Improvisations by Henri van Zanten

The Baudelaire of Rotterdam:
Henry van Zanten’s Art of Scandal

@ 2002 by Laurens Rook

Introduction

A few months ago in the city of Rotterdam a political landslide seemed to be in progress. The commonly extolled �poldermodel� was replaced by a variation that seemed more liveable. Although the former minister-president Kok was praised worldwide for years for his dedication, one single artist reproached him for years already with his colourlessness and lack of attitude: �Kok kookt niet�(i.e.: Cook doesn�t cook�).Now a whole group of the population shared the opinion of the artist. For a short time Rotterdam was the focus of the national and international press, and in the streets there was an atmosphere of collective rage and protest. Although at the time everywhere in the city little orange stickers appeared requesting �please don�t talk about politics�, the tension in the city was unbearable. In the night before the municipal election, at 24.00 exactly, this same artist took action. In a purging white smoking he sold off the local politics with one single gesture. The moment he glued his brightly coloured cardboards to the pillars of the townhall, he doubtlessly announced a closing-down sale. Henry van Zanten, artistic professional revolutionary had spoken once again.

Many people will have thought: �Oh no not again!�. Because it is an open secret, that in the national art world they are at their wit�s end concerning Henri van Zanten. Minimally he is an �enfant terrible� who regularly represents his political and social involvement with performances and interventions in the public space, and in doing so not denying his past experience in theatre. Van Zanten is an aesthetic activist, who says he thinks the famous Hamlet of Shakespeare is only a weak infusion of �the original, the gothic, the best� and above all historical Amleth. Amleth �was not a talkative sissy, but funnier, crazier, more clever and a true killer and a good son who became hero and king of his people�. ₁ Not without reason the Hamletmachine by Heiner Muller became the leitmotiv in his oeuvre. Van Zanten has up to now already staged this �ultra-political ideological requiem� in twelve different ways. The radical nature and shock effect that Heiner Muller pursued with this piece, equals what Van Zanten pursues in life and work: to get the public to applaud him by smacking themselves in their faces. Rightly the artistic effort of an �enfant terrible�.

Ideology criticism, shock effect, intervention and the psychology of the public are central motives in the work of Van Zanten. Yet in the national art world he is too often not judged by his merits. Van Zanten is extremely many-sided, and works in a high tempo on different projects at the same time. He manifests himself as director, dramaturge, musician, visual artist, designer, poet and rapper, but also as buddhist, social worker and activist. He goes through life with several pseudonyms, varying from Mc Wisecrack to Nirvana then Zen (i.e. anagram of Henri van Zanten), and at one moment collaborates with one collective, and then with another. There is also a possibility that Van Zanten after a while counteracts that same collective. It is clear, that artistic and political motives are cast by the artist into an as large as life and lifelong Gesammtkunstwerk. In bureaucratic terms this is mostly not understood as such. His incalculable manner of operating and multidisciplinary behaviour are too often and unjustly translated with �inconsistence� and �non-committal�. Many bureaucrats would like the artist who founded De Bom (De Bond Onafhankelijke Makers, i.e. The Bomb- Alliance for independent makers � against commercializing of the arts), and who invariably wears his No Product T-shirt during meetings with artistic directors and experts, to become a dependant maker of products.

In the first place this disqualification is due to the ignorance of so-called experts of the arts field. They don�t know the history of the arts, of only partly. In the second place it has to be said , that Van Zanten has waited till 2002 before he has arranged himself and his work neatly for the outer world. Van Zanten has entirely in his own way assembled a �Multi-Tasking Game� from his personal archives, so we from now on can play cards with his curriculum vitae and artistic range of ideas. Over it Tent in Rotterdam presented a special exhibition of the ever expanding � suerealist � oeuvre of Henri van Zanten from 8 November till 15 December 2002. A self portrait in a group and a group in a self portrait. An extraordinary look into an artistic network, that mostly remains �underground�. So extraordinary that it is very well possible, that spectators, collegue-artists, policy makers and experts will suddenly realize, that Van Zanten works on a consistent, impressive and uncommonly valuable artistic oeuvre. For those who nevertheless don�t sense it, with this text the artistic phenomenon Henri van Zanten is provided with a historical context. Not by referring to the resemblances he has with Dada and representatives there of like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Not by referring to the Surrealism of Andre Breton and Rene Magritte. Not by referring to the Situationism of Guy Debord. And also not by referring to William Burroughs� � �stop breathing down my neck�. This in itself would be a nice �group in a self portrait�. But by going back to the poet who was in fact a professional revolutionary; a man for whom life equalled art; a man who has been written about, that he has put down the laws for our unambiguous autonomic arts field: Charles Baudelaire.

