Andre Van Der Kerkhoff

POSTAGE FOR REPUBLICS OF DREAMS

by Ed McCormack

> Consider his latest conceit: a stamp album! Such is the audacity of Heinz Krautberger, an Austrian who has settled in Australia and reinvented himself as Andre van der Kerkhoff, a name that seems to have little to do with either his actual or adopted nationality.
> Sometimes I think van der Kerkhoff has to be the most subversive artist since Andy Warhol, with whom he shares a background in commercial art that gives him an edge when it comes to communicating subliminally. This is something I can state authoritatively, having known Andy and spent sufficient time at The Factory, at parties, in restaurants, watching him fuck with peoples’ heads. (I once saw a confirmed drag queen switch genders overnight because, at lunch in a health food place called Brownie’s, Andy made a casual remark: “Oh, Jackie, I think I liked you better as a boy .” But that’s another story.)
> Van der Kerkhoff I only met face to face once, a couple of years ago, at Jadite Galleries, in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. I seem to remember a little graying Max von Sydow beard and a grip –– perhaps the overcompensation of a European self-exiled to the land of Crocodile Dundee –– that made me remind myself never to shake hands with this dude again. But since he seemed otherwise personable, I chalked it off to an excess of social exuberance and turned my attention back to the work: nude images of comely young women he had photographed with black and white film then printed on large sheets of brushed aluminum. The areas that would normally register as white took on the silvery radiance of the bare aluminum, bringing the generous areas of naked flesh in his pictures peculiarly alive. But he tempered the innate eroticism of his imagery with flat areas of primary color that added an element of Mondrian-like austerity to his compositions, even when piquant touches of fire-engine red were used to fill in lips or nipples.
> What made this tension between hot and cool all the more intriguing was being hard put to decide whether van der Kerkhoff was redirecting the so-called “male gaze” toward higher planes of aesthetic contemplation, or simply providing us with a new pretext for looking at pictures of naked girls for the same reasons we have always looked at them.
> The fact that van der Kerkhoff’s femmes fatales are as iconic as they are titillating is just the beginning. His subversiveness goes way deeper in terms of how he blurs the line between photography and painting in a manner that, had he lived to see it, would probably have given poor old Clement Greenberg, the most curmudgeonly of formalist critics, heartburn. In his classic essay, “Towards a New Laocoon,” Greenberg wrote that “purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.” But van der Kerkhoff, it would seem, accepts no limitations whatsoever. Certainly he is no purist when it comes to either photography or painting. In this sense, he is very much in tune with the postmodern eclecticism exemplified by the so-called “Pictures Generation” (Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, and Company), privileging pictorial content over the traditional values of the medium every time.
> And while the title “The Model as Muse” would seem even more apt for his nudes than for the current show about the cultural influence of couture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a subsequent series of New York City street scenes van der Kerkhoff proved that he could also create compelling pictures in which everybody (with the exception of an intrepid flasher in one picture) keeps their clothes on. Shown last year at Artbreak Gallery in Brooklyn, these digitally enhanced photographs, also printed on brushed aluminum, are loving odes to a city that the artist once thought “symbolically reeked of a nation’s decay.”
> Although van der Kerkhoff claims that this Sodom on the Hudson later grew on him, resulting in 2500 images to print from following a three-day photographic orgy, one suspects that its New Hades aspects were what he still found most inspirational: the crumbling landmarks and broken iron security gates; the ironic graffiti; the visual cacophony and the lonely crowds; the discarded citizens slumbering on flattened cardboard boxes under the scornful gaze of million-eyed Moloch financial towers where future Bernie Madoffs were holed up plotting new crimes; the cracked, piss-smelling sidewalks; the face of the dead actor Heath Ledger in the evil clown make up of his last role as the Joker in “Batman,” dissolving into the darkly brooding toxic clouds like the Ghost of Gotham...
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> Back in New York for the show at Artbreak, van der Kerkhoff stayed at the Carlton Arms Hotel, the city’s last outpost of hobohemia, now that the Hotel Chelsea has been commandeered by a new board of directors intent on turning out all its long-term artist residents like bedbugs and trading on its former legend to turn the place into a glitzy hostel for affluent wannabe hipsters. At the Carleton Arms, which still has the narrow halls and frayed charm of a Bowery flophouse (before the Bowery itself was gentrified) van der Kerkhoff found community and was prevailed upon by management to decorate one of the guest rooms with his imagery, joining the select group of international artists thus honored and gaining a permanent foothold in the city he has depicted so dynamically.
