Robert Kleyn
Born in Amsterdam, Robert Kleyn studied mathematics and architecture at UBC and was active in early photo-conceptual, video and projection-based art in Vancouver. His early seventies slide works and photographs were often performative as in his 1976 exhibition with Rodney Graham at Pender Street Gallery. In addition to exhibiting in Canada, he had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy where he lived from the mid-70's until 1990, and in New York where he was associated with the interdisciplinary groups Colab Projects and Machine Language. Kleyn has worked in theatre and film, in addition to an ongoing practice in sculpture, installation, and photography. He has taught architecture and has done numerous art-related projects and collaborations with other artists since moving back to Vancouver in 2003. His artworks are in public and private collections.
The Billboard Project | in collaboration with Manuel Piña | Fall 2020
Location: E 1st Avenue and Clark Avenue, Vancouver, BC.
When Monica first asked me to be part of her pandemic-year billboard project, the structure rising from the parking lot right behind the gallery was really like an extension of the gallery itself, like an exterior gallery wall. Once that location was out of the picture and we settled on the 'trivision' board at E1 St and Clark, that connection vanished leaving no support from any immediate artistic context.
Freed of that association, the billboard project offered a new chance to think about strategies of public address, also a primary concern of my architectural work. While in architecture this is usually a matter of typology and style, the impact of the billboard relies on the fertile relationship between text and image, between the different forms of communication they can encode. The visual use of text has long been a part of my work, starting with the slide sequence projections of the early 1970’s, continuing with the found text assemblages included in the Naufragio show at the Monica Reyes Gallery in 2017, and with the series of posters responding to the covid pandemic shown in the gallery's storefront window while the city was in lock-down, not to mention the recent book, 'Page 10' which treats entire pages of text as image.
Advertising has long been a part of art’s territory, but it was conceptualism and the political aspirations of appropriation art in the 1970s that initiated the practice of artists working with the billboard as a medium in its own right, and one that is inherently political because of its reliance on its siting in the public realm. In recent years it’s become ever more apparent that true public life rests on the freedom to ask real questions, and for me the only question of the moment is fundamentally political – How to live? (I could equally have asked, What to do? as the two are inseparable, as they where for the poet Wallace Stevens who used the couple as a title.) In a sense, the question embodies its own answer – always be asking questions! Within the image-text dialectic of a billboard, the image and the text interrogate each other.
To reinforce this dynamic, I asked Manuel Pina, one of the artists in the Naufragio show, and known for his views of the ocean, to collaborate on this billboard. The image he proposed creates a perspective of four horizons plunging from the corners toward the centre. The crystalline structure of Manuel's photo construction, reminiscent of the early sculptures of Robert Smithson, creates a vanishing point over which float the bold and simple lettering of my text, HOW TO LIVE UNTIL THE WATER IS OVER YOUR HEAD. The artificial spatiality of the image and the imagistic quality of the grotesque font emphasize the visual, logo-like character of the words. The whole composition aspires to be, not a work of art, but just a billboard. Long seen as a negative thing, the billboard has been both symbol and example of the urban 'blight' that so obsessed twentieth-century urban planners and other interested observers of public space, so portrayed by Charles Olson in his Maxiumus Poems:
But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
Our billboard does not aim to parody or subvert artistic strategies that have been co-opted wholesale by advertising, but instead wishes to provoke and enlarge upon the nature of the question of what it means to make a public statement in the first place. From this perspective we can see the billboard as a tableau, its frame a proscenium: even the catwalk along the front used by the workers to install the giant poster, is a sort of stunted stage from which to declaim, like the vestigial stage in the movie theatre, only used to make a public announcement to the audience as it awaits the main event.
Robert Kleyn, Sept 2020
Freed of that association, the billboard project offered a new chance to think about strategies of public address, also a primary concern of my architectural work. While in architecture this is usually a matter of typology and style, the impact of the billboard relies on the fertile relationship between text and image, between the different forms of communication they can encode. The visual use of text has long been a part of my work, starting with the slide sequence projections of the early 1970’s, continuing with the found text assemblages included in the Naufragio show at the Monica Reyes Gallery in 2017, and with the series of posters responding to the covid pandemic shown in the gallery's storefront window while the city was in lock-down, not to mention the recent book, 'Page 10' which treats entire pages of text as image.
Advertising has long been a part of art’s territory, but it was conceptualism and the political aspirations of appropriation art in the 1970s that initiated the practice of artists working with the billboard as a medium in its own right, and one that is inherently political because of its reliance on its siting in the public realm. In recent years it’s become ever more apparent that true public life rests on the freedom to ask real questions, and for me the only question of the moment is fundamentally political – How to live? (I could equally have asked, What to do? as the two are inseparable, as they where for the poet Wallace Stevens who used the couple as a title.) In a sense, the question embodies its own answer – always be asking questions! Within the image-text dialectic of a billboard, the image and the text interrogate each other.
