Roy Villevoye’s LIKE at the Museum Beelden aan Zee
By Sophie Turner
Roy Villevoye, LIKE, 1996, six plates on aluminium light boxes, 552 x 11 x 62 cm. Image sourced from Museum Beelden aan Zee’s Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/museumBeeldenaanZee/posts.
Museum wall labels act as an important means of contextualising an art work, offering viewers the means to gain an appreciation of the artist’s intentions beyond the work’s obvious aesthetics. The curatorial design of a recent acquisition at the Museum Beelden aan Zee, in The Hague, appears to disregard the value of contextualisation; Roy Villevoye’s LIKE is hung with no description of the artwork beside its name and materials. A curious acquisition in itself; Roy Villevoye’s photographic exhibit was donated by Anno Lampe and Lex Plompen to the Netherlands’ only museum that focuses upon modern sculpture, specifically representations of the human form. Displayed within lightboxes, the exhibit could be considered to have a three-dimensional quality. However, in a self-reflexive manner, the work is thematically concerned with photographic representations of intimacy which positions itself directly within its own medium. Hung in a corridor between the two main display rooms, LIKE can be considered a prompt for the freestanding sculptures and is thus forced into a subsidiary position; an age-old hierarchy between low photography and high sculpture and painting. With little attention given to the artistic object, one can ask whether LIKE is afforded the opportunity to convey its message within a sculpture museum, exploring the limitations but also possibilities with this.
LIKE comprises of a series of six photographs that are housed inside aluminium light boxes, which discuss human connection both intimately and globally. Three of the photographs present intimate human connection from cultures across the globe: an Indian father carrying a child, an Asmat father from the Indonesian part of New Guinea who carries a child on his back and a white person who is hugged by two hands. The images are cropped, closely focusing upon the skin-to-skin connection that is witnessed across cultures, delineating the universality of these intimate bonds. These three photographs alternate with another three that display hands holding up coloured boards in cyan, magenta and yellow; the three colours which, combined with black, are used within photographic printing. The cropped focus upon the skin of different ethnicities is juxtaposed with the knowledge that different skin tones are reproduced in photography using the same three colours; a concept that invites similarity rather than difference. The museum Beelden aan Zee was founded upon a private collection that focused upon sculptural representations of the human form. Even without wall labels, the work supports the museum’s thematic curation. The concept of human connection invites viewers to consider their relationship with the human sculptures surrounding them, fostering a more empathetic response. However, considering the photographic exhibit as a tool to train the viewer’s eye to respond to the sculptures reduces the individual significance of the object. Moreover, the message of universal feeling only becomes clear if one recognises the colours to be those used within the printing of the images of skin. Thus, without a wall label, the work may be lost upon the viewer and moves towards abstraction.
Throughout Villevoye’s work, his photographs contrast cultures by placing seemingly disparate objects alongside each other. Within the 1990s, Villevoye repeatedly travelled and photographed the Asmat people, who are represented within LIKE. His photographs contend with traditional anthropological studies that focus on cultures because of their temporal difference to modern Western culture. Placing the cyan, magenta and yellow planes within the jungle, interacting with the modern camera lens, Villevoye argues that the Asmat people also live within “an impure, multiple and contradictory present” rather than our ‘primitive’ past. The comparison between different cultures that are given an equal weighting within LIKE throws off the traditional ethnographic position of subject versus object, highlighting how every culture now contributes to our globalised world. Sven Lütticken, in his essay titled ‘Roy Villevoye’s Art of Exchange’, makes an interesting observation that “Villevoye enlists the cooperation of Papuans to produce artistic commodities that enable him to survive as an artist in the West”. However, the curation of LIKE without a wall label reduces the specificity of the cultures represented, only citing Villevoye’s name as the Western artist who profits from the piece, perpetuating the colonial idea of the ‘other’.
Main exhibition area inside Museum Beedlen aan Zee.
Conversely, the lack of contextualisation for LIKE that reduces the work’s cultural specificity could be viewed as an opportunity for the work to function as an aesthetic display rather than a photographic record that is set for an anthropological museum. Throughout the Museum Beelden aan Zee, there is a conscious effort placed upon material and technique. Speaking to the museum’s head of collections, Dick van Broekhuizen described how, to live up to the name of a museum of modern sculpture, they are looking to expand the focus of their collection beyond the human form to include more abstract work. Thus, the lack of contextualisation is perhaps a step to invite a new genre of art into a museum that is well established in figuration. The headline ‘ABSTRACT+BEELD’ (ABSTRACT + SCULPTURE) that announced the acquisition suggests the curators to have found value in the abstract quality of the work. Again, this can be viewed as the photographs contributing to the wider museum’s focus rather than valuing it as an individual art piece. However, the consideration of colour and form within Villevoye’s oeuvre allows his photographs to be viewed as art rather than ethnography, moving away from the display of documentary photography that invokes past colonial systems of racial hierarchy.
Thus, are wall labels important? Should a photographic exhibit belong within a sculpture museum? Is the museum Beelden aan Zee just being idle – considering LIKE only important as a means to invite the visitors to consider the collection as a whole? Without a wall label, we cannot understand the work fully - it loses its cultural specificity and becomes a study of colour. Yet, while LIKE’s place within a sculpture museum reduces the specificity of the work, one thing is for sure that the photographs are works of art and do not belong as ethnographic material for an anthropological museum. LIKE is not a record of culture but rather an artistic representation of it.
Bibliography:
J. Dietvosrt, “Introduction” in Roye Villevoye. Detours, ed. J. Dietvorst. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2008.
Seven Lutticken, “Roy Villevoye’s Art of Exchange,” in Detours. ed. J. Dietvorst. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2008.
Museum Beelden aan Zee. “ABSTRACT+BEELD” Facebook, 5th June 2022. https://www.facebook.com/museumBeeldenaanZee/posts/pfbid0QZEpTi2ijTeBkuPRahsEwFHvyAWrMzfaoYJkgxaWsd2M9DbL3m5Rv4XuT8xoFUcKl (Date Accessed: 5th April 2023)