeFo
rm
8 The New World, California and
Lebensreform
Nature Boys: California’s Wandervogel Portable – Digestible Landscapes
214 Conclusion 222 Bibliography 232 Biography
234 Acknowledgments 236 Summaries
242 Appendix: ŔeFormat
Co
ŔeFo
rm
10 Positioning Myself as an Artist in the Research Field
My central aim in what follows is to determine how, and in what ways ‘Lebensreform’ philosophy and practice has shaped my ideology, commitments, personal aesthetic and art practice.
This text is the written part of my research project (titled ‘ŔeForm’), undertaken in the context of the PhDArts pro-gramme of the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts at Leiden University between 2009 and 2015. The disserta-tion consists of an analysis of, and reflecdisserta-tion on the social, ideological and spiritual underpinnings of the Lebensreform movement and its historical links, on the one hand to the 20th century European avant-gardes and radical politi-cal movements, and, on the other, to mid 20th century Californian utopian thinking and hippy counterculture. A sus-tained account of the series of art works I have made in the past six years, which constitute the practical-experimental arm of the ŔeForm project, is presented alongside the dis-cursive outcomes of my research project. The two parts of the thesis form a hybrid, a theory-practice test site, a place where the materials, beliefs and practices most commonly associated with the historical Lebensreform movement are
compounded1—re-framed, re-modelled, re-formed and held
up for critical examination.
The series of art works includes, performances, installations and ritual actions which involve the fusion and reworking of
1 Compounding is the practice that leads to the creating of pharmaceutical products by combining various natural substances but has ancient roots as early humans already compounded a variety of preparations made from soil, animals, plants, moulds, fungus and bacteria as well as inorganic minerals within their environment. Ancient civi-lizations used pharmaceutical compounding for religion, grooming, keeping the healthy well, treating the ill and preparing the dead an meanwhile discovered poisons and the antidotes. http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/Pharmacy_ compounding < 20 May 2015>
Artis
t Po
sitio
ŔeFo
rm
12
Artist Po
sitioning
site-specific objects and materials. As Lebensreform is not just a theory but a praxis-based movement, I have chosen to consciously position myself in the role of a believer through-out this project. ‘I believe’ is a position, which is at once imaginative, passionate and sincere. From the outset I felt strongly that in order to produce work of the level of inten-sity I was seeking, I needed to adopt the radically alchemical, i.e. magical and material, Lebensreform agenda and to take its techniques and its methods seriously. Submission to the founding principles is a condition of entry into any faith-based practice/body of knowledge. Throughout history, be-lief as a transformative threshold experience and, as a form of willing agency, has played an important role in not just imagining but implementing the alternative systems, structures and futures which are central to any reform movement. In this case, such a leap of faith was not hard for me to make, given my schooling in the Waldorf-Steiner system and my anthroposophical upbringing. At the same time, however, I have used this project as a way of re-examining and to some extent unravelling my own indoctrination. The ŔeForm project documented in this dissertation is thus partly an excavation of my own subconscious. My position of so called
believer is connected to a form of primal play2, not just as a
re-experiencing or re-enactment, but also as a means of ex-ternalizing unconscious positions and assumptions, allowing me to be at one and the same time a Life Reform insider and a (partial) outsider. My performative installation works trace out what Johan Huizinga calls a ‘magic circle’ — a temporary world marked out from the ordinary world and running on a different set of rules. It is a place where, what Huizinga called the ‘consecrated spot’, cannot be formally distin-guished from the play-ground (Huizinga 1955, 10).
Reform as it is commonly understood is linked to the idea of beneficial change — an attempt to improve on an existing state of affairs. Sometimes it is seen to involve a reversion
2 I use the notion of primal play as in trauma based primal therapy, based on Freud’s and Jung’s ideas on personal and collective subconscious experiences which are brought to awareness and played out.
to a ‘natural’, pure or original state. In what follows, notions of reform as either progress or regression (and sometimes as both at once) are examined and put into question. This happens through a process of immersion — as I purposefully get lost in the materials (the archive/historical record and the literal materials I use in the artworks — mud, clay, water, graphite, textiles, medicinal plants, drywall, brick, recycled scrap). My ŔeForm research was primarily conducted hands on, in and through the production of art works, interven-tions, performances and ‘pilgrimages’. These works and ac-tions refer back to and comment on the historical research, and on the overall project. In order to abstract the idea of ŔeForm from its material supports, I set out to filter it through the ‘materials’ themselves, rather like running milk or water through screens and sieves to make cheese from curd or to extract flecks of gold from river silt.
My research questions are thus rooted in an art practice which is based in and on a kind of dreaming and emerge from an immersive process that is in large part intuitive. However, this immersion has also involved prolonged reflec-tion on, and extensive reading in the history and philosophy of the Lebensreform movement.
The two central questions around which the thesis is organized concern what I argue is the continuing impact of Lebensreform ideas and practices on various avant-garde art and social movements from the early 20th century to the present day, and at a more personal level, the influence exerted by those ideas and practices on my own beliefs, aesthetics and artistic methodology.
Other subsidiary questions addressed include:
• How can I articulate and excavate the subterranean mysti-cal and ‘irrational’ strands in Lebensreform within my art practice?
ŔeFo
rm
14
Artist Po
sitioning
history, for example in the contrast between writer and psychologist Frederik van Eeden’s socialist Walden com-mune and its North American forebear and namesake, Henry David Thoreau’s experiment in solitary ‘back to nature’ survivalism in rural Massachusetts? How are these contradictions played out, resolved or left unresolved in my work, in individually authored pieces and in my col-laborations with the now dissolved artists’ collective Civic Virtue?
• Anthroposophy and the Lebensreform were heavily impli-cated in the development of National Socialist ideology in Germany in the period up to and including the late 1930’s. What is the nature of the liaison between these move-ments? Can anthroposophical and Lebensreform ideas be recuperated without reinstating the connection? What implications, if any, play a role in that history and implicit legacy for the current environmental/ecological movements and associated art trends (e.g. neo-hippy/back to nature/ mud works/neo-land art)?
• How does the clash between modernity and a vision of the future rooted in an ideology of ‘growth-at-all-costs’ and Lebensreform ideals and practices/contemporary ‘counter-cultural’ art and life style production play out?