To reinforce this dynamic, I asked Manuel Pina, one of the artists in the Naufragio show, and known for his views of the ocean, to collaborate on this billboard. The image he proposed creates a perspective of four horizons plunging from the corners toward the centre. The crystalline structure of Manuel's photo construction, reminiscent of the early sculptures of Robert Smithson, creates a vanishing point over which float the bold and simple lettering of my text, HOW TO LIVE UNTIL THE WATER IS OVER YOUR HEAD. The artificial spatiality of the image and the imagistic quality of the grotesque font emphasize the visual, logo-like character of the words. The whole composition aspires to be, not a work of art, but just a billboard. Long seen as a negative thing, the billboard has been both symbol and example of the urban 'blight' that so obsessed twentieth-century urban planners and other interested observers of public space, so portrayed by Charles Olson in his Maxiumus Poems:
But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
Our billboard does not aim to parody or subvert artistic strategies that have been co-opted wholesale by advertising, but instead wishes to provoke and enlarge upon the nature of the question of what it means to make a public statement in the first place. From this perspective we can see the billboard as a tableau, its frame a proscenium: even the catwalk along the front used by the workers to install the giant poster, is a sort of stunted stage from which to declaim, like the vestigial stage in the movie theatre, only used to make a public announcement to the audience as it awaits the main event.
Robert Kleyn, Sept 2020
Poster Project | rotating window installation at MRG
Spring 2020
The poster format has long intrigued me, both as a popular medium (just think of all those posters that adorned our bedroom walls like totems) as well as a political one (I still own a Paris 68 silkscreen on newsprint) and it's that cheap and dirty quality, allowing for quick and lively response to current events, that I'm looking for in this poster project.
In many ways the poster project for Monica is a continuation of my un- finished project, "Conversations with the Octopus", that I started in 2019 while looking for studio space in Mexico City after having been evicted from my Downtown East Side space which was to be converted into emergency shelter space for the homeless; when COVID started to spread into Mexico from the US and I had to return to Vancouver, I decided to wind that project down, as I wanted it to reflect on my relationship to Mexican culture in an immediate way that couldn't be maintained at a distance. (Octopus is itself an outgrowth of an earlier writing project, 'Probably Robert Kleyn', which attempts to register the enigmatic quality of certain common phrases from art's deployment of language.)
Some of the stylistic manners I adopted for those 'conversations' are present in these posters, although the impetus for them lies in the self- isolation I undertook when I returned home. Confined to my apartment, in particular the back room I used as my office, I saw the city's institutions closing their doors to the public, and it struck me that back in the late 60's, about the time of Paris 68, then-young artists had protested the fatuousness and commercial capitulation of art and art galleries by postulating a series of projects which involved closing galleries, barring the public, and otherwise eliminating the work of art as a direct encounter with its audience. Some 50 years later, this experimental work was being realized involuntarily as social distancing replaced social sculpture as the predominant relationship between people. So I began a series of conceptual descriptions, some based loosely on the works of those 60's artists such as Robert Filliou, Robert Barry, Vito Acconci and other masters, some instead more ironic captions to our new cultural condition.
While not 'about' the pandemic, the posters wish to reflect the unexpected and unforeseeable condition that the art gallery, as the primary insitution for the propagation of artistic ideas, is facing. As I write this, there are again concerns about the food supply chain and questions as to how this can be maintained. And of course the travel industry and airlines are in total disarray, but maybe that's not a bad thing--even before the pandemic we were re-thinking our dependence on air travel and its impact on the global climate. So yes, maybe it is true that art can offer visions for the future, not reliant on carbon-rich art fairs and art star galas. Not that I claim such status for these posters, they are only a modest proposal in black and white as dreary as the East Hastings streetscape they will participate in.
From the start my sense was that these words should be out in public, quickly and easily read, hopefully leaving a lingering doubt. I then suggested the poster project to Monica Reyes, and we agreed to post them in the window of her shuttered gallery on East Hastings, which continues to accommodate a reduced but steady flow of traffic. We decided on a weekly cycle, posting two at the time, so that they could be in some dialoguiie between them.
Language, and written language in particular, has long been a central part of my work. Influenced by early conceptualism, such as Lewitt's Sentences and Judd's Specific Objects, I wrote texts on index cards, manipulated the typewriter's output, scratched words onto acetate for projection as slides, and transferred letraset onto card for photography. For me, language was not only an abstract medium, but a very form of material practice, and I treated words and letters as images as much as signs.
