Crossing borders: Robert THE – Loving Vandalism

Er zijn kunstenaars die je niet zoekt, maar vindt. In een zijstraat van het internet, aan de rand van een beurs in een stad die je nauwelijks kende, in de tijdlijn van iemand die je verder niets zei. Deze reeks begint daar: bij de toevallige ontmoeting, de onverwachte stilte voor een werk van iemand wiens naam je nog niet kent.
Ik schrijf je hierover niet als gids, maar als medepassant. Iemand die ook maar half begrijpt wat hem raakt, en die dat halve begrip toch wil delen. Want misschien is dat het enige wat een flaneur kan doen: aanwijzen, aarzelen, en doorlopen.

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There are artists you don't seek, but find. In a side street of the internet, at the edge of a fair in a city you barely knew, in the feed of someone who meant nothing else to you. This series begins there: with the chance encounter, the unexpected silence before the work of someone whose name you don't yet know.
I write to you not as a guide, but as a fellow passer-by. Someone who only half understands what moves him, and who wants to share that half-understanding anyway. Because perhaps that is all a flaneur can do: point, hesitate, and walk on.

It began, as so many things begin these days, on Instagram. An algorithm that knows me - or believes it does - slid an image into my feed that I could not scroll past. A lobster. Red, precisely cut from the pages of a thick art book, Art of the Masters, the title still legible along the spine of the creature. For a moment it seemed as though the book had fought back. As though the object had decided: enough lying around, enough being forgotten, enough being thrown away.

The algorithm as Cicerone

I kept scrolling - not forward, but back. Again and again to that single image. Something was happening that I could not immediately name, and that unnameable quality is always, for me, a sign to look further.

The maker of this object is Robert The. Not The as an article - The as a name, as a statement, as a linguistic knife. I did not know him. In Flanders, virtually nobody knows him. And yet: here he was, on my screen, planted there by a machine that operates on the basis of what I had previously viewed, previously clicked, previously looked at too long to be a coincidence. There is something unsettling in that thought - that an artist who has devoted his life to rescuing books from rubbish bins, to liberating text from the cycle of consumption, reaches me via the most consumptive medium humanity has ever produced.

Loving vandalism

Robert The makes what he himself calls loving vandalism. Books, mostly fished from rubbish bins or bought in charity shops, are transformed into objects that enter into conversation with their own existence. A Bible is cut into a hand grenade, the gold lettering Holy Bible still intact on the black cover, a wedding ring as its pin - the tension between sacrament and destruction, between vows and detonation, carried by the material itself without a single word of explanation being necessary.

A copy of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage - yes, that title - is reworked into a pistol, Quentin Fiore's graphic design now serving as stock and barrel, as though the book has converted its own thesis into a weapon. And then there is the white Kalashnikov, cut from a catalogue of Malevich - pure, geometric, almost abstractly suprematist in form, a white-on-white that makes you briefly wonder whether you are looking at art or at theory.

It is this doubling that gives the work its peculiar weight. Robert The does not choose his titles by chance. He chooses them because they talk back. The book does not simply become an object - it becomes a commentary on itself, on its own cultural history, on the way in which we produce, consume, and discard text.

The letter that contains everything

To understand the artwork you need to know something about where it comes from. Robert The did not begin as a sculptor or as a book artist - he began as a calligrapher. Not calligraphy as a craft, not as the refined service to an already given text, but calligraphy as a philosophical practice. He was interested in the boundary between sign and form, between what a word is and what it does when it is set down by hand on paper, letter by letter, in full consciousness of the movement.

Two words would not leave him alone: I and THIS.

The English I - first person singular, a single vertical stroke - fascinated him as a linguistic black hole. In English, the symbol for the self coincides with the simplest possible form: one line. No accent, no inflection, no plural to nuance it. Around that one letter revolve, as he writes, all Western notions of rights, property, law, and psychology. He immersed himself in Vipassana meditation, in the way mindfulness breaks consciousness open into a free fall of wonder - and discovered that writing I, over and over, by hand, made the same movement. Not toward an answer, but away from the illusion that an answer exists.