1. Concise biography of Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire is born in1821, according to some sociologists in an aristocratic and wealthy family, predestined for a life in luxury and prosperity. ₂
At the age of 18 he decides to become a writer. In the first years of being a writer he lives in luxury, especially also thanks to a huge inheritance. He is a dandy par excellence, surrounded by friends as rich as he and from the same aristocracy. Baudelaire develops into the greatest (and most arrogant and most provoking and most anti-bourgeois) literary talent of Paris. In 1844 he has already written the biggest part of his (later on very famous) book of poems Les Fleurs du Mal. He however decides not to publish the book, because he still wants it to ripen. In that same year however he is placed under guardianship by his family because of financial mismanagement. He perseveres in his anti-bourgeois provocation and blasphemy, and refuses the respectable job his family has arranged for him.
Baudelaire is borne down upon the lee shore and gets to know the hard side of society. His circle of friends changes, especially because a second type of bohemian appears in the literary world. ₃ This type-2 bohemian is from the lower class, and is forced to take commercial additional jobs, as journalist for example, to prevent starvation. Totally in tune with the spirit of the age Baudelaire gets obsessed by revolution, conspiracy and provocation. In that time Baudelaire tries, just like his type-2 colleagues, to get work as a political journalist, and to get his book of poems published. His reputation is too extreme though: he is too radical, too anti-bourgeois and too blasphemous. Les Fleurs du Mal is a literary explosive no one dares to venture upon. When Louis Napoleon, who indeed comes from the circles of conspirators, makes a coup d�etat and proclaims himself emperor, Baudelaire�s political interest weakens. His predilection for provocation and revolt stays, but he gives it the shape of Satanism and spiritism. Baudelaire�s reputation as poet grows, although especially thanks to his formidable art criticisms and his aesthetic doctrines.
Simply because Baudelaire has become too big a name in the literary world, no one can prevent that his book of poems Les Fleur du Mal is published at last in 1857. Almost immediately he is put on trial on account of the blasphemous quality of the book. Baudelaire is publicly stigmatized as immoral pornographer and is no longer allowed in the literary salons. However at home and abroad he is praised on all sides as martyr for good cause of the arts. In the end he goes to Belgium as exile, where the local police think he is a French spy. Baudelaire dies in 1867. Shortly after that is poem Correspondances is posthumously proclaimed to be the artistic manifest of Symbolism. ₄

2. The arcades of Paris, Baudelaire & professional activism

It is a popular misunderstanding, that visual art and social involvement are connected to each other from of old. Famous paintings like Guernica of Pablo Picasso and 18 October 1977 of Gerhard Richter seem to confirm that art and activism go hand in hand. However, the first real political attitude in the arts was adopted not until 1800 � the series etches Desastros de la Guerra by Goya. Art engage didn�t arise until the middle of the nineteenth century, on the one hand in the form of a romantic anti-bourgeois idealism of liberty (Delacroix, painter of scenes of the barricades), on the other hand socialist realism (Courbet, painter of the �Verelendung� of the Lumpenproletariat). In this age of the great revolutions Paris was the centre of the political world, while on the scientific, economic and artistic level also a few things happened. It is interesting, that through the influence of such social factors an art-of-the-big-city originated, that was characterized by a feeling for political scandal and artistic shock experience, revolt against consumerism and fetishism of goods, and an interest in the psychology of the crowd. This spirit of the age of modernity was put into words by Charles Baudelaire like nobody�s business. An aesthetic activism of the 21st century cannot be estimated without taking note of the life and works of the professional revolutionary Baudelaire.