ŔeFo
rm
16
Introd
uctio
n
Fig. 0.0. Private Prophesy, No Excess, aluminium sign post installation/photo, 180 × 45 cm, California,
ŔeFo
rm
18
Intro
ductio
n
ŔeForm
Introduction
‘Ŕ: symbol for medical prescription, abbreviation of Latin recipe, imperative form of recipere, “to take” or “take thus”. Medieval prescriptions typically instructed the patient to “take” certain materials and to com-pound them in particular ways. Folk beliefs note similarities between the Ŕ icon, the Eye of Horus and
the ancient symbol for Zeus or Jupiter.’1
‘Having read several of your books, I wonder if you could find the time to read my brochure “Le Neo-Plasticisme”, which I am enclosing. I believe that Neo-Plasticism is the art of the foreseeable future for all true Anthroposophists and Theosophists. Neoplasticism creates harmony through the equiva-lence of the two extremes: the universal and the individual. The former by “revelation”, the latter by “deduction”… …It is impossible to bring about an equilibrium of relationships other than by destroy-ing the “form”, and replacdestroy-ing it by a new ‘universal’
expressive means.’ 2
In 2008, I was invited by De Lakenhal, a museum in Leiden with a historic collection of works by De Stijl movement, to make an exhibition. Leiden had played an important role in the formation and promotion of the movement’s ideals
from 1917 onwards.3 At De Lakenhal, I installed Statisch
Vooruitgangsmonument (‘Static Progress Monument’) in which
I combined selected works from the Museum’s De Stijl
1 Wikipedia entry, ‘Medical Prescription’, <14 April 2015> 2 Piet Mondriaan, letter to Rudolf Steiner (circa. 1921–
1923) quoted in Michel Seuphor (ed.), Abstract Painting, New York: Dell Publishing Co, 1964, p. 83–85. 3 Theo van Doesburg founded the influential De Stijl
20 ŔeFo rm Intro ductio n
collection with my own designed ceramic pieces, a Eurythmy dance video and items from my personal collection of Anthroposophical artefacts. The exhibition juxtaposed ideas of progress-through-design against occult elements within early 20th century modernist movements, to produce a space in which the desire for an all-encompassing ideology of transformation was materialized within a subjective historical framework. The exhibition, installed at the beginning of this doctoral project, set the tone and the direction of all of my subsequent research, which is rooted in the fusion around site-specific objects and materials of personal and impersonal histories.
I was born and grew up in Leiden and I knew the collection of de Lakenhal by heart, not only through frequent visits to the museum in my childhood and adolescence, but also through my experience as a security guard in the museum in the late 1990’s. I had already developed an interest in the connection between de Stijl’s austere-looking straight lines and squares, and the more fluid, liquid figural forms associated with anthroposophy. I had encountered Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy in my early childhood and had been trained in its artistic style as a child educated at de Mareland Waldorf school in Leiden.
In the process of researching these two contemporane-ous movements — Neoplasticism (a Dutch abstract art movement also known as De Stijl) and Anthroposophy — I became fascinated by the occult underpinnings of the sup-posedly ultra-rationalist De Stijl movement. Aesthetically these movements could not appear more different; hazy ‘numinous’ wet-on-wet water colours versus ‘hyper-rationalist’ rectangular blocks, primary colours and straight lines, flooded dream scenarios versus hard edge diagrams of a progressive future. Now that I was invited to make a work so close to home in every sense, I felt I wanted to investigate the common ground between these two early 20th century movements which had influenced my formation as a person and an artist. I thus settled on the Lebensreform movement as a research topic that would draw De Stijl and Steinerism together. In addition I wanted
to find connections between my artwork and personal value system, and the spiritual-religious framework I had internalized through my upbringing in both the Waldorf school and the Reformed Church. My parents were open to syncretic 1960’s New Age thinking and were strongly committed both to Anthroposophy and Reform Church ideals and beliefs (my maternal grandfather was a promi-nent Protestant Reformed Church theologian). My work is concerned with processing, analysing and digging into that dual legacy — exploring the terrain of a specifically northern European (post-)Christian spiritual and aesthetic legacy through its passage back and forth between the New World and Europe. I investigate the occult roots of the Anthroposophic and Reform traditions while examining their impact on 20th century avantgardes and consider how aspirations for self- and social transformation were articu-lated within them.
My practice continues to evolve from a fundamental sense of solidarity with, and desire for a worldview in which art functions as a practical, spiritual and social
Gesamtkunstwerk. In the various projects described in the
ŔeFo rm 22 Intro ductio n
curators who have sought in recent decades to uncover the occult underpinnings of those avant-garde movements including the Symbolists, De Stijl and Der Blaue Reiter, strongly influenced by Theosophy, Anthroposophy and the
Lebensreform movement.4
In this context, I was surprised to come across Mondriaan’s letter to Steiner, which I quoted at the beginning of this Introduction. After spending fourteen years as a pupil in the Waldorf school system, the idea of any kind of natural fit between Anthroposophy and Neoplasticism seemed far-fetched. It directly contradicted my own understanding of Steiner’s aesthetic principles (and the fact that Mondriaan’s letter went unanswered probably tells us something about Steiner’s response to his idea). The hazy spiritualist style of water colour painting that Steiner and his followers pro-duced, and which remained the artistic standard in Waldorf schools when I was being educated, stood in stark contrast to the rectilinear grids and saturated blocks of colour that make Mondriaan’s later abstractions so distinct. As I pur-sued my research, I learned that Mondriaan was deeply influenced by the strands of esoteric thought represented by Steiner and ‘Madame’ Blavatsky. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) is regarded as the founding architect of Theosophical cosmology. Despite the fact that Mondriaan’s engagement with theosophy is well known in art historical circles, I believe that the larger implications of the impact of occult and esoteric thinking, not just on Mondriaan but on modernism in general, have yet to be fully appreciated and understood. By tracing Steiner’s commitment to Theosophy,
4 See for instance, Maurice Tuchman (ed,), The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (catalogue: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1986); Veit Loers (ed.), Occultismus und Avantgarde: von Munch bis 1900–1915 (catalogue: Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 1995); Jean de Loisy & Angela Lampe (eds,), Traces du Sacre (catalogue: Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2008); Serge Fauchereau & Joëlle Pijaudier Cabo (eds.), L’Europe des esprits ou la fascination de l’occulte, 1750–1950, (catalogue: Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, 2011).
as well as Blavatsky and Annie Besant’s5 ideas of world
his-tory as a process of spiritual evolution, I ended up immersing myself in the rich history of the Lebensreform movement. Lebensreform has its roots in earlier European occultism and finds its inspirational sources in both Indian religious and mystical practice, and the hermetic/alchemical traditions of medieval Europe.
At its height, between 1880 and the early 1930’s, Lebensreform found expression through the Rational Dress movement of clothing reform, health food (veg-etarianism and organic farming), natural medicine, educa-tional reform, nudism, and new spiritual movements like Theosophy and the new Christian-Hindu hybrid embod-ied in Anthroposophy. In addition, the importance of the Lebensreform movement for the European art world, and society as a whole, is most intensely highlighted in the ex-perimental art and lifestyle work undertaken at the Monte Verità colony at Ascona in Locarno, Switzerland. Operating between 1900 and 1940, this residency, retreat, art centre and sanatorium attracted a range of influential European artists and intellectuals including Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Carl Jung, El Lissitzky, Wassily Kandinsky, Hermann Hesse, Paul Klee, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Frederik van Eeden, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis (co-founder of the Dutch socialist movement), Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban. For more than fifty years, Monte Verità served as a vital hub of interdisciplinary exchange and as a dynamic incubator for cultural and artistic innovation, new ideas and practices geared toward the development of communitarian ideals, physical, mental, spiritual health and social transformation. In the light of the central position that the Hill of Truth (Monte Verità) has come to occupy in my personal mythol-ogy as a 21st-century anarcho-mystic, I have chosen to call my research ‘ŔeForm’, in order to reference simultaneously the social-political aspirations of the Lebensreform move-ment, the Reformation of the 16th century, and the literal
ŔeFo
rm
24
Intro
ductio
n
processes of compounding: the transformation and physical re-forming of materials that are essential to any art practice, and on which I focus explicitly in my own work and what I refer to as the alchemical component. In Dutch, the word
Reform refers to the Lebensreform movement and, via the
re-lated Reformwinkel (German: Reformhaus), an organic retail chain that still operates across parts of northern Europe, to the ‘alternative’ flower power culture of the 1960’s, 1970’s and after. The Reformhaus brand was the forerun-ner to the now globalized ‘organic’ food/’natural’ health and beauty product markets and, despite the mainstreaming of organic ‘brands’, I would argue they still carry a lasting echo of the other-worldly idealism of the original Life Reform Movement.
