There, I Fixed It: Mark Manders i.c.w. Roger Willems

13 March thru 15 May 2011
Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Survey page There, I Fixed It: click here

'There, I Fixed It' refers to a mentality, a way of looking at materials and problems that is both bold and unexpected. Unruly solutions to urgent problems.

Mark Manders (1968, Volkel) initially wanted to be a writer. A map with pens and writing materials, laid out by him as a scheme for a book, made it clear that art was the language in which he wanted to express himself. This was the beginning of a concentrated artistic practice with "Self Portrait as a Building" as his life's work. It is not literally a self-portrait, but an idea of a self-portrait. It is a fictional structure that exists outside the body, in the world. As shoes that protect feet, because they have become too weak during the evolutionary process.

Mark Manders says in an interview with Angela van der Elst in De Groene Amsterdammer in 2008: "My work is actually about the principle of organizing, and how you can organize things through thinking. How you always relate to something outside yourself." A recurring theme in a number of installations is the number 5. "I'm working on this since 1993. I have chosen a thing from the world with which I have a compulsive relationship. I do that in order to see how my head works." Take something from the outside to the inside and the machinery starts working. Five trees. Five letter words. Five fingers. Stamps of five cents. Everything was there all the time, but often unseen. "The world is much more beautiful than we know or realise."

Roger Willems (1969, Tilburg) studied graphic design at the St. Joost Academy in Breda, and was assistant to Karel Martens for several years. He graduated from the advanced program at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. In 1998 he founded, together with Mark Manders, ROMA Publications, a project that develops in an informal and dynamic way, one publication leading to the next. It is a platform for exchanges between a growing number of artists, designers, writers, poets and institutions. The sober design of Roger Willems is the framework within which the very different publications become a unit. So far there are over one hundred fifty publications released, including artists' books, newspapers, catalogs, posters, and postcards. Each publication has its own rules of distribution based on the specific content of the project.

In 'There, I Fixed It' the newspaper Newspaper with Fives will be shown. It was made in 2001 for Sonsbeek 9. The newspaper collects numerous 5's - 5 peapods nailed to the wall, 5 death animals, 5 balls - and shows a world that seems to be controlled by a There, I Fixed It mentality, by chance and improvisation. In that world, the logic is often lost; you wonder why things are brought together in such and such a way or why they are organized in this particular fashion. And yet it makes sense.

"Manders's installations employ everyday objects (sugar, tea bags, a pencil, a toothpaste tube) as narrative subjects. The ordinariness of the objects imbues the work with a poetic tension - things are familiar but, isolated from their original function, somehow wrong.

Manders makes a physical as well as mental space for the viewer to "enter the world of objects and matter and find poetry in it...and to know how poorly we normally see our daily life."

While the elevation of the mundane to the status of art object has occurred since Marcel Duchamp, Manders's sculptures are not mere readymades. It is through his surreal interventions that traces of the artist's presence are suggested, as if the viewer had stumbled upon the furniture of Manders's mindscape."
- Curator of the Matrix 214 exhibition Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson on the work of Mark Manders, 2005.

Mark Manders i.c.w. Roger Willems, Newspaper with Fives, 2001
photo: Rob Kollaard, courtesy Stroom Den Haag

Mark Manders i.c.w. Roger Willems, Newspaper with Fives, 2001 (Roma Publication 25), 34 x 24 cm, offset on paper

Mark Manders i.c.w. Roger Willems, Arnhem Promotional Poster, 2001 (Roma Publication 30), 68.5 x 96 cm, offset on paper