THIS worked differently - fractured, anagrammatic, more earthbound. But THIS too has that quality of the token-reflexive word: it always points to itself, and simultaneously always to something else. Write it long enough and it loses its grip on reality. Or perhaps: it reveals how precarious that grip always already was.

It was Peter Lamborn Wilson - the American writer and anarchist, a close friend - who directed him to Max Stirner, to Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum from 1844, the book that Marx and Engels tried to destroy and that nevertheless kept haunting. And it was the late-antique sceptic Pyrrho, via the commentaries of Sextus Empiricus, who inspired Duchamp - and via Duchamp, albeit from a distance, Robert The as well. No certainties. No fixed ground. Only the question, again and again, of what this is - THIS - what we hold when we hold a book.

The cutting was, in that sense, no rupture with calligraphy. It was its logical continuation. What you can open in language with a pen, you can open in an object with a knife.

The integrity of the hand

In one of his emails the artist describes his point of departure with a clarity that even the most elaborate work of art criticism might envy: "Books (many culled from dumpsters and thrift store bins) are lovingly vandalized back to life so they can assert themselves against the culture which turned them into debris." That is from 1995, but it reads like a position statement he has had no need to revise since.

He grew up in Chicago, moved to New York in the late eighties, lived in the East Village at a time when that neighbourhood was still a laboratory and not yet a museum piece. The New York art world confronted him with something that has never let him go: the systematic contempt for artistic labour. Paintings outsourced to studios that also produced theatre sets. Artists openly boasting that they had no talent and that their buyers were stupid clowns. A scene that treated the actual making of something by hand as something to be looked down upon. He - formed by calligraphy, by Chicago's directness, by the conviction that the doing itself carries the meaning - refused to go along. He has never had an assistant. Could not afford it, but would not have wanted one either.

That refusal is not nostalgic craft sentiment. It is an epistemological position. Only by truly knowing the material with one's hands - the clay of the book block, the resistance of paper, the way a page breaks or bends under pressure - can the conversation with that material genuinely take place. Concept without matter is, for Robert The, an empty assertion.

The reader persists

The comparison with John Latham presents itself - Robert The himself makes it, with appropriate reticence. Latham ate Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture, fermented the chewed pulp, and attempted to return the result to the library that had lent him the book. Robert The knows this story, admires it, and places his own work alongside it without claiming priority.

He has also studied Marcel Broodthaers' early work thoroughly - the first sculpture in which Broodthaers cast Mallarmé's poems in plaster - the book as enclosed, petrified language. But Robert The does something different: he leaves the pages as intact as possible. You can, even in his most radically reworked pieces, still leaf through the book-guns. The reader persists. The text keeps breathing, even through the trigger.

That detail is not accidental. It is an ethical position. He avoids glue as much as possible, precisely because the ability to turn pages allows the object to remain a book, retaining a residual potency. And in that unfolded state - when a book-gun is opened fully - something unexpected unfolds: the trigger and the trigger guard become fallopian tubes, the barrel becomes vaginal. The object that suggests violence turns itself inside out and becomes feminine, fertile, ambiguous. As though the book, after everything that has been done to it, refuses to be one single thing.

What we miss here

In Flanders, his name will mean nothing to most people. There is no gallery representing him in Brussels or Ghent. No survey article in a Dutch-language journal. No mention in the exhibition histories we know. And yet his work touches on a tradition that is not foreign here. Broodthaers lived and worked in Brussels before Paris. The core of his early sculpture is precisely what preoccupies Robert The as well.

The book as body, as thing that is more than the sum of its words. As object that can be transformed without losing its spirit. That this throughline is readable, from a city I do not know, a studio I have not visited, via images that reach me through a screen - it makes the question no less urgent.

There are artists you must first view to understand them. There are also artists you must first read in order to be able to see them. Whose work only acquires its full weight when you know which questions preceded it. Which books were lying in the rubbish bin. Which letter someone wrote by hand for years until it tore loose from its meaning.

Robert The is one of those artists. The algorithm already knew.

More info: JHB Gallery
All images: © Robert The. Courtesy of the artist and JHB Gallery, New York.