Fig. 0.1. www.trademarkia.com < 5 June 2015>
In addition to developing and marketing organic products, Lebensreform, rooted in a combination of European ‘back to nature’ romanticism and Eastern mysticism, was first and foremost a counter-cultural movement, and was character-ised by a powerful, all-encompassing critique of industrialisa-tion and urbanisaindustrialisa-tion. As such, Lebensreform thinking and practice might be said to contain a fundamental critique of industrial capitalism and to offer a set of alternative or op-positional values. Such values were resonating as the century progressed, for better or worse, with both left and right cultural and political trends, with both socialist and National Socialist tendencies.
The lineage that links Lebensreform, and connected the Wandervogel movement of the 1920’s through the figure of the longhaired German immigrant ‘Nature Boy’ to California’s hippies of the 1960’s, tends to be regarded
as relatively nonthreatening.6 But the influence applied by
Steiner’s advocacy in 1924 of mystical ‘biodynamic’ farming methods on early formulations of the Nazi ‘blood and soil’ doctrine is harder to connect with the ‘politically correct’ self-image of today’s growing mainstream environmentalist movements. In Ecofascism (2011) (co-authored with Janet Biehl) and Between Occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and
the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era (2014), American
histo-rian Peter Staudenmaier makes a convincing case for placing Lebensreform and Anthroposophy in the category of move-ments that contributed key components to National Socialist ‘Nordic’ mysticism and ideologies concerning the invented superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race (a concept first introduced
by Blavatsky).7 While Anthroposophy was banned by the
Nazis in 1935 because of its ‘close contact with foreign freemasons, Jews and pacifists’, and the Waldorf system of
‘individualistic and human-oriented education’8, the
simi-larities with National Socialist thinking and the support of prominent Nazis like Rudolf Hess continue to cast a dark shadow over the entire movement and its history. These associations with anti-democratic, xenophobic and racist ideologies have caused many of the utopian elements rooted within Lebensreform to have been overlooked and gradually forgotten since the Second World War.
It is this conflicted and controversial legacy of the Lebensreform movement that I seek to uncover and to reflect upon in this dissertation and through my art: instal-lations, performances and publications completed during my research over the past years. The artworks, interven-tions, ‘pilgrimages’ and performances presented under my ŔeForm category grounded in the written research and the project as a whole — both the writing and the ŔeForm
6 See for instance Gordon Kennedy: Children of the Sun: A Pictorial Anthology From Germany To California 1883–1949, (Nivaria Press, 1998).
7 Though it should be noted Blavatsky included the Jewish people within the Aryan category.
ŔeFo rm 26 Intro ductio n
artworks — are simultaneously historical and personal. They embody an excavation, at one and the same time, of my own formation and of the darker aspects of modernism, a move-ment that is still oftentimes, despite all the evidence to the contrary, presented as homogeneous and straightforwardly linear, progressive and rationalist. As with other European-based contemporary artists and writers, such as Austrian
artist Martin Beck and the German curator Anselm Franke,9
who are interested in uncovering the roots of the 1960’s and 1970’s counter-cultural utopianism, this archaeological project which, in my case often involves literal excavations, has taken me to California. In the course of research trips to California between 2011 and 2014, I have made several soil-based works, which set out to implicate alternative medicinal/ Naturopathic practices and the concept of land ownership and private property. To give one example, I approached this by compressing dirt, plant fragments and building debris, collect-ed on the ruins of an early 20th century socialist commune in the Mojave desert, into a digestible pill form (I will elaborate on this in chapter four ŔeForm Land(scape) — Consuming Sites) From the late 1970’s onwards, several prominent curators and contemporary artists have made works and exhibi-tions exploring the history and legacy of the Lebensreform movement in Europe. In 1978, Harald Szeemann curated an on-site exhibition at Ascona entitled Breasts of Truth, based on historical documents, photographs and significant objects from the original Monte Verità colony. Szeemann presented the exhibition as ‘archaeological research into the metropolis
of alternatives’ (Szeemann, 1978. It. RN). A contemporary
practitioner of archive-based artwork10 in this area who has
significantly influenced my approach is Stephan Dillemuth. His work addresses the continuing impact of the Lebensreform
9 Anselm Franke, The Whole Earth Exhibition, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2013. http://hkw.de/en/pro-gramm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_87732.php < 4 October 2015>
10 Lichtmenschen im Sumpf der Sonne — Studien zur Lebensreform (Sun people in the Slush of the Light — Studies on the Reform of Life), London’s LUX Magazine 28, 2002.
‘lifestyle’ and he was generous enough to allow me access to
his elaborated Lebensreform archive.11
An important aspect of my ŔeForm research involved con-ducting collectivist experiments in the form of collaborations with fellow artists in the Civic Virtue collective. Between 2009 and 2014, the members of the group: Brian McKenna, Geirthrudur Finnbogadottir Hjorvar, Gijsbert Wouter Wahl and myself, participated in a series of residencies in The Netherlands, Italy and Germany that resulted in a number
of collective statements, exhibitions and performances.12
The group was drawn together by a shared interest in the unifying ideologies and aesthetics of historical social move-ments, with a particular focus on iconographies of power and (public) virtue. In the final project, organized shortly before the group’s dissolution in the fall of 2013, we cre-ated consecutive installations on the grounds of the former artists’ colony at Worpswede in Saxony (The Gewebe Project at Künstlerhäuser Worpswede) and at the Stadthausgalerie
in Münster (CV VI.2 — Immergo Identidum) that dealt with the
history of the Münster Anabaptists rebellion in 1534–5. As I hope will become clear from what follows, the
Lebensreform movement was not some sudden trend or the product of a temporally or geographically isolated subcul-ture, rather, it was deeply rooted in earlier European move-ments. This can be deduced from its countless similarities with certain, mainly Christian, heretical sects and communi-ties of faith which developed in the early modern period in Europe. Examples include the Anabaptists in 16th century Amsterdam and Münster during the Radical Revolution, and the English Diggers, Puritans and Quakers from the around the mid 17th century English Civil War period. The various
11 And to which I also contributed some of my own re-search into Dutch strands of life reform.
12 CV III — Office of Propaganda, Hinterconti, Hamburg, 2012.
CV IV — After the Butcher, Berlin, 2012.
CV V — the Cloth of Vittoria, Kunstverein Milano 2012. CV VI.2 — Immergo Identidum, Kunsthalle/
ŔeFo rm 28 Intro ductio n
histories, competing ideologies and aspirations of these diverse groups have all fed directly into this dissertation and into my artworks, which together comprise the present body of research. Resemblances between these diverse religiously inspired movements include a predilection for pacifism, communal property, various forms of civil dis- obedience and the direct experience of spirituality with no mediating authority.
