On On Kakawara, travail d'Alexandre Half expecting a collecTion of scatalogical doodles on scraps of toilet paper I soon realized it was much more than that... Displaying the same sort of obsessional methodicalness, this series of dates, calendar accumulation has an interesting relation to it"s ono-maopeic counterpart... In fact one might consider if this is a anti-dating, rather than ante-dating the reflective counterpart... Anything but the neutral depiction of date in the method of the zone in which produced, this ia contrarily individualist, subjective, non-intellectual without being obtuse... In fact many are very witty and can compete with any humerous tradition cultural history can reference...
While in the first instance conjuring various styles of "underground comix' especially from the time when censorship was loosened in the late sixties, early seventies, thinking here of the freak brothers, Robert Crumb came to mind quite quickly, alomg with punk aesthetics and more recent badly drawn boy trends... Could fittingly illustrate Bukowski"s stories or any renegade literate figure, but also free-fall flux associations...
Personally I am a can-reader, and have a pile of reading material I take to hand wile doing the buisness... The idea of scribling or drawing in the wc never came up in my mind, but then "why not?" As long as one is in there anyway- evert day, practically peristaltic clockwork... Perhaps the dates series have a similar origIn? The fact that these. Anifestations of "lost time" are in themselves so interesting is already a fact worth considering... But in addition to just the amassmet of a daily production of er some seven years, there are also indications of what might be done with them...
This exhibition being a case in point, using showcase-tables, walls, piles and even projection... A slide-show in the latrIne no less... As well as some folded versions, minuscule zig-zag booklets, different kind of framing, transparencies, modifications coloured-in versions (a bit like the postcards of yore) and then a step further... Namely printed versions: etchings.... Here we immediately return to a more traditional mindset, the dry-point versions being less rough and more distilled... Here one has to think of Roland Topor, both in style and subject matter, and Paul. Joostens springs to mind... But also any manner of rybald illustrations from the various publications of the turn of the last century, Alfred Jarry, the inconherentes, to some degree les hydropathes...
So a much broader palette that I initially expected, and hopefully we will be seeing more... Another interesting aspect is the relation between Alexandre van Leemput and On Kakawara - where one ends and the other begins... More food for thought, producing, hopefully more. Creative excrement! The most obvious would be in book-form, but this little illustration has shown that any avenue is possible...
