“In my art work, hand painting would take much too long and anyway that’s not the age we’re living in. Mechanical means are today …”

Andy Warhol, 1966.¹

“The hardest thing in art, even before you find your limits, is to find that which pleases yourself. That’s the hardest thing to discover. Most artists never find work which pleases themselves, because they never got out of the student hack, little kid, of trying to do things that please other people. And if you can’t please yourself, you can’t please another person in this world”.

Carl Andre, 1971.²

“Too great a visibility is an administrative dead end, and that is not what I am aiming for. This is why I started, very intuitively, believing in the manipulation of things towards a greater invisibility”.

Willem Oorebeek, 2008.

On the pages with biographical information in the catalogue for a solo exhibition at the Dutch Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 1988, the artist Willem Oorebeek placed a remarkable self-portrait. A black and white photograph shows a figure standing on a plinth with a baroque marbled pattern, dressed in a dark coloured jacket, a white shirt, tie, black shoes and white trousers of which the legs are slightly too short. The figure wears a large, elongated vase on the head, which is also decorated with a similar, but denser marbled pattern. The image, dating from 1986, depicts Oorebeek’s participation at a masked ball during the performance festival PERFO in Rotterdam. The person in question is however not the artist himself, but his partner at the time whom the artist had enlisted to go to the ball in his disguise. What at first looks like a clever prank, turns out to elicit several questions. We know from art history that self-portraits are rarely innocent. Both in traditional painting and later in photography the self-portrait serves as a medium of self-examination and self-criticism, as an image genre in which artists question their artistic personality, role and position. Self-portraits show, conceal, feign, and omit things so that the artist is able to create an image of what he considers himself to be at that particular moment in time, what he possibly wishes to become, and alternatively, how he can possibly be perceived at a later point in time. Portraits and especially self-portraits by an artist – whether ‘at work’ or not – offer potential clues for the uncovering of an artistic history and for the study of greater developments of the artist’s personality, persistence, cunning and triumph.³ With Oorebeek this is certainly the case. Why else would the artist use the image to illustrate the data and facts regarding his artistic career until 1988? He undeniably wished to express something with it. But what exactly? Why did he enlist a stand-in for the ball, and was her face subsequently hidden by a vase? In the catalogue not a single vase or other comparable sculptural object is to be found. On the contrary, the twelve works which are included as plates in the book are of a purely graphical nature, such as HAND SHOULD HE MASK (1987), AU PAIR (1987), OPOLKA (1987), MUSCAE VOLITANTES (1987) and TARTAN (1987).

The image reappears a second time, namely in the book MONOLITH, between echo & HOPE that Oorebeek produced on the occasion of the one-man exhibition MONOLITH, lettered rock in Witte de With in Rotterdam in 1994. This second ‘appearance’ of the self-portrait is at least as significant, because it is no longer printed as an autonomous image but as a reproduction of its first appearance. On the first 50 pages of MONOLITH Oorebeek reproduced the pages of some twenty catalogues and books in which his work is previously included. He neatly printed all the pages over each other, according to their page number.⁴ In the resulting kaleidoscopic arrangement of reproductions of previously printed images and works, the pages in question (30 and 31 with the self-portrait) appear on the new page-space of MONOLITH in the company of four other pages that contain biographical and bibliographical information as well. The result is at the same time arresting and confusing. Whereas originally the self-portrait was neatly placed on the bottom right hand corner of page 31, it is now overprinted by a shower of signs. On the two pages we get to read five times what Oorebeek has achieved in his artistic life. We are no longer dealing with a dry list of biographical and bibliographical data but with a graphical accumulation of such intensity that the reading of some parts of the pages becomes impossible. Any form or legibility is gradually ‘pressed away’ from pages 30 and 31 of MONOLITH. It seems as if Oorebeek wanted to suggest that his artistic career is not to be understood as a linear, historical course of events, but instead as a scattered spatiotemporal domain: a time-frame with many different, overlapping trajectories.⁵ This does not prevent the self-portrait in question from giving a temporal indication within the diffused field. Through the overlapping of the various editions of biographical references within the book space of MONOLITH it becomes visible that it is the only illustration Oorebeek ever included in the successive artistic profiles or ‘documentary portraits’.