The Life Reform traditions I refer to, and with which I align myself, sprang out of an underground of heretics, anarcho-mystics, free thinkers and nature-anarchists. They sought to build a new order by appealing to the higher authority of the spiritual world over the hierarchical, corrupt and worldly dictates of church and state. I have sought to channel and mobilize the spirit of that long history of confrontation between heresy and orthodoxy, dissidence and legitimated authority, while striving throughout to remain aware of the dangers of extremism and self-righteousness. Therefore, I have tried to keep some distance from the faith driven positions and personae I inhabit and invoke. For instance, I recognize that for all their initially subversive or anti-au-thoritarian character, many of the radical historical religious movements I am referencing degenerated over time — some-times rapidly — into rigid and intolerant dogmas, a pattern I acknowledge, comment on, and at times parody in the art projects as much as in the writing.
Among the many conflicts and contradictions within the traditions of religious dissidence and civil disobedience I identify, work on and play with, is the tension between self-isolation/individual ‘transcendence’ (for example, Thoreau’s
Walden, 1854; Emerson’s Self-Reliance, 1841; gustaf nagel’s Mein Testament, 1920), and communal organisation and
co-operative ideals as realized in communes like Monte Verità at Ascona, van Eeden’s Walden in Bussum, and Llano del Rio in Southern California.
Another issue I set out to address with the benefit of hind-sight, is the position of women within the various opposi-tional religious/Reform movements. While the iconography
of revolt and revolution has many identifiable charismatic female martyrs and female leader figures, from Jeanne d’Arc to the figure of La Liberté with her Phrygian cap, women artists and designers were notoriously underrepresented and overshadowed by males in Lebensreform no less than in De Stijl. The female form was objectified and idealized in the often kitschy prints of official Lebensreform artists, such as in de the work of the German visual artist Fidus (1868– 1948). Throughout my work, I return to this iconography in order to retool and revise it, for example, in the figure that recurs in many of my installations of Liberty holding up a monkey wrench. In my performance pieces I often position myself anachronistically as an actor out-of-time, for instance, as an animated character from a Lebensreform bass-relief, a worker from a therapeutic spa displaced first to the desert (Diopharma), and then some months later to a gallery in Amsterdam (Ŕ), or as a member of a group of orange monks or nun-witch hybrids street-cleaners sweeping the streets of Amsterdam’s red-light district (Redemption Value, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, 2014).
Experiment
ŔeFo
rm
30
Intro
ductio
n
in ways that set out to complicate hard and fast distinctions between progressive and conservative social and artistic movements.
The influential figure of Madame Blavatsky13, occultist,
feminist and mother of Theosophy, therefore of invented
traditions,14 and what is now called ‘New Age’ thinking,
hangs over the entire project from start to finish as an impenetrable enigma, as both visionary seer and charismatic fraud. The proclamation cited below, taken from Blavatksy’s 1877 opus, Isis Unveiled functions as a unifying mantra: ‘Our voice is raised for spiritual freedom, and our pleas made for enfranchisement from all tyranny, whether of Science or Theology’. (Blavatsky 1877, 41) Each of the four chapters in this dissertation treats the idea of ŔeForm from a different angle, in a sequence that relates the subject matter to the following categories: ŔeForm the Subconscious, ŔeForm the
Body, ŔeForm the Collective and ŔeForm the Landscape. The
chapters contain descriptions and documentation of a total of seven art projects completed as part of my doctoral research.
13 Fig. 0.2. H.P. Blavatsky in 1877, New York. Photo: The Blavatsky Archives.
14 Invented traditions are so called new and non ‘authentic’ traditions, Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983.
Chapters:
Chapter 1: ŔeForm SUBCONSCIOUS (Muddled
Thinking)—Internal Colonization—Unrealistic Dreamer—
American Walden—(Sub-)Consciousness—Enclosed Garden—Asocialen-Private-Prophesy-Detox—Dirt.
The first chapter, ŔeForm SUBCONSCIOUS (Muddled Thinking), deals with the subconscious in relation to Reform practices in recent history. It combines the account given by writer and psychiatrist, Frederik van Eeden of his attempt from 1898 to 1907 to establish a socialist commune on his estate in Bussum in the Netherlands, with documentation of Asocialen
- Private Prophesy - Detox. This was a mud hut and mud bath
installation I built on a ruined campground in Diepenheim, Overijssel in October, 2012. Van Eeden’s socialist utopia and the vision of cooperation on which it was based, contrasts sharply with the experiment in solitude and self-sufficiency conducted by American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau near Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts fifty years earlier. The conflict between these two versions of ‘back to nature’ utopianism — one cooperative and socialist, the other ‘anti-social’ and secessionism — runs throughout the history of the Lebensreform movement. It forms a major source of tension and concern within both this dissertation and the artworks described here as part of the Ŕ project. The conflict played out in the early 20 th century in the bat-tle between social reformers and the ‘asocial’ (marginal or ‘lumpen’) classes, between the Cleanliness, Order and Quiet
programme of social housing advocates15 and the unsanitary
habits of the disobedient masses or the ‘dregs of society’ liv-ing at the end of a low lyliv-ing-delta in the muddy terrain of the Netherlands. Mud as a foundational material creates trouble for modernity’s gridded out future. The story of the Dutch version of Walden is interrupted throughout by extracts from van Eeden’s Dream Diary, a pattern that is reflected in the chapter’s title.
15 The ‘Woningwet’ of 1901 was a series of laws and legislations that were taken in the Netherlands in order to improve housing and end unhealthy slum living. 13 Fig. 0.2. H.P. Blavatsky in 1877, New York.
ŔeFo rm 32 Intro ductio n
Chapter 2: ŔeForm
BODY—HYGIENE-PRANA-PRAXIS: The Lebensreform Legacy — Lebensreform
— Hill of Truth — Ecology — Spiritual Evolution — Anthroposophy — Static Monument to Progress — Nature Prophets — Live Earth, Idols and Embodied Landscape — Occult Dunghill.
The second chapter, ŔeForm
BODY–HYGIENE-PRANA-PRAXIS, focuses on the legacy of the Lebensreform
move-ment by tracing the continuous influence of Lebensreform practices and thinking on today’s alternative health and organic farming movements. The text refers to the growth of Naturopathy, nudism and the counterculture of the body. Through the work of 19th and early 20th century German thinkers such as Adolf Just and Sebastian Kneipp, I track the emergence of a post-Christian animistic approach to health issues in which the idea of a unifying vital force (prana), stirring the entire universe, gives rise to a holis-tic approach. In this methodology, nature can no longer be studied from a detached or objective external view-point, but is seen instead as part of an all-encompassing, inter-linked system of ecology. Here I discuss the legacy of Theosophical and Anthroposophical ideas and beliefs that manifested in a variety of early 20th century experi-mental movements and subcultures from Monte Verità to naturism, from the Wandervogel and Hitler Youth movements to Mondriaan’s neoplasticism and the idealized Nordic iconography of artists like Fidus. By adding my own ŔeForm-inspired objects, drawings and statements to items taken from the Lakenhal Museum collection, my exhibition-installation Statisch Vooruitgangsmonument (Static Monument to Progress, 2008), described earlier in this introduction, I was attempting to literally think through and complicate an already complex and muddy heritage. At the end of this chapter I confront the irrational and contra-modern ten-dencies within the Lebensreform movement, by taking up and taking on the pathological practice of Geophagy: eating earth and soil.
