^{And Yet a Trace of the True Self Exists in the False Self} 

^{At the end of the evening the end of the evening, conversations intensify, as if trying to cover all the ground before time runs out. There is a general sense of feverish urgency and excitement. ‘LAATSTE ROOONDE’— the bartender’s call cuts the air thick with breaths and beers. Conversations turn apocalyptic, and we take the apocalypse out onto the streets.}

We’ve been told it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But since we’re already living in the near-extinction future, I guess at some point imagination must make room for experience. At least that’s what my friend says, ‘wegbier’ in his hand, as we continue our drunkard’s walk.

‘THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS’ always already sounded like the name of a zombie film. We should have known better. Some years ago, I would be writing this text nestled up on a second-hand sofa in one of the oddball hipster cafés cropping up across my neighbourhood. Now, I’m wrapped up in a blanket and hunched over a desk at my overpriced and under-heated studio apartment. There’s been so much talk about speculative futures amongst artists and institutions. Is there not enough speculation in our undead cities? ‘HAITI’s HOMELESS GET TARPS, WANT TENTS.’

After smokestacks and pit heads, billboards became new monuments to industrial obsolescence. Wedged in the landscape, those lonesome brutes obstruct the flow of time and divert currency streams. Billboards hollering ‘YOUR AD HERE’ to anyone who cares to look up. Billboards, disappearing into the landscape. Billboards enacting the vengeance. ‘BILLBOARD CRUSHES CAR, INJURES TWO’. Tarp, tar, trickle, turquoise.

This is the end of the world of advertising as we know it. Advertising has now become fully internalised. It is no longer an extension but a structural part of digital and subliminal infrastructures. Living in a city used to be like living with permanent tinnitus; we had to learn to ignore the surrounding visual noise. Now, I live in an ad-free part of town, where its own carefully cultivated image, distributed across social networks, has become its most efficient advertisement.

I experience a pinch of nostalgia and a tangy feel in my mouth when passing by the only postered blind wall in this part of town. Faded posters are peeling off, revealing traces of information starved for attention. Someone is leaning against the wall, holding up a cardboard sign that reads ‘EXHIBITION TEXTS ARE SPONSORED CONTENT—CHANGE MY MIND’.

What comes after the attention economy? Are we all going to become prosumers, in an autophagic manner consuming only our own content?

I’ve always preferred to look at works in their context, from the distance of a second remove, I tell Arthur the other day, after we both confess how challenging it is to put in words our opinions — no, feelings — on painting. Each time he sees a painting he likes, Arthur says, he has this distinct taste on his tongue… ‘Tangy?’ I inquire.

While I enjoy lingering on their surfaces, appreciating the interplay of abstract and figurative elements, it is the ostentatious materiality of Arthur’s paintings — ‘synthetic’, ‘sticky’, ‘weathered’ — that speaks most urgently to me. What does it say?

It says something about the processes of production and distribution of the work, the histories of the stuff that makes it up, set against the backdrop of extractive, logistic, and financial operations that simultaneously implode the globe and lash it together.

It is a hauntological, palimpsestic kind of materiality: used truck tarpaulin reads like a road novel of the cargo’s journey; layers of shoe shine and ink lure the eye inwards; here and there, adhesive vinyl is peeling off, revealing traces of information.

The silhouettes of plants in Arthur’s paintings hark back to their fossilised forefathers whose juices nourished the synthetic composite they are made from. They make me think of the cycles of material transformation, of decay and renewal, not only in the physical sense but also in terms of the materials’ circulation across different mental domains that we neatly divide from one another in order to make sense of the extractive world order; the domains we call ‘nature’ or ‘industry’ or ‘culture’.

And they are, in fact, a kind of fossil —of the past work, referring back to the project ‘Kunst-planten’, during which Arthur loaned office plants from various advertising agencies to be cultivated in an exhibition space. In line with a managerial optimisation tactic, office plants can increase workers’ productivity. Let’s assume for a moment that their displacement incites a minimal decrease in the productivity of the advertising agencies, triggering a chain reaction. THE FLAPPING OF A PLANT’S LEAVES IN THE HAGUE SETS OFF A STOCK MARKET CRASH IN SHENZEN.

Last round, round, circle, cycle, loop. Talking with Arthur, I have to think of various semi-circular motions within his work; how they appear to feed back, folding onto themselves. Yet, with every transformation cycle, something is lost, some degree of entropy takes place, and we arrive at another place. I think after some time spent exploring circular formations, we are both interested in taking this logic of entropy, seepage, and derailing a step further. Incorporating it into a work, a text that doesn’t perfectly loop, that leaves something out, something obscure, something to be questioned or desired. ‘LAATSTE ROOONDE’ — the bartender’s call cuts the air thick with breaths and beers.


Oct.2023. In the context of Laatste Ronde, at Trixie The Hague.