> Now, however, for his new show in his adopted city of Brisbane, some might think that van der Kerkhoff has gone too far. Is nothing sacred anymore? they might ask; has the man no scruples that he should see fit to impose his priapic vision on the scholarly field of philatelics? Is not even the humble stamp album, sacred refuge of innocent hobbyists and asexual nerds, safe from this incontinently imaginative image fiend?
> Apparently not, judging from the rich array of often surreal images he has come up with for his faux postage, such as a USA stamp bearing the profile of a hipster in shades who could appear to be nodding out after a fix in the manner of William Burroughs in the Beat Hotel, with “Ye Olde Carlton Arms Hotel” running up the left side, and, “If you after fun, join Club Med” emblazoned diagonally across the image, with the denomination “13 dimes” at the bottom. Another Carlton Arms Hotel stamp with an image that could suggest a black and white still from “Sid and Nancy” says, “Funk or Punk,” and has the disclaimer, “No substance has been taken during the taking of this image.”
> The texts that adorn postage stamps have obviously given van der Kerkhoff an opportunity to indulge and expand upon the conceptual wordplay that figured less prominently in some of his earlier work, particularly his street scenes, where the found phrases on billboards, the signs on store facades, and graffiti have commented wryly on the imagery, amounting to a kind of found poetry. Here, he goes all out with verbal free-association, as in another USA stamp showing a lithe young nude with a shaved pubis (but grown-up breasts to offset the Lolita effect) and lots of hair hanging in her face posing with outstretched arms as though for a crucifixion bearing the legend, “dervishingly fluent Isabelle.”
> Along with the unabashed Balthus-like voyeurism of a middle-aged man enthralled by youthful beauty, van der Kerkhoff also pays homage to some of his illustrious artistic predecessors in stamps such as one bearing a picture of a model in scanty lingerie that says, “Thinking of Schiele”; a Deutschland commemorative in which the face of Bertold Brecht –– adjusting his circular spectacles with a Freudian cigar in one horny paw and framed in a central rectangle that could be the window of a peepshow –– is surrounded by feminine imagery multiplied as in a hall of mirrors. And as if to make the point that something more than subtle and tender than brute Humbert Humbert lust is at play here, he also gives us a 30 centavos stamp for Chile juxtaposing a relatively chaste image of a blond beauty with that of the ultimate maestro of love poetry, Pablo Neruda, a wistful little smile on his lips, that trademark pancake cap plopped atop his portly pumpkin head like a fallen halo.
> This stamp, like Norman Mailer’s poignant title, “The Prisoner of Sex,” also suggests that the mature lover of youthful beauty can often be not so much an exploiter or an oppressor as simply a hapless, if happy, victim of what nature hath wrought –– a fact perhaps not as freely acknowledged as it should be in precincts of political correctness in relation to the heterosexual male, on whom it has become safe to blame all that is wrong with the world.
> That said, there are even stamps in this collection bearing no female imagery at all, most notably those of the artist’s adopted country Australia, in which the distinctive beehive-shaped mountains and rock formations of the indigenous western region known locally as “Bungle Bungles” figure prominently. Sometimes they tower over the metal carcasses of an automobile graveyard, perhaps suggesting how we sully even our rarest natural wonders with our ever growing junk heaps of consumer detritus. And on more than one Australian stamp, these topological oddities seem to be transformed into lungs by traceries of fine, vein-like lines, calling to mind Frederick Seidel’s poem “Climbing the Mountain,” about an aging man’s near-fatal attempt to keep up with the exertions of an athletic young woman in bed.
> Not that one could reasonably expect van der Kerkhoff to be familiar with the work of that excellent American poet, since most Americans certainly aren’t. However, both artists, in their different mediums, touch poignantly upon certain futilely romantic mature male aspirations that may be more or less universal.
> “When I started, I hadn’t the idea to conceive images in the form of stamps, that fact evolved organically in the past few weeks step by step,” the artist admitted to me in an e-mail some time back. Yet it was a brilliantly intuitive stroke, nonetheless, for Andre van der Kerkhoff to impose his private obsessions on formats normally reserved for governmental commerce and propaganda, turning actual nations into republics of dreams.
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> Ed McCormack, a former columnist
> and feature writer for Rolling Stone,
> and one of the original contributing editors
> of Andy Warhol’s Interview, has written
> extensively on art and popular culture
> for the Village Voice and numerous other
> publications. Presently, with his wife
> Jeannie McCormack, he co-publishes
> the New York art journal Gallery & Studio.