Chapter 3: ŔeForm COLLECTIVE: Countering
(Individual) Culture — Civic Virtue — The Gewebe
Project: Weaving/Worpswede — The Collapse of Civic Virtue — Full Immersion, Co-Knowledge and Hydrotherapy — Redemption Value — A Note On The Colour Orange. The third chapter, ŔeForm COLLECTIVE: Countering (Individual)
Culture, examines the problems and difficulties associated
with the idea(l) of the collective as a vehicle for social, spir-itual, cultural and/or economic transformation. The history of Lebensreform includes many examples of failed social experimentation as groups of people brought together by a common desire to put socialist or anarchist principles into practice within a circumscribed space become sooner or lat-er beset by intlat-ernal divisions and schisms or fall prey to the inherent instability and apocalyptic tendencies of charismatic movements. The central contradiction dealt with in this chapter is between the aspiration on the part of committed individuals to promote a collaborative or cooperative ethos within a circumscribed space and on a small scale and the principles of competitive individualism and private property enshrined in the institutions of the larger societies in which they are embedded.
The chapter weaves back and forth between a meditation on these historical attempts at realizing social utopias at different times and the documentation of two collaborative projects completed back to back in the fall of 2013 by Civic Virtue, the four person artist’s collective which I helped to found in 2009 and of which I was a member until 2014 when we disbanded. And the last project of Civic Virtue which in-volved the construction of a primitive loom on the grounds of the artists’ colony in Worpswede in Lower Saxony found-ed in 1895 by Fritz Mackensen and which four decades later was called by Hitler the National Centre for German Nordic
art.16 The result of this project was the exhibition Immergo
Identidum: Civic Virtue, which was a collective response to the
ŔeFo
rm
34
Intro
ductio
n
idea of religiously inspired counter culture. The exhibition took place at the Stadthausgalerie in Münster, located close to both the Platz des Westfalischen Friedens (Westphalian Peace Square) and the cathedral. Today, the iron cages are still hanging on the cathedral’s façade in which the dead bodies of the Anabaptist rebels were exhibited.
Chapter 4: ŔeForm Land(scape) — Rhizome —
Pearblossom Highway — Diopharma — Earth Works and Non Sites — Compressed Landscape — Land Development — The New World, California and Lebensreform — Nature Boys: California’s Wandervogel — Portable-Digestible Landscapes.
The fourth chapter, ŔeForm Land(scape) draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome in order to chart a network of subterranean connections linking disparate times, events and places. It maps the back and forth migra-tion of Lebensreform ideas, values, and social and aesthetic experiments between northern Europe and the American southwest from the early 20th century to the present, in the wake of the 1960’s and 70’s U.S. hippy movement. The focus of this chapter falls back onto the ground itself: the soil on which history gets made, whether that be Bussum’s Dutch mud, or the dry desert dirt on which the short-lived socialist colony of Llano del Rio (1914 –1918) and Garth Bowles’ present day Boulder Gardens commune in Pioneertown were erected. The research and artworks dealt with here were completed during several trips to California (and in one case, Marfa Texas) undertaken since 2011 and gives a description of Hortus Conclusus, a mini roadside monument piece I installed on private land in Marfa in the spring of 2013. This piece sets out to bridge the distance between European radical traditions and American land-art in a different way from the ‘compressed landscape’ works: a sign with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous text on the origin of private property was mounted on a dried mud structure. This structure was made out of the dirt which was removed to create the mud bath hollow directly beneath it.
I explored the historic roots of the hippy movement in German Romanticism, neo-paganism, health reform and 19th and 20th century back-to-nature movements through archival research in southern California. I made a series of collectable-digestible ‘compressed landscape’ site-specific works in the Netherlands and in the Mojave and Chihuahuan deserts in the American southwest, using fragments of built structures, and earth and plant material collected from the ruins of Llano del Rio and van Eeden’s Walden. I manually ground and compressed these materials into pills that were then vacuum-sealed in pharmaceutical-style plastic pack-ages. This happening was both a re-enactment and a magical act in which belief and faith played a major role. The pills were distributed to members of the public in an improvised ‘alternative’ pharmacy mounted at an exterior location in Wonder Valley, California. (Diopharma was part of the
Spectacular Sub-Division group show, 6-4-2014 organized
ŔeFo
rm
36
Cha
pter 1:
ŔeFo
rm
SUBCON
SCIOUS
(Muddled
Thinking
)
ŔeFo
rm
38
Subco
ns
cio
us
Chapter 1:
ŔeForm SUBCONSCIOUS (Muddled Thinking)
In this chapter I use Frederik van Eeden’s Walden experi-ment as a case study to examine the role of the subcon-scious, of regression and dreams in the articulation and testing of Lebensreform ideas and ideals. The spread of utopian artist colonies, rooted in a ‘back to the land’ ethos across both northern Europe and the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is typically seen as a reaction on the part of intellectuals and artists to the onward march of industrialization, urbanization and colonialism. In this process of resistance to emergent capitalist values, the soil itself figures for Lebensreformers as both fruitful resource and raw material: the ground upon which the garden we need to get back to is grown. In my own work, mud figures in a similar way as the primary material with which, and on which I work. At the same time it functions as a symbol of every-thing progressive modernism struggles to distinguish itself from and to master.
Internal Colonization
ŔeFo rm 40 Subco ns cio us
way it was introduced in the wake of the anarchic 1960’s was designed to discourage future attempts at repeating the experiment.
Nowadays, Bussum is one of the most expensive living areas in northern Holland, in ‘Het Gooi’, and is sometimes even referred to as a ‘reservation for the wealthy’. At the time of van Eeden this situation was quite different: when his group arrived to found their socialistic gardening colony, they were building on what was then barren land. The plot of land that van Eeden bought was part of a private estate of one of his former patients (van Eeden, 1980), but the thin, sandy soil proved infertile and unsuitable for farming. Van Eeden’s idea to enlist artists, dreamers and psychiatric patients to establish a self-sustaining colony turned out to be a recipe for disaster and bankruptcy: seven years later he was left with a gigantic debt. Much later I learned that, although it eventually failed, van Eeden's colony can be regarded as a pioneering experiment in co-operative living, based on the ideas of communal land ownership. These ideas grew out of the broader Land Reform movement of that time, for which
van Eeden was a spokesman and an energetic advocate.1 The
colony initially consisted mainly of artists and well-off young people who wanted to escape the city, together with a number of van Eeden’s psychiatric patients for whom manual labour in the colony’s fields and workshops was supposed to be therapeutic. In the wake of the 1903 railway strike, a group of fired railway workers joined the colony. This was the first of a flow of working class recruits with multiple practical skills. They were drawn by van Eeden’s writings on
the principles of ‘homeland colonization’2 and communal
land ownership, whereby self-sustaining communes were to function as a social-economic tool, gradually reforming society from within. The Reform movement presented a gradualist ‘organic’ alternative to violent revolution in radical
1 The Organisation of Communal Landownership was called: Vereniging Gemeenschappelijk Grond Bezit (GGB). It existed between 1901–1958.