Maybe in the first instance it is strange, to go back to Baudelaire. For it is customary to relate the spirit of the rebellious and anti-bourgeois artist to Dada on the one hand and Surrealism on the other � and then one always encounters Marcel Duchamp, the most influential artist of the 20th century. But Walter Benjamin has sensibly argued, that the father of Surrealism was Dada; and his mother a Parisian arcade. And the poet of the city of arcades was Baudelaire.
The arcades of Paris were built in de 15 years after 1822 in a time of boom. The arcades where the first non-industrial application of glass and steel constructions, filled with marble and shops offering fancy articles. The arcades were the dream of the rich Parisians who had enough money to indulge in the cult of the fetishism of goods. Benjamin has pointed out, that the cult of the fetishism of goods already had fashion as a collective ritual: �Fashion prescribes the ritual through which the fetish � that the merchandise is � wants to be worshipped.� ₅ Through the influence of economic growth the bourgeois for the first time got the luxury of a private space. And thanks to the fancy articles displayed in the arcade city they could install in their own home a private altar for consumed goods.
The division between private space and public space didn�t only arise because of a favourable economy. Also demographic factors had an important relevance: the population of Paris grew enormously and explosively. In the streets of the city they got to know a new phenomenon: the masses, the crowd. The crowd evoked fear, aversion and abhorrence in the bourgeois, who preferred to retreat in their own homes. Many intellectuals started, motivated by the same fear, aversion and abhorrence to study the psychology of the crowd. ₆ The sociologist Simmel makes clear, that people in the big city under the influence of technological developments got into a totally new situation, in which they were confronted with strangers and strangers, without being able to avoid this situation: �Who sees without hearing will be more alarmed than who hears without seeing. This is a feature of the big city. The mutual relationships of the people in the cities are charaterized by a striking predominance of the activities of the eye over these of the ear.
The main causes of this are the transport devices. Before the auto bus, the trains and the trams [�] people wouldn�t get into the situation in which they had to look at each other for minutes of even hours without speaking with eachother.� ₇
The crowd was seen as a superhuman, uniform and above all evil phenomenon. They tried to give a face to the crowd, and they reverted to the physiognomy of Lavater, with which one could read criminality and bestiality from faces. Paul Valery wrote in this context: �The inhabitants of the centres of the big city fall back into a state of brutalization, that means a condition of isolation. The consciousness of being dependant on others, previously kept alive by needs, is gradually blunted by the smooth, automatic course of social mechanisms. Every improvement of the mechanism renders inoperative certain ways of behaviour, certain feelings [�.]. ₈ A big need arose to ward off the danger of the masses. Doctors and psychologizing doctors like Le Bon wrote about �the criminal crowd� that suddenly could get collectively infected with delinquent behaviour, and the pathology of the criminal, while the first sociological study by Durkheim dealt with social function of �suicide�.
The fear for the masses appeared to be a breeding ground for protest, revolt and terror. Friedrich Engels wrote in 1848 as prelude to the Communist Manifest: �This enormous concentration, this accumulation of three and a halve million people increased a hundredfold. But the victims that it cost, one only finds later. When one has roamed about a few days on the pavements of the main streets [�.] only then one notices that they had to sacrifice the best part of their human nature to produce all these wonders of civilisation with which their city is filled; that innumerable capacities slumbering in them have been left unused and have been suppressed. [�.] Let alone the bustle is somehow disgusting, something against which the human nature revolts.�. ₉
Also many literary writers were deeply affected by this new phenomenon, and Edgar Allen Poe wrote the first literary work about the inhumanity of the masses with his The man in the crowd: �Their hair was in most cases already fairly thin, �..

Although this seems to be a description of a group of alcoholics and paupers, Poe was in fact dealing with people from the upper-middle class, traders, lawyers and stock exchange speculators. ₁₀ The story itself is a detective story about a pursuer, a crowd and an anonymous person who tries to escape by hiding himself in the crowd. When the pursuer gives up, he suddenly sees the face of the anonymous � an old man;�This old man is the incarnation and spirit of crime itself �, I said to myself, �he can not be alone, he is the man of the masses�.

