^{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.

^{Maybe we made ourselves blind voluntarily. Perhaps there is always something lurking behind the forgotten and ignored. For how could, from the pitch-black darkness, come so much light and life; from tar so much energy that eventually it could implode the world from within and tear it to pieces? How can verdant and luscious greenery vegetate in the soil of gloomiest shades and that same greenery turn into a putrefying stench of compost? How can so much richness hide in the dullest nooks of the world?}

^{To tell you the truth, I always found green and black an odd couple.}

An oddness not unlike that of people eating fries with ice cream. But I nonetheless thought that there is something freakishly satisfying in dissonance, in queerness, in peculiarities, in strange relations. Whether in couples or colors, whenever we encounter disorder, we may find a glimpse of unintentional harmony. Shouldn’t we say that entropy is harmonious, then? In its own offbeat way, I mean.

For ages beauty was associated with harmony and order. But I doubt we ever truly considered how beautiful disarray can be, for we always sought shelter from chaos, or it seems to me. Just look how desperately we try to keep everything neat. Trash must be picked, sick people must be separated from the healthy, prisoners kept in their cells. Maybe now things are slowly becoming different. Maybe now we are brave enough to see beyond the orderly and pristine arrangements. Maybe we are coming to realize that there is more to filth than we think?

But I get it, harmony is contentment; It’s suiting. We judge our time spent observing an ordered universe as time well spent. Isn’t it a vicious cycle? Now it becomes crystal-clear to me why we call imposed harmony by the name of beauty. But is that all there is to beauty? Doesn’t harmony pacify conflicts, establish an illusion of order, make one relaxed, and produce dream-like languor. Isn’t it merely a cop-out?

Yet, as a rebellious youth, I’m fonder of dazzling confusion, of vertigoes, of frivolous play, of futile squandering of my precious energy. I like to daydream and drown in my reveries and spend my energy constructing irrational narratives and absurd scenarios. My mind and body are more inclined towards the incongruous and unfamiliar; my heart expands more when an array of clouds overwhelms the horizon than when I discern an elephant’s tusk or a pig’s snout in a lonely cloud’s shape. I enjoy when imposed order crumbles. For instance when you witness a pile of garbage stacked near a container or a mountain of rubble left near the construction site in an otherwise sanitary city. I adore microwaves or washing machines thrown on the sidewalk by carefree and light-hearted anonymous spirits. I secretly love those who litter and justify it by stating that without their littering janitors would be out of job. You can crucify me for my honesty, call me an ignorant and foolish person, but I stand firm by my statements. For me these are instances that remind me of another world where obsession with accumulation, control, and order doesn’t reign over us.


Sometimes my thoughts, too, flow in disorder, like a letter without an address. Sometimes a thought or a melody pops up in my mind--and do what you will, point a gun at me or something-- I still couldn’t tell you where it came from. Disorder does that. It’s, if you permit this fancy term, acausal. It’s of its own kind. Independent and autonomous. This means that behind every imposed order there hides an abundance of disorder, of energy squandered without remorse. Disorder always disguises itself in the form of order only to burst forth and surprise those who believe that they are in control. It’s like death that spares you once or twice just to come and snatch you away when the time is right.

Disorder appears uncalled for. Like when you are driving on a highway and a trunk is in front of you and for a moment you are mesmerized by its loose tarpaulin dancing in the wind, bequeathing you to join the dance and steer along the rhythm of its delicate movements. And you enter a vortex that sucks you in, and you try to trace the entire history of that mystical, loose tarpaulin appearing in front of you on the way to Nottingham Forest or Mendelin or Albuquerque of all places, and you end up understanding that everything is connected and that every road leads not to Rome but Disorder.

Layers of clothing on my skin, layers of meaning behind any word, layers of rules behind any action. Everything is so layered that it gives you an illusion that behind all those layers you may find something static, naked, familiar. But no, behind that pitch-black forest of layers, you find more chaos which is the epitome of infinite layers. Isn’t it beautiful when you give in and let go and see your layered reflection in a puddle of tar?