2 van Eeden, F. Binnenlandse Kolonisatie, Vereniging Gemeenschappelijk Grondbezit, Amsterdam, W. Versluys, 1901
circles in the late 19th and early 20th century. Society would be altered not by the seizure of power by a revolutionary caucus, but by a process of ‘osmosis’. Smaller cells organized along communitarian lines, would gradually transform society as a whole from the bottom up. Van Eeden’s Reform agenda appears tied to his experience as a psychiatrist. I think that it is clear that van Eeden set out to transpose his ideas con-cerning the therapeutic treatment of the individual mind (his patients) to the larger social organism that he regarded as sick and equally in need of a radical ‘cure’.
‘...already for a long time I have considered my house too large and my life too wasteful. I metabolize more than 6000 guilders per year and I have no idea on what. This consuming of what others bring forth strenuously is causing me grief. Now I’m planning to buy a small piece of land to place a small house on. I will cut into my household costs and will try to live on what the land at my disposal makes possible through hard work and planning. Then I will save money and I want to share this with others who want to live the same kind of life with me but are not able to do this by themselves because they don’t have the means to
buy themselves out of this society.’3
It seems clear from even a casual reading of the history of modernism that van Eeden’s experiment was just one in a long line of attempts on the part of radical counter-culturalists to dismantle the principle and practice of private property. One of the most iconic examples of opposition to the institution of private property occurred in 17th century England, around the time of the English Civil War (1642– 1651). The Diggers, a group of protestant agrarian egalitar-ians led by Gerrard Winstanley resisted the enclosure of common land by planting vegetables at St. George’s Hill, near Cobham in Surrey, and settled in the vicinity, thereby forming the first Agrarian Socialist commune. More than a
3 Fragment of a letter by Frederik van Eeden to Henri Borel, Bussum, dated 28 February 1898
ŔeFo
rm
42
Subco
ns
cio
us
century later, Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his famous denun-ciation of private property as a destructive and egotistical institution, equated private land ownership with the origins of social injustice: ‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society’ (Rousseau 1754). Rousseau’s critique of property as theft helped clear the ground for the French Revolution. It seems incontestable that in northern Europe and North America, the state historically has tended to ob-struct and to oppose any concerted attempts on the part of ordinary citizens to abolish private property and share goods in common. Early examples of levelling attempts to over-throw existing property law include the Anabaptist rebellion in Münster of 1534, and the lesser known abortive attempt at an Anabaptist revolution in Amsterdam a year later, which grew out of the German Peasant’s War (1524–1525). In the first case, the Münster Anabaptists seized the city and installed a religious egalitarian commune under the leader-ship of the Dutch prophet, Jan van Leiden. Van Leiden held the city for a year until it was recaptured by troops led by the Bishop of Münster and the Count of Essen, and all the surviving insurrectionaries were either killed or tortured. These predecessors of the 20th century Lebensreform spirit figure in this dissertation and in my work as Reformation archetypes. I am convinced that their actions and their fates — the faith of Reformation martyrs — continues to haunt the dissident imagination up to this day. They are the restless, unavenged ghosts of an alternative history of the world that remains thwarted and unfinished, and which finds an outlet in our dreams.
Fig. 1.1. Asocialen - Private Prophesy - Detox, Ruchama Noorda, installation performance, Diepenheim, 2012. Photo: RN.
Unrealistic Dreamer
It is worth noting that from the start, van Eeden’s Walden experiment in Bussum was treated with contempt and scorn by the press and leading intelligentsia in Holland. In 1907, not long after Walden’s downfall, van Eeden set out to defend the colony in (social) scientific terms in his article entitled ‘My Experiences in the Field of Sociology’, published in De Gids literary magazine:
‘And one has to admit that especially when it comes to social economic issues, the testing of one’s own theo-ries by experiment is not a common practice, but is no less valid for that. My education in the natural sciences during my medical training taught me the importance of practical experimental research in all studies’ (van Eeden 1907, 102–122).
ŔeFo
rm
44
Subco
ns
cio
us
failure as irrelevant. However, in van Eeden’s case the con-ventional idea of scientific detachment hardly applies, since observer and observed cannot in any way be separated from one another. Theory and practice were one and the same in this instance, and van Eeden could not approach the ‘body of society’ as pure other, as his own body, mind and socio-economic circumstances, in other words his privileged posi-tion, were all implicated in the research and formed part of the ‘object of study’. The spirit of ridicule, which greeted van Eeden’s Walden, can be seen in the work of another well-known contemporary writer, Nescio — the Latin pseudonym of Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh, meaning ‘I do not know’:
‘...one day when we walked there on a Sunday, about a four hour walk, we came across a hatless gentleman in a farmer’s costume wearing very expensive yellow shoes, eating candies out of a paper bag, in intense communion with nature, as they described it that time and a beard full of crumbs. We didn’t dare to go
further and just walked back to Amsterdam.’4
4 Nescio (De Uitvreter, 1911) on van Eeden’s Walden.
ŔeFo
rm
46
Subco
ns
cio
us
By the 1960’s, Nescio (1882–1961) was regarded as one of the most important writers in the canon of modern Dutch literature. All of Nescio’s work bears witness to the conflict between his own career and his ideals, against the backdrop of a flourishing pan-European utopian socialist movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Nescio’s thinly veiled reference to van Eeden as ‘the Sponger’ in his novel of the same name (De Uitvreter — The Sponger, 1911) is character-istic of the contempt in which Agrarian Socialism was then held, even in Bohemian circles: ‘Except the man that thinks the Sarphatistraat is the most beautiful place in Europe, I have never known a more unusual guy as the Sponger.’ (Nescio 1911, 45)
Although van Eeden appears here in Nescio’s fiction, most notably at the beginning of Nescio’s novel, De Uitvreter, the character seems to be a mix between van Eeden and other clichés surrounding the bohemian lifestyle. Nescio, a one-time salesman from 1901–1903, set up ‘Tames’, his own short lived attempt at a self-sustaining commune near Huizen. Some of the resentment Grönloh seems to have felt towards the older man may have stemmed from the fact that Nescio in 1900 had tried unsuccessfully to join the Bussum community in 1900. He was rejected presumably because he was an ‘artistic type’ (Heijder 1995, 103–107). Van Eeden by this time was seeking to attract members of the labouring classes with proven manual skills. During the Bussum years, van Eeden tended to be portrayed in the press as a charlatan and unrealistic dreamer. In one newspaper cartoon (Fig. 1.3), van Eeden appears beneath the caption ‘Royal Simplicity’, dressed as a farmer standing on a pile of hay carrying a pitchfork. His own books are skewered on the tines. He is surrounded by a crowd of his followers who are hailing him as the ‘King of Walden’. This satirical portrait of van Eeden as a vain demagogue leading gullible followers astray, or as a dreamer wearing foot-re-form sandals, remained largely unchallenged and the image became fixed in the historical record. The caricature of a ‘Geitenwollensokken Idealist’ (an idealist in goat woollen socks) in the Netherlands persists to this day. In the 1970’s
with the rise of the hippy movement, socks-and-sandals became once again a conventional emblem of unworldly non-conformism.
