Resistance. On the Work of Ton Schuttelaar 

Resistance is a term that springs to mind when one thinks about the work of Ton Schuttelaar. The work seems at first to manifest itself in the form of objects and images, which are meticulously arranged in a space where the spectator may relate to them. They are interventions using apparently minimalist materials. These materials generally have little volume, but they make a significant three-dimensional impression through their placing and the implicit span of their form. Each work is accompanied by a title, although the latter is not usually displayed prominently. The connection between a work and its title is usually far from evident, however, and it clarifies little about the artist's intention. The experience of the object and of its spatial interactions are primary. The artist offers us few clues to close the gap between the image and its assigned title. The spectator is left alone with the bare image, the bare space and the title. 

Photography

The method Schuttelaar employs in his work starts with a “quest” in the real world. His activity at that stage consists of looking, of searching for images eligible to be cropped from reality and photographed; a process of absorption. In the photographs, which will form the basis for subsequent steps in his process, the known world is scanned and scrutinized for potential information. That information is “found” by free association: it is constructed from forms and objects that exist in the real world, where conventional structures and prior meanings predominate. The photographs are conspicuously sparing in their content. Our gaze is not drawn to the aesthetic of the photographic framing, but to the semantic payload of reality, to the relations that the objects around us enter into with one another and with space.

      Ton Schuttelaar focuses his searching, penetrating gaze on the texture of reality, which is made up of things, of their relations to their surroundings and of their capacity to convey concepts, ideologies and politics. Objects, their surroundings and their mutual relations are presented as potent signifiers. It is a signification which is mutable and indefinite, yet which pertinently displays and imposes itself. 

Title

After selecting a photograph, the artist pairs it with a title. Some of the titles are descriptive, and match closely with the subject of the photograph. In other cases they seemingly refer to identifiable, significant social issues, while in others they may be of a more general reflective, philosophical or religious nature, or may bear connotations of political ideas or current happenings. A title may appear to ventilate a passing opinion, with the photograph serving merely as an incidental or arbitrary antecedent; or it may be an assertion without any evident prior cause, whose origin must be sought in the hidden thought processes of the artist. Some titles address the formal interaction of the work with an artistic context, thereby anticipating the work's future setting.

      The mood of the title texts ranges from simple bombast, banality, bravura and dogmatism, to introversion, modesty and objectivity. The artist is here testing the boundaries of the subjective, as well as the limits of political correctness and good manners. Through the sheer breadth of his palette of texts, the artist presents himself to us as a composite of different moods and characters. His use of English as a lingua franca bolsters their generality. Employing what to him is a foreign, not fully mastered, language is tantamount to tolerating some loss of control. The text thereby opens up a space of its own, creating the potential for misdirection (as opposed to passive misreading, in which the interpretive space is left to the reader). Offering us a multiple cast of voices through the filter of a non-native language creates doubt about monolithic, unitary nature of the personal element. The status of the speaker in general, and hence that of the world-interpreting artistic voice, becomes ambivalent.  

Object

The artist chooses a number of the titled photographs for execution as three dimensional objects. The process is a search for candidates and combinations. The selection may be occasioned by an upcoming exhibition and its associated context and space, or it may be unrelated to a particular occasion. From the photographic images, he isolates elements which, in combination with the indicative titles, convey an essence. The selected elements are relentlessly stripped down and transposed in minimalist fashion into three dimensional forms. He uses found or readily available materials. The modus operandi is direct, raw and unadorned. The rigour with which the photographic information is copied into materials in the studio is the maximum extent to which the work addresses the insignificance of repetition. The objects are minimal in form but maximally charged with the energy of selection, choice and copying. The reduction process is one that tolerates no further information; reduction to a copy is the information. The subsequent meticulous composition in space accentuates the degree of rigour. The work is maximal in its reductive transformation, maximal as object and maximal in the dismembering of what was first amalgamated as text with image. 

Surroundings

Three-dimensional realization is the concluding act in a process which, as an entirety, constitutes the work. Printed matter accompanying Schuttelaar's exhibitions and PDF documents which are downloadable from his website show the original photographs, the added titles and the realized objects, separately or in different combinations. The artist's process and methodology are illuminated by the disclosure his starting points and the subsequent development. Nothing is veiled, there is no mystery or suggestion of concealed origins. The course of action which at first sight must inexorably lead to the objects is undermined by an interpretive loop. The nature of the primary destination, the sequence and the centre of gravity of the entirety become indistinct. The outcome is to undermine the unequivocally sacrosanct character and ambition of the work of art.

      Atelier als Supermedium ('Studio As Supermedium', The Hague 2006-2007), an artists' initiative which Ton Schuttelaar and Machiel van Soest ran for several years, similarly evinced a search for the place where art actually stops. In this hybrid between a studio and a museum gallery, the status and position of the elements that make up the totality of artistic production - the art object, the space, the artist, mediators and spectators - were investigated and reset. 

Schuttelaar researches the wider substance of art - the triangle formed by the subject role of the artist, the context and the social structuring of art, together with the functionality of art as a probing and interpretive intermediary in this triangle - by means of the different forms (the isolated art object, the process by which it is made, and observations on the context of artistic production). It is impossible for the spectator to casually halt at one of these stages; he is continually either thrown back to a previous form study or pushed on towards a succeeding one, to a study which may contain a possible concluding moment or point of fixation. 

The confrontation between the artist as subject, the context and the social infrastructure is stripped to its barest essentials. The photographs are stark and impersonal. They are no man's lands whose possession is contested. In these images, the practically mechanical absorption of the surrounding world indicates its nearly total acceptance. The subject matter is simultaneously expressed by the image yet expelled from it. The space is evacuated. The artist attempts to drain it of any ideological content or colouring. The titles give an illusory impression of personal involvement and vision, but they play a stripped-down part as mere voices. Schuttelaar uses himself as an exemplary object, as a container for a progressive construction of opinion and ideation. This process always gives rise to an intangible, meaningless reality, in which things and structures present themselves without offering any prospect of their being grasped. 

The information implicit in each of the successive transformations (reality to photography, photograph to titled image, titled image to 3D object, 3D object to installation and, finally, installation to photographic documentation) is sacrificed. The images transform, through their isolation and recontextualization, into new images. Thus the work presents the relation between the knowledge of reality and the interpretation of it (for example as verbalized in opinions and ideologies) as suspect and irreconcilable; quite aside from any question of the utility of that relation as a basis for action. This loss, this intervening space, is what this work is in fact about. These non-meaningful non-spaces appear in all of Schuttelaar's activities: in the transitions from reality to image, from image to meaningful symbol and from meaningful symbol to object. 

The work pursues the sublime in its stripping-down of images, and corners it in suppressed expressiveness, which becomes its final refuge: emptiness. The resistance of Ton Schuttelaar's work resides in its rejection of the idea that art could lead to understanding. He raises fundamental doubts about the core idea adhering to art, that reflection and analysis are potential keys to better social models and hence to a better world. Art cannot make good on its promise; neither the readymade, the copy, the installation nor the expanded context leads to a valid perspective or insight. This doubt and scepticism are perfectly embodied in the bareness of the images and objects, in the artist's designation of himself as an object in this game, in the deferment of a conclusion, in the cold vacuum between the players and - despite Schuttelaar's passion for image-making - in keeping the gap open. 

The world suddenly looks both very big - and exactly as small as it is. Awareness. 

Jack Segbars