A vacuum-packed birch and other brusque imagery
- Fine Art
- Design
- Education in Art
Every year, magazine Metropolis M releases a Graduation Special, featuring work by several alumni who graduated as visual artists. Max Werkman, alumnus Fine Art and Design in Education, is one of the artists featured in the special. Metropolis M asked the artist the question, "What is the story behind your work?"
In the drizzle, a vacuum-packed birch tree, eight metres tall, sways surrounded by scaffolding. The leaves are still gasping for air, the last of their moisture choked by the plastic. It is an alienating image, yet it's easy not to take it in at first glance. Initially the everyday sight of the tree in the academy garden combined with the all-too-familiar plastic does not arouse any suspicion. My second thought was about the death of the tree and how that probably runs counter to what the artist wants to tell us. Werkman recalls that the tree itself was recalcitrant. Just when the work was in place, it slid out of its transparent jacket. So he found another tree – which then blew down in a summer storm. Irony or coincidence?
Werkman likes big words and gestures. His work is peopled by statements about life and death, colonialism, sexism, consumerism and ecology. You can't help furrowing your eyebrows, becoming irritated or outraged by so much directness and the brusque formal language, which is exactly what Werkman wants to achieve. Apart from the gently swaying tree, he also displays a likewise vacuum-packed lamb's carcass (the meat of which he ate himself), a film about digging out the tree by its roots, and teaching materials he developed for the state forestry service. He wants to provoke questions in young people, he says, bring back a sense of wonder. Awareness, too. As a teacher, he takes his pupils into nature and has them carry out assignments that make them question how we treat our environment.
Werkman initially trained as a photographer, after which he started asking himself ever more insistently how he could take his responsibility in a society that is undermining itself. With his in your face works, he hopes to contribute to the debate about the damage being done. Sometimes he does so with a wink that makes the loss a little easier to bear. For instance, packing grass seed into balloons that will hopefully find their way all over the world. He is still looking for a biodegradable balloon.
Author: Inge Pollet, curator and poet