Left a caricature of van Eeden in Magazine Vooruitgang 1903 nr. 39 and right a drawing by Albert Hahn in Het Volk; Amsterdam, 1906. Images Courtesy of DBNL. 5
In the second caricature (see fig. 1.4 above) van Eeden is called ‘a failed reformer’. He is standing beside a dried out plant growing on ruins. The depiction of Walden’s founder as an ‘unrealistic dreamer’ seems to be strangely fitting to his research into dreams. As a psychiatrist in the circles around Freud, van Eeden did actually coin the term ‘lucid dream-ing’ (Mavrematis 1987, 96) in his 1913 article, ‘A study of Dreams’ printed in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research (van Eeden, 1913).
Lucid dreaming is a state in which one ‘wakes up’ in a dream and is thus able to consciously operate inside it. By doing so the conscious dreamer becomes actively engaged in the
5 http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/eede003wald01_01/eede-003wald01_01_0209.php
ŔeFo
rm
48
Subco
ns
cio
us
work of creating reality by envisioning or imagining it. The following dream from van Eeden’s dream diary of 3 February 1903 mentions the half-conscious dream states he describes in the article:
‘I had a dream influenced by a hostile review in the newspa-per in which I was again portrayed as an imposter. I woke up in a room and Hans was entering the door. Then I thought how much this being awake resembles dreaming and still I’m awake. And I felt sad because life is a dream-like illusion. Then more or less lurid stuff, my father, a skeleton, Hans with dirty hair, etc. Then I suddenly really woke up and it took a while for me to realize that I’d been misled again.’
(van Eeden 1979, 149)6
Fig. 1.5. Ruins of Thoreau’s hut, Lake Walden, Concord, Mass. Postcard from Ebay.7
American Walden
With its roots firmly planted in the Romantic movement, the idea of forming a self-sustaining brotherhood based on principles of equality and justice, on a small scale through communion with nature, held a strong practical and political
6 van Eeden, Dromenboek (Dream Book), 8 January 1898. 7 http://www.ebay.com/sch/sis.html?_nkw=Thoreaus%20
Cairn%20Concord%20Massachusetts%20Linen%20 1948%20Postcard&_itemId=390827176615 <13 May 2015>
as well as a spiritual appeal for many Western intellectuals, who were concerned about the alienating effects of urbani-zation and industrialism. In the 19th and early 20th centu-ries one of the most celebrated and influential experiments of this kind was famously documented in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). The book is the author’s literary account of two years he spent living by himself in a house he built with his own hands in the woods of Massachusetts. Thoreau’s goal was to gain a better understanding of both society and himself through seclusion and personal intro-spection. During his solitary sojourn in the forest on the edge of Walden Pond in Concord, Thoreau attempted to live a self-sufficient life, cutting his own timber, growing his own vegetables and going on long walks into the sur-rounding countryside. Not only did Thoreau’s book (and title) serve as the inspiration for van Eeden’s own efforts in alternative living, but Thoreau’s aspiration to ‘live deliber-ately’, that is consciously, might be said to correspond at some level to van Eeden’s idea of lucid dreaming as a tool in the development of the self. I think that in both cases the individual is approached holistically as an integrated organ-ism that both shapes and mirrors the larger world in which s/he operates.
ŔeFo
rm
50
Subco
ns
cio
us
Fig. 1.6. The cabin of Carry van Hoogstraten, a colonist at Walden circa 1903 and van Eeden’s cabin at Walden, circa 1905. Image Courtesy of DBNL1
1 http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/eede003wald01_01/eede-003wald01_01_0209.php<13 May 2015>
A mentee and close colleague of the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau was part of the American Transcendentalist movement. This movement had its roots in German Romanticism and the then recently translated texts of eastern Vedic Philosophy. Although some Transcendentalists were interested in radical social change, at least on a theoretical level, others in this group (including Emerson himself) considered it an exclusively individualist project. He makes this clear, for instance, in his essay ‘On Self-Reliance’ in 1841. For Emerson, individual development and self-reliance were the leading virtues. I would argue that Thoreau, by way of contrast, in putting the principle of self-reliance into practice at Walden Pond, projected introspec-tion outwards, thereby developing a thorough critique of the new American democracy and of the capitalist economic and social relations that emerged with it.
Van Eeden’s experimental colony functioned from 1898 to1907 and can be seen as an extension of Thoreau’s experiment: a collective European answer to the American Transcendentalists’ more individualistic approach. The ex-perimental character of the Dutch Walden colony is evident. It constituted what was in effect a multi-year process of cu-mulative, collaborative research (van Eeden’s Walden experi-ment lasted from 1860–1932). The exclusive but collective
garden cultivated at Bussum and neighbouring villages sur-rounded by primitive cabins reminded me of similar reclusive institutions — such as a monastery or a mental hospital or a sanatorium — because the experiment was taking place in the equivalent of an enclosed garden. But for Bussum to suc-ceed as a reform project with large-scale effects on society,
it would have to be expanded and replicated elsewhere.8
This might have happened, despite the negative attention during that time. Even today, in some corners or niches of society, the experiment survives as an idea and a model.
(Sub-)Consciousness
As a psychiatrist, van Eeden used hypnosis in an effort to help his patients retain consciousness at some level while crossing the border between dreaming and waking. In his writings and speeches he was open about how hypnosis works in and through suggestion. In his 1913 article, ‘A Study of Dreams’ he rejected the idea of the productivity of the unconscious as something without an willed intention:
ŔeFo rm 52 Subco ns cio us
‘I, for one, do not believe in “unconsciousness” any more than in Santa Claus.’ For van Eeden, dreams are not the result of a passive process, like taking dictation, but are rather forms of experience, internal dialogue and expres-sion in which one can actively and consciously engage. These are two of his dreams from his dream diary that I think illustrate this point:
‘In May 1903 I dreamt that I was in a little provin-cial Dutch town and met my brother-in-law, who had died some time before. I was absolutely sure that it was he, and at the same time I knew that he was dead. He told me that he had communicated at length with my “controller”, as he put it — my guiding spirit. I felt glad, and our conversation was very cor-dial and more intimate than it had ever been when he’d been alive. He told me that I was facing impend-ing financial disaster. Somebody was goimpend-ing to rob me of a sum of 10,000 guilders. I said I understood, though later when I woke up I found myself utterly puzzled and unable to make sense of what he’d said. My brother-in-law had informed me it was my guid-ing spirit that had warned him about my financial situation. I’d gone on to tell the story to somebody else in my dream. Then I’d asked my brother-in-law to tell me more about the after-life, and just as he was about to reply I woke up — as if somebody had cut off the communication. I was not at that time as accustomed to prolonging my dreams as I am now.’ (…)
‘Lately I have had some more clear dreams some-times with doubling?? some days ago, for instance, I dreamt I was floating above a city and its hinterland, I saw everything very clearly. I saw wild animals, cattle and other beasts running towards me, but I was float-ing above them and was pressfloat-ing them down with some kind of fork. Though the animals wore fright-ening facial expressions, I wasn’t scared of them. I understood that while under normal circumstances I would be afraid I merely felt annoyed and a little sad. Because the animals had to my mind very low and
despicable expressions of uncontrolled aggression, I clearly remember a grey cow’s head with cruel, dumb wild eyes, that I skewered (with my fork) out of disgust. And I thought everything was uni-formly low and ignoble. The animals made unusual jumps, flipping back upon themselves. And I thought that these repetitive movements were probably the dream shape of something I had seen the night before. And I tried to think of what I had seen that could have caused this dream. This was a double judgement during my sleep, made as I stood above the dream. This fact made me happy the next day and it still does. It is what Thoreau called “The sense of Dawn in soundest sleep”. I want to raise my judge-ment above sleep and dream’ (van Eeden 1979, 75).
