Tineke Schuurmans (NL, º1962)

Dressed(un)dressed
photography, 2004-05
Collection of the Verbeke Foundation

Science intersects, divides, classifies, makes everything a kit. Holism seems the antidote to that lust to determinate. With the Earth as a living being as summum, the primeval mother, the goddess Gaia. It’s easy to Tineke Schuurmans in that camp of the holisten. When you say that leaf, beast, tree are equal, then you should be a full-blooded tree hugger. But it is not that simple. Tineke Schuurmans is not a holist talking with trees. Actually she seems much more like a scientist. A reasonable, reasoning being with a great desire to organize, interpret, explain, appoint, over and over again. And actually, that right away what wedo continuously. She zooms in, makes cut-outs, makes photos that you can see what is photographed, but that are at the same time, abstracted to building blocks. What she gets is a kind of periodic table of life with which she can build and combine.

Man is not the only organism, scientist, aesthete, ethicist. The researcher of true or false, beautiful or ugly, good or bad. As a researcher Tineke Schuurmans says that more possibilities of organisation. As aesthete she says there is beauty and ugliness, but there are no fixed data. As ethicist she rips and skins the existing morality, and that there are other distributions are possible. Eventually she says that everything is in a constant movement of growth and decay, the meat, the thought, the beauty, the law, even the arts. (Frits Eights)