In Paris the city of arcades, where a malicious crowd overindulged in the fetishism of goods, Baudelaire saw very quickly � under influence of The man in the crowd by Poe � the possibility of an intermediate figure � the flaneur or bohemian. The dandies of Paris annexed the arcades very quickly, and walked around there as if it was their own home. In 1839 even a silent protest arose against the fetishism of goods, when dandies decided to let their tempo of living being dictated by turtles whom they took for a walk in the arcades. Baudelaire realized very quickly that there was a potentially successful relationship between �flaneur�and �terreur�. About the flaneur he wrote:�The one who is able to be bored in a crowd, must be an idiot�. For him the observing flaneur was like �a sovereign who nowhere lost his incognito�. Under cover of casually taking a turtle for a walk, the flaneur could keep an eye on the crowd in a perfect and unnoticed way. Like a spy the flaneur hid himself in masses. Baudelaire put this double life into practice to evade his many creditors. On the run for these creditors he he haunted the arcades, cafes and reading rooms. He was also registered at different addresses at the same time, while on the day of payment he would �stay� with at the place of a friend or an acquaintance.En passant Baudelaire would meet his literary colleagues in the cafes. There he introduced and discussed his poems that were rejected for publication, and established his reputation as promising �enfant terrible� of the Parisian art world.
As flaneur Baudelaire was a professional revolutionary as Karl Marx pictured to himself. Marx described the professional conspirator as follows: �With the rise of the proletarian conspiracies there also developed a need for a segmentation of labour; the members were subdivided in occasional conspirators, that means , labourers who only conspired in addition to their normal activities, only visited the meetings and were standby to follow the order of the leader to appear at the place of assembly, and in professional conspirators, namely those who dedicated all their activities to conspiring and made a living with it. [�.]. The social position of this class determines beforehand whole character. [�.]. their insecure existence, in daily life being more dependant on chance than their own activities, their disorderly way of living, with the caf� as the only fixed point � the place to gather for conspirators � their unavoidable contact with all sorts of dubious people, made them find themselves in that sort of milieu, that in Paris is called la boheme�. 11
The fact that Marx saw artists and professional conspirators as equals, is confirmed by the behaviour of Baudelaire during the days of the revolution. Thus during the revolution of 1848 the 19th century poet was seen on a street corner of Paris screaming and waving a gun, without however shooting at anything. Baudelaire was actually nothing more and nothing less than a professional conspirator, because the target the conspiracy was directed against , didn�t really matter. Not without reason he said: �I say �long live the revolution!� as I could say �Long live the destruction! , Long live the punishment!, Long live the castigation!, Long live death!�. Not only as victim I would feel happiness, also the part of hangman wouldn�t displease me � in order to experience the revolution from both sides. The republican spirit is contained in our blood just like the syphilis in our bones: we are infected with democracy and syphilis�. 12 Although the famous words: �I only understand one thing of all politics: the revolt� has to be attributed to Flaubert, it was Baudelaire who actually put this into practice, in his life and in his art.