Enclosed Garden
ŔeFo
rm
54
Subco
ns
cio
us
contrast to the contemporary paradise of suburban villas for which the area is now known. The protection of the fenced-in hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) has nowadays been outsourced to private security companies and elabo-rate hightech alarm systems.
Fig. 1.7. The former colony of Walden, Bussum. Walden, digital photograph, Ruchama Noorda, 2014.
Asocialen-Private Prophesy-Detox
Asocialen-Private Prophesy-Detox was a sculpture and
happen-ing I presented in 2012 as part of the Now I lay Me Down To
Eat project. From 26 – 28 May, ten artists camped out with
members of the public for three days in an abandoned camp site in Diepenheim, in the east of the Netherlands, with the aim of forming a temporary autonomous artist community. On a clearing surrounded by tall trees we built a house out of loam, osier and straw mounted on a frame of repurposed material such as discarded bicycle frames and shopping carts (Fig.1.8). This pieced together framework remained visible through the skin of loam, which covered it and protected the interior to some degree from the elements. The hut became a place of shelter and retreat — a muddled version
of ‘social housing in the wild’. Behind the ‘house’ in the backyard, we dug a kidney shaped pool that was designed to function as a curative mud spa, a social hub and detox centre: a place to relax with friends and family while purg-ing the skin of impurities. The frieze above and beside the entrance of the hut was inspired by decorative architectural ornaments, found on the facades of early 20th century Dutch social housing. Like the original Amsterdam School’s friezes, it referenced socialistic ideals of welfare, labour and progress. The temporary construction out of loam created a provisional monument to a set of historical ideals now increasingly consigned to the ‘dunghill of history’. The struc-ture will gradually disintegrate, washed away in Holland’s watery climate by exposure to the elements.
ŔeFo
rm
56
Subco
ns
cio
us Fig. 1.8. Asocialen-Private Prophesy-Detox, performance and installation, Ruchama Noorda, Diepenheim, 2012. Photo: RN.
I think that together with the medieval overcrowded living situations in historic cities, the dilapidated shacks and impro-vised housing that seemed almost to have grown out of the damp Netherlands soil, were held responsible by modern urban planners for epidemics of tuberculosis and other diseases, and were linked in the minds of the administrators and progressive modernists in Holland and elsewhere to bad nutrition and ‘backward’ or ‘primitive’ living conditions. The people living in these kinds of structures were often called ‘a-socials’ because they lived beyond the reach of the emerging bureaucracies outside governmental control. State intervention via housing reform was also an attempt on the part of the reforming elites to regulate as well as improve the living conditions of the ‘underclass’. However, not all the relocated people volunteered happily to give up the hard won autonomous habitat they had built for themselves, and there was an element of coercion that was resented and in some cases resisted.
Fig. 1.9. An example of the Dutch ‘plaggenhut’ (sod hous-ing) at the beginning of the 20th century. Photo: National Archive Spaarnestad Photo.
ŔeFo
rm
58
Subco
ns
cio
us
Fig. 1.10. Asocialen-Private Prophesy-Detox, performance and installation, Ruchama Noorda, Diepenheim, 2012. Photos: Paulien Oltheten.
On the wall of our mud house in Diepenheim, next to the interior campfire, a neon light box containing ergot (spoiled rye) was installed, radiating blue light that was visible at night through the open door (Fig. 1.11.). Ergot is a parasitic fungus which appears in wheat. It was a widespread contaminant of the cereal grains that were central to the diet of the peasantry throughout medieval Europe. The Ergot parasite caused periodic waves of gangrene and ‘choromania’ (exces-sive unstoppable dancing, sometimes called ‘St. Vitus Dance’ throughout the Middle Ages). The potent hallucinogen Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) which served as a catalyst for the counterculture of the 1960’s was first synthesized from ergot alkaloids in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland (Hoffmann 1980, 37).
Fig. 1.11. Asocialen-Private Prophesy-Detox, performance and installation, Ruchama Noorda, Diepenheim, 2012. Photo: RN.
ŔeFo
rm
60
Subco
ns
cio
us
Fig. 1.12. Asocialen-Private Prophesy-Detox, performance and installation, Ruchama Noorda, Diepenheim, 2012. Photo: Paulien Oltheten.
Dirt
Both mud (dirt) and ergot (fungus) are polluting and purify-ing agents at the same time. Functionpurify-ing potentially as either contaminant or cure (or both at once), mud and ergot in my view are reminiscent of Plato’s pharmakon — a word that incorporates the diametrically opposed meanings of ‘poison’ and ‘remedy’. In Asocialen, the installation-performance I made in Diepenheim in 2012, I worked with ideas that spoke through rudimentary and elemental materials. The concept of ‘social housing in the wild’ sprung forth out of ideas sur-rounding camping and outdoor activities that have been of great importance to the Lebensreform movement together with general yearnings to go back-to-nature. Anthropologist Mary Douglas states:
ŔeFo
rm
62
Subco
ns
cio
us
Fig. 1.13. Asocialen-Private Prophesy-Detox, performance and installation, detail: ergot fungi, Ruchama Noorda, Diepenheim, 2012. Photo: RN.
Within my Lebensreform research project, this binary urge connects to the symptoms of alienation and lifestyle-generated ailments. It was the desire to go ‘primitive’ that started me on this path — a longing to go back to the basics and a fascination with the paradoxical idea of
progress-through-regression. Whereas psychologists tend to classify regression negatively as a defence mechanism, i.e. the organism’s reversion when under pressure to an earlier stage of development, regression, according to me, could also be considered a creative act involving play that is potentially triggering adaptive behaviour. The mud bath func-tioned both as a form of relaxation therapy and as a baptis-mal ritual, providing access to the work. The mud pool was the first threshold to be crossed in the dissolution of the boundaries between body and dirt. Although the installation appeared natural, the material out of which the hut and bath were constructed was actually pre-packaged ‘instant mud’ (‘just add water’) purchased in bulk from an organic building supply store 250km south of the installation site. Participants thus found themselves immersed in an experience that was simultaneously both ‘natural’ and ‘inauthentic’ (here the dirt was literally as well as figuratively ‘matter out of place’). The breathing exercises during the ritual rave were designed to invoke a sense of grounding and exaggerated gravity, which helped to shape the embodied experience and to merge the
participants with the landscape.9
By mounting the performative and ritual work,
Asocialen-Private Prophesy-Detox in a plein air natural setting, I was
aware of the connection to the type of immersive ritual performances choreographed at Monte Verità by Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman. Such performances were examples of the Gesamtkunstwerk and improvisational
Ausdruckstanz10 (expressionist dance) in a natural setting
(Brandstetter 1998, 453). Consciously or otherwise I was setting out in Diepenheim to restage or recapitulate ele-ments of the Monte Verità experiment.
9 Merleau-Ponty described the embodied experience prior to mental representation as: ‘my body has its world, or understands its world, without having to make use of my “symbolic” or “objectifying function” ’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 140–141).
10 Ausdruckstanz was developed out of
