New Europeans

A Test Site For Everyday Life

Making Histories Apr22 2016, Amsterdam

David Bade’s Frieze of Our Time – Interview

Talking to David Bade in front of his sculpture (a decorative relief reacting on the present European moment), the interview started as a bit of a therapy session, with Bade the therapist and me the patient. I started by telling him I was a bad interviewer (always a good start) because I often ended up doing too much of the talking. He kindly reassured me that he was a big talker himself (it was indeed a pretty balanced conversation). We then went on to talk about the difficulties of making a mark on the wall (our exhibition space) which quickly led to a broader discussion of the differences between his native Curaçao on the one hand, and the Netherlands (and Europe more broadly) on the other.

Bade boiled it down to a lack of necessity. In Curaçao, he works with 16-24 year olds in a very free, autonomous context, working together with their parents to discover their passions and try to focus these passions into meaningful and useful pursuits. There he sees necessity. They do art because they need to do it.

In contrast, the arts are very established in Western Europe. Some time ago art became, in his words, “luxury decoration”: something of value but not something that was completely transformative and vital for the people doing or experiencing it. Sure, there’s a lot more funding for it here, but you have to formally justify your ideas before you act and explain them after you’ve acted. As such, expectations are higher and the space to create is more restrictive.

On this note, later this year, Bade explained how he will bring his work at the school in Curaçao to an exhibition in Holland, to show Holland how it’s done (De Kunsthal Rotterdam : ‘IBB All you can Ary’). But I think the themes are just as evident in his current work at our site, which at the time of the interview was a wall of suits, with clay-modelled heads protruding from the necks of each (many of these are contributions from participating groups and individuals).

David told me that the suits were a pretty recent decision. A week before work on the sculpture began, he sent his interns to market in search of a deal on a couple of dozen suits (finalising the deal over the phone, he said he felt like an old-style trader). It’s fitting that this was the material he chose to initially fill the empty grid. I picture him staring at this imposing wall, looking at the surrounding environment, probably seeing one or two besuited men wandering past the heavy security and into the facility and making the natural decision to have suits as the centrepiece of a decorative relief about the present European moment.

I asked him whether his intention was for the suits to signify European institutions. His response was hesitant. “Yes, sort of” he said, “and the funny thing is that everybody understands… content-wise I made the point, not that heavy, it’s reality, but it’s also abstract because what do we really know about those meetings?”. From this I surmised the intention of the sculpture is rather to bring these people out into the open, down to a human level, and also to make good-natured fun of them.

It brought to mind a contrast with the pleasure people in the UK have derived from the literal decay of their houses of parliament, which is so dilapidated that the politicians have to move out. I said it’s sad that we get any enjoyment out of the decay of our institutions. “Yes. It is sad, [also] that I come to the conclusion that [Europe] is about suits” he added, while making it clear that the piece was about more than the suits: the faces are fun and they convey the personalities and histories of each of the participants who contributed.

As we talked, we moved onto a broader discussion of his approach. “Regarding my drawings and paintings,” he explained “some are very full of stuff, full of images and association, I’m a storyteller and I love the anecdote and the encounter, and what it brings. And then I translate it into form. It’s like a poem.” This says a lot about why Bade’s work appeals to me personally, because it tells stories, and also because (as with my own approach to writing) it is not overly planned and is responsive to other people’s input, with the overall idea developing gradually. He kept using the word “encounter” to describe what informs the process, a word which evokes chance meetings and a kind of mental meandering (meander being another word that came up quite a bit). It makes for work that is incredibly effective at absorbing its context.

One such encounter during the process of the current work brings us back to the golden thread of our conversation, institutional restriction. It involved a young graduate in sculpture who was contributing a clay model admitting that he wasn’t familiar with clay-work. His reason: “Well you know I work very contemporary”. This greatly amused us both. But Bade was quick to highlight that the clay model that the person did was really great. That’s not the issue. The issue is that we live in a very specialised society, where it has become difficult to act without talking a lot first and where we are denied the basic tools to take direct action (something I also dealt with in my review of the Bildung Acadamie).

It was clear as we talked that the work was not finished. “I want to make it more alive” Bade told me. But it has already achieved a wonderful articulation of the local context and the wider state of affairs in European society. I think it also says a lot that I have managed to pour a lot of my own current concerns into the sculpture. It is, indeed, an exceptionally porous work, absorbing its surroundings and the stories of the people who encounter it. It is a credit to Bade that he is capable of reading a person, listening to them and encouraging them to make thoughtful contributions. With that in mind, I would urge you all to stop by and take a look.