3. The law-maker, the art and the scandal

As poet-artist Baudelaire introduced his mentality of the revolutionary professional provocateur into the arts. The cultural sociologist Bourdieu went so far as to say, that modern art as we know it now can be explained from the influence Baudelaire had on his contemporaries and colleagues. Baudelaire as an ‘omni-artiste avant-la-lettre’ occupied himself with the art of poetry, politics, activism and art criticism. For that reason Bourdieu named him the law-maker of pure art.
In Paris the city of arcades the literary and visual arts were very dependent on the civil service and art-institutions run by so-called experts. During the reign of Napoleon III there was even a strong censorship, combined with indirect control by bankers, through which the artistic freedom of expression was seriously hampered. Artists and writers could chose between adjusting themselves to the dominance of the Salon or the Academie de Peinture, or to leave their artistic carreer for what it was. Between artistic fame and financial prosperity, or poverty and the existence of a doomed artist. The road to success was to gain access to the salons of rich women. Because of this there was a strong dependency on a political and economic elite. ‘The sullenness of the 19th century man of letters is remarkable, especially when we compare it to the mondaine life of the 18th century literary figures [�]; the contemporary bourgeoisie only looks for company of the man of letters when he is willing to play the role of funnyman, fool or guide in foreign countries.’ ₁₃
As professional revolutionary Baudelaire refused to reconcile himself with this situation. As well-to-do original type-1 flaneur/bohemien, Baudelaire believed in an uncompromizing way of writing poetry and an absolute contempt for the bourgeoisie. When he was put under guardianship by his family, he perservered in his radicality. He moved through the crypts of the city, in the hangouts of conspirators, while he took the hardships as the condition for a literary oeuvre. From the barricades of Paris, the caf�’s and arcades of the city, he worked on an uncompromizing oeuvre, that was only published
scantily. In that way – by-passing the salons, the bureaucratic political and artistic institutons of Paris – he succeeded in becoming the greatest poet of his generation, while ‘tout monde’ refused to give him a total view of his oeuvre with a publication of Les Fleurs du Mal. Inspite of all that he succeeded to command respect as artistic anomy.
In his method of working Baudelaire proved himself to be a child of his time. In his poetic art he was well aware of its revolutionary potential, of the plan that formed its foundation and the shockeffect that it could have. In the portrait of a colleague-artist Baudelaire circumscribes the iron consequence of the genuine creative process:
‘How he stands there, bent over the table, absorbing the drawing with the same piercing look as he absorbs the things around him during dayime; how he struggles with the pencil, pen or brush, sprinkling water from the glass, trying his pen on his shirt, the haste and vehemence with which he chases his work asif he’s afraid the images will escape him; such is his warlike spirit, although he is alone: he parries his own thrusts.’ ₁₄
Also contemporaries were conscious of what Baudelaire layed down as criterion for the creation of art. One poet said ‘ that even in the slightest word of Baudelaire he could see the effort that made him accomplish so much magnificence’. Another wrote: ‘Even now he has nervous breakdown, Baudelaire still is somehow healthy.’ And a third one: ‘With Baudelaire the poetic process looks like a physical exertion’. ₁₅
For Baudelaire the physical shock of writing poetry and the physical shock of sword fighting were synonymous. In his poetic art he combined his predilection for the psychological mechanisms that determined the untameable masses. As introduction to his cycle Spleen de Paris he wrote: ‘Who of us hasn’t dreamt in days of aspirations, of a wonder, written in poetic prose, musical, without rhyme or rhythm but supple and staccato enough to be able to follow the lyrical movements of the soul, the arabesques of reveries and the shocks of consciousness. This ideal, that can become an idee-fixe, will especially get hold of those that are at home in the giantic cities, with their network of countless relations, that cross eachother.’ ₁₆
To become the law-maker of the arts, Baudelaire however had to perform an act in order to lay down a new norm. Bourdieu describes two revolutionary acts with which he does that. The starting point in this case is, that Baudelaire in the end grows into the greatest poet of his time, because no one can any longer ignore him in his non-conformity.
His book of poetry is published, and he is immediately put on trial. In this court case Baudelaire refuses to make a compromise because of the so-called blasphemous content of Les Fleurs du Mal, and to let a few poems to removed from the collection.As a result of this he was banned from the court, the salons and artistic institutes. With this he lays down the artistic law, that an artist in artistic sincerity must be willing to suffer for his art.
Must be prepared to go through life stigmatized. That reflects his admiration for the principles of the Jesuits. Devotion in the form of a battle cry. Secondly, and much more decisive, by thereupon putting himself up for candidate for the Academie Francaise, the most prestigious literary institute of Paris. Exactly because no one in the literary world of Paris can ignore him, as anomy personified, he establishes himself as equal to the dominant institute in the art world. His goal: acceptation of his aberration, or the the institutionalization of the anomy, or the artist suffering on principle as the law for edifying art. ₁₇ What Baudelaire does with this, is ‘to bring up for discussion, to expose mental structures, categories of observation and appreciation that have to such an extent been adjusted to social structures, that are so deeply rooted and are so congruent that they seemingly escape the most radical criticism, and that with that lay the foundation of an unconscious and immediate subjection to the cultural order’ ₁₈
He demands the freedom for the artist.

to be continued