Specific gravity - Pieter Laurens Mol, traveling exhibition

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Janet Koplos

In a recent traveling retrospective, the Dutch artist Pieter Laurens Mol presented photographs, relief sculptures, objects and installations that combine apparent earnestness with a droll amusement at the ironies of the human condition.

Curiosity is Pieter Laurens Mol's signature quality. And that's probably the only simple statement that can be made about his extensive, varied and elusive body of work. In the early '70s he first drew attention in his native Holland, and soon thereafter in Germany, with Conceptual photographs that often made explicit photography's light-recording nature, or involved set-ups in which he acted a role in some ontological search or visual pun. But from the becoming he was also interested in the character and symbolism of materials. Over the years he has produced not just photographs but relief sculptures, objects, installations, even paintings of a sort--and combinations of all these genres. Curiosity has led him to look into philosophy, the history of science, alchemy, art history, mythology, religion, His works, whatever their form, are layered with associations. There is always something interesting to see in them, but how much one sees depends on what one knows.

The early photographs, which are his most accessible works, are unfortunately in short supply in the retrospective exhibition orgarnized by the van Abbemuseum of Eindhoven, Holland. The show appeared in the late spring at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Mass., went on to Montreal and Houston, and closed at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, on Jan. 15.

Mol regards himself as adhering to the Northern Romantic tradition, "so the type of melancholia or intimacy, also the intellectual approach or the keenness of perception that the Dutch had in the 17th century, [are] all involved in the work."[1] But another Dutch heritage is also present: the photographs, especially, often reveal the Dutch propensity to see one's own role in the larger scheme of things with modesty and a certain detached amusement. One notices that in the photos, where he is always the sole actor, Mol treats himself as just another malleable art material. His face is usually out of focus, turned away or cropped out, minimizing personal and identifying aspects of his appearance.

A Buster Keaton gravity common in the photos--an utter earnestness that often turns out to be wryly funny--might have been better illustrated by some well-known works not included. For example, Blue Defeat (1981, shown in 1982 in the Chicago MCA's "Contemporary Art from the Netherlands' and now in a private collection in Chicago) has Mol falling unflinchingly off a ladder while the loaded paintbrush he holds records his trajectory on a wall. The work refers to International Klein Blue, to Yves Klein's famous faked jump photo and to the greater subject of the Fall--this last a theme that Mol has returned to in subsequent sculptures and "photo sculptures."[2]

An early photo sequence in the exhibition called E-Motion (Up and Down Diagram) (1976) demonstrates his punning playfulness: eight bluffed photos show an arm waving a stencil of the letter "E." A few years later he made the whimsical Ascension Dream Sculpture (1980-81), a collection of 25 black-and-white photos scattered up a high wall, in 24 of which he depicts himself in a different posture, his head buried under a bedroom pillow. In a single image isolated at the bottom of the wall he (seemingly) stands on the pillow in midair as his dream is realized.

Mol's drollness also comes through in the photo sculpture Spiegel van het Noodlot/Mirror of Fate (1983).[3] Hung high on the wall and leaning forward like a great baroque glass is an ominously blank red canvas: neither magic nor functional, this "mirror" terms nothing. To its right, scales of justice are suspended. The last element is a photograph on the wall that seems to offer a banana-peel theory of fate: it shows Mol trying to maintain equilibrium and dignity after putting his foot through the seat of a chair. In this and other works he uses mundane materials and activities to point to eternal human questions--good and evil, destiny, death, afterlife--with tongue firmly in cheek.

Mol was not alone in his systematic and often serial use of photography in the '70s. The two contemporary Dutch artists best known in the U.S., Jan Dibbets and Ger van Elk, made wide use of the medium for works both Conceptual and humorous. Dibbets, for example, made grids of pictures of a single site taken every 10 minutes over the span of a day. Van Elk's comic "anecdotal tableaux" photos mocked diplomatic, religious and art-historical conventions. Around the same time Bas Jan Ader posed his own black-clothed body as the lines in a "Mondrian painting" assembled of colored found objects, and he presented civilized man as just another animal in a photo sequence in which a large box trap in the woods, baited with high tea, catches a man in a tux.[4] Sigurdur Gudmundsson, an Icelander long resident in Holland, staged spoofing photos in which thought and speech balloons were actually clipped onto his head, or in which he camouflaged himself in a library by draping his head and shoulders with open books. Late in the decade Teun Hocks began making narrative photographs shot against painted backdrops, often amusingly illustrating a proverb or an artistic principle.[5]