Andre Van Der Kerkhoff
Sexing the City: Andre van der Kerkhoff Bites 'The Apple'
One would think that the nude and near-nude photographic prints of knowingly wicked young woman, immortalized on large plates of brushed aluminum, with which Andre van der Kerkhoff made his initial splash in the New York art world, would be a tough act to follow.
However, in ³New York Blues,² his new series of streetscapes in the same medium, this Austrian-born transplant to Australia demonstrates that it is his unique angle of vision, rather than a choice of pointedly provocative subject matter, that makes his post-Pop compositions so compelling.
Interestingly enough, Kerkhoff claims that when he visited New York City for the first time in May of 2006, he thought of it as ³a place that symbolically reeked of a nation¹s decay.² Then, four months later, he returned to the city and experienced a vibrant creative epiphany that he now describes as a ³love affair.² Still, there is no trace of wide-eyed tourist naiveté to be found in his pictures; rather, a sense of decaya residue of festering decadence, to be more precise permeates the images he selected to print from among 2500 downloaded after a three day photographic rampage.
Times Square may have been ³Disneyfied,² as some New Yorkers (this one included) who preferred its earlier, sleazier incarnation are fond of complaining; but van der Kerkhoff obviously has an instinct for sniffing out its underlying funk that seems all the more remarkable in a non-native. Indeed, his innate street-smarts are everywhere in evidence, enabling him not only to pick up on the jackhammer beat, the underlying rhythms, of what Norman Mailer once referred to as this ³insane, rapacious, avid, cancerous city,² but also to isolate telling details in its unrelenting visual cacophony.
The atmosphere of impending apocalypse that has haunted Manhattan island since September 11, 2001 comes across especially spookily in ³Deja vu,² where a tiny jetliner, streaming over rooftops and a watertower, is juxtaposed with the sinisterly glowering faces of Leonardo De Capio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson, looming on a huge billboard for ³The Departed.² Down below, a somewhat smaller airline ad for travel between New York and London bears the slogan, ³CROSS THE POND WITHOUT GETTING SOAKED.²
In another print,³Missing in Action,² the streamlined span of the Brooklyn Bridge shoots like a silvery missile toward the broken skyline of Manhattan under dark clouds brightened here and there by the metallic surface of the brushed aluminum, which invariably substitutes for white in van der Kerkhoff¹s prints, heightening their otherworldly luminosity.
The pregnant mood also extends to less overtly ominous images such as ³Passing By² and ³Canine Blues on Broadway,² where hurrying pedestrians or a woman walking a dog through a drizzle (both in absurdly matching raincoats! ) are dwarfed by gigantic billboard goddesses whose imperious poses seem to mock their smaller-than-life mortality. And in ³Scaffolded Icon,² the eternal precincts of art itself appear under symbolic assault by a scaffold superimposing the blown-up face of badgirl supermodel Kate Moss over the facade of the Guggenheim Museum as if to suggest that mass media fame is the only remaining Immortality!
Van der Kerkhoff possesses a special gift for evoking profound notions with casual snapshot immediacy, even while endowing his compositions with an immutable formal grace by virtue of his spare, flawless ³spotting² of brilliant primary colors, skillfully balanced with glowing areas of bare aluminum. Yet, he is not above making witty asides: In ³No McDonald in Sight,² he artfully savors the cruddy but newly chic facade of Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery, which has survived since 1910 on the ground floor of a rotten-tooth tenement now bracketed between slicker structures on the recently gentrified Lower East Side. He also takes wry notice of a much newer, more pretentious neighborhood establishment called Alias Restaurant, in another insightful print called ³In Need of Identity.²
It would not be a stretch, prompted merely by the more overtly sexual imagery he has exhibited in the past, to say that Andre van der Kerkhoff eroticizes every subject he photographs and subsequently transforms in his peculiarly painterly prints on brushed aluminum. For van der Kerkhoff¹s eye is clearly an erogenous zone, as capable of imparting sensual qualities to pee-smelling streets, with their kinetic collage of lonely crowds and tattered semiotic wonders, as to the naked bodies of beautiful young women. Taken in these terms, his newest work represents a deepening of his exquisitely seductive vision.
Ed McCormack
New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice & the New York Daily News,
Editor & Founder of Gallery&Studio,
Contributing Editor of Andy Warhol's Interview,
New York City, 2008