While my early interest in language was that of structure and system, at this time, when touch and proximity are severely restricted, I'm looking at language as a stand-in; it seems that "language evolved to allow individuals to learn about the behavioural characteristics of other group members more rapidly than is possible by direct observation alone." Technology as an extension of language for observing others, has multiplied this capacity. Language in public is largely directed toward changing behaviour - prohibitions, restrictions, urgings, cautions. My posters adopt this character, but their aim is not to make you do but to make you pause, if only for a moment, just enough time to reflect on where and when you are.
As with the Octopus conversations, these posters were written in photoshop so that the visual quality of the writing was always evident, in a sans serif font for rapid legibility. They are 'pole' size posters, printed on light-weight bond on a high-speed digital machine.
In many ways the poster project for Monica is a continuation of my un- finished project, "Conversations with the Octopus", that I started in 2019 while looking for studio space in Mexico City after having been evicted from my Downtown East Side space which was to be converted into emergency shelter space for the homeless; when COVID started to spread into Mexico from the US and I had to return to Vancouver, I decided to wind that project down, as I wanted it to reflect on my relationship to Mexican culture in an immediate way that couldn't be maintained at a distance. (Octopus is itself an outgrowth of an earlier writing project, 'Probably Robert Kleyn', which attempts to register the enigmatic quality of certain common phrases from art's deployment of language.)
Some of the stylistic manners I adopted for those 'conversations' are present in these posters, although the impetus for them lies in the self- isolation I undertook when I returned home. Confined to my apartment, in particular the back room I used as my office, I saw the city's institutions closing their doors to the public, and it struck me that back in the late 60's, about the time of Paris 68, then-young artists had protested the fatuousness and commercial capitulation of art and art galleries by postulating a series of projects which involved closing galleries, barring the public, and otherwise eliminating the work of art as a direct encounter with its audience. Some 50 years later, this experimental work was being realized involuntarily as social distancing replaced social sculpture as the predominant relationship between people. So I began a series of conceptual descriptions, some based loosely on the works of those 60's artists such as Robert Filliou, Robert Barry, Vito Acconci and other masters, some instead more ironic captions to our new cultural condition.
While not 'about' the pandemic, the posters wish to reflect the unexpected and unforeseeable condition that the art gallery, as the primary insitution for the propagation of artistic ideas, is facing. As I write this, there are again concerns about the food supply chain and questions as to how this can be maintained. And of course the travel industry and airlines are in total disarray, but maybe that's not a bad thing--even before the pandemic we were re-thinking our dependence on air travel and its impact on the global climate. So yes, maybe it is true that art can offer visions for the future, not reliant on carbon-rich art fairs and art star galas. Not that I claim such status for these posters, they are only a modest proposal in black and white as dreary as the East Hastings streetscape they will participate in.
From the start my sense was that these words should be out in public, quickly and easily read, hopefully leaving a lingering doubt. I then suggested the poster project to Monica Reyes, and we agreed to post them in the window of her shuttered gallery on East Hastings, which continues to accommodate a reduced but steady flow of traffic. We decided on a weekly cycle, posting two at the time, so that they could be in some dialoguiie between them.
Language, and written language in particular, has long been a central part of my work. Influenced by early conceptualism, such as Lewitt's Sentences and Judd's Specific Objects, I wrote texts on index cards, manipulated the typewriter's output, scratched words onto acetate for projection as slides, and transferred letraset onto card for photography. For me, language was not only an abstract medium, but a very form of material practice, and I treated words and letters as images as much as signs.
While my early interest in language was that of structure and system, at this time, when touch and proximity are severely restricted, I'm looking at language as a stand-in; it seems that "language evolved to allow individuals to learn about the behavioural characteristics of other group members more rapidly than is possible by direct observation alone." Technology as an extension of language for observing others, has multiplied this capacity. Language in public is largely directed toward changing behaviour - prohibitions, restrictions, urgings, cautions. My posters adopt this character, but their aim is not to make you do but to make you pause, if only for a moment, just enough time to reflect on where and when you are.
As with the Octopus conversations, these posters were written in photoshop so that the visual quality of the writing was always evident, in a sans serif font for rapid legibility. They are 'pole' size posters, printed on light-weight bond on a high-speed digital machine.
ROBERT KLEYN
his comment on the COVID-19 situation
his comment on the COVID-19 situation
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March 27, 2020 |
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ROBERT KLEYN | SOAP
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FROM THE PAGE 10 SERIES
Robert Kleyn, in this series of pictures, takes the printed page of text as his point of departure, in particular the page as the historically pre-eminent site for the organization, storage and display of text. We avid readers know so many books, so that when we read, other texts spring to mind, carrying on their own dialogue. Kleyn's pictures depict that special moment—familiar to everyone--when the primary text dissolves to becomes a visual thing, drifting free from story and page to intertwine with our own dreams and fantasies. These text pictures can be seen like the 'thought balloons' in a comic strip, where the characters are absent and only their words appear .