Were it up to the artist, the photograph marks a starting point. Today he only counts his artistic biography from the year 1986.⁶ But from the biography which is included in the catalogue of the Boijmans- van Beuningen Museum, we learn however that Oorebeek’s participation at the masked ball is far from his first artistic deed. At that time he had already been active as an artist for a decade. In that same biography we read that between 1982 and 1985 he self-published little books with a re-working of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; in respectively 1983 and 1985 he made artists’ pages for magazines such as Hard Werken and Museumjournaal; and in 1984 he already had his first group and solo shows. If the performance does mark a ‘beginning’ or an ‘end’, then the question arises what is respectively being started or finished. As Geert Bekaert recently remarked, the fascination for the commencement of an artist’s oeuvre depends ‘not so much on what it possibly causes in future, but what precedes it, what it is reacting to by taking a distance from it.” A ‘first work’ doesn’t pop up out of nowhere, but has “many and deep roots in the past.” But, so continues Bekaert, “in order for it to be able to be a first work and the beginning of an autonomous story, the work needs to possess sufficient exclusive hallmarks in order to typify that story as new, perhaps not immediately, but in any case retroactively.”⁷ Oorebeek’s ‘self-portrait with a vase’ marks neither a beginning nor an end. It symbolises the precise moment at which the practice of the artist, both formally and content-wise, made a decisive turn and provided the conditions for the proverbial ‘first work’ or the conditions for a new and independent story.

Ideas and Intuition

Between 1970 and 1975 Willem Oorebeek followed the ‘free’ route or TSO (drawing, painting and design) at the Academy of Visual Arts in Rotterdam. His preference was for the graphic arts and printing and for the traditional medium of lithography in particular. This however confronted him with a problem. Oorebeek wished to do lithography, but was careful not to get bogged down in the traditional result of the medium, the so-called “picture prints.” Moreover, Oorebeek was studying at a time in which conceptual art was at its heyday and had, as he remarked himself, “become academic, just like pop art.” For the young artist in the making, both pop art and conceptual art provided a frame of reference and two distinct artistic legacies which he had to negotiate, willy nilly. It was conceptual art however that placed him before a crucial dilemma in the first place. While he was personally fascinated by a classical artistic medium, he realised that merely acting within that medium was no longer an option: “It didn’t seem to make sense to make work that came purely from intuition. The artist’s reflection on art was contained in each work; that was the time.” With the radical attack that conceptual art carried out on the traditional status of the art object, its visibility, market value and modes of distribution, not only the classical media – such as painting and sculpture – were declared outdated, but the notion of medium per se. Since an artwork merely could and needed to exist as an idea or concept, the realisation, let alone the metier or knowledge for making a work, became obsolete. When Sol LeWitt in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art of 1967 pronounced the legendary words that “[t]he idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” he continued that “[t]his kind of art (…) is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.”⁸ This did not however prevent Oorebeek from mastering a specific craft: printing and the particular process of lithography. He countered the total formal and procedural freedom that came along with conceptual art by allowing the simultaneously irrevocable and unavoidable condition of critical reflection to intentionally clash with a specific production process. Oorebeek was, as he expressed himself in technical printing terms, “imprinted” or saturated by the development of conceptual art; marked, but not to such an extent that he ever slavishly followed its prerogatives. On the contrary, it was precisely the suspension of ‘making’ that LeWitt or a contemporary like Lawrence Weiner preached, that he objected to.⁹ According to Oorebeek, a fascinating artwork is not only the product of a good idea. The ‘making’ also carries some significance and generates meaning in and of itself. The irrational space that LeWitt pleaded for is, according to Oorebeek, not exclusively a matter of thinking but also of acting. Reductivism within conceptual art, the artist notes, has caused a forgetting of “the fact that making of a thing stands apart and alone, with all its irregularities and incidents. For me a work does not limit itself to the execution of a concept. I expect something of a work. Of the procedure, that it produces something that I didn’t foresee.”¹⁰ Whereas LeWitt stated that “[id]eas are discovered by intuition,” Oorebeek adhered to the principle that a captivating work of art is the product of both a decisive idea and a good dose of luck during its making.¹¹ This declares Oorebeek’s idiosyncratic choice and perseverance in the use of the printing medium. His strategy existed in not merely confronting the conceptual striving for new forms of visuality, saleability, and circulation with just any old medium, but to ‘press’ them as it were ‘through’ one specific medium. Oorebeek did not return to traditional painting or sculpture, but aimed his focus at precisely that medium which has proven to be of such vital importance within the marketing and promotion of conceptual art. The protagonists of conceptual art had after all quickly understood that their ‘immaterial’ work needed ‘publicity’ and demanded a specially adapted policy of public exposure, commodification and distribution.¹² From the middle of the 1960s printed media served as a crucial means for the presentation and representation of that art movement which had created a great rift between the art work and its public appearance. It is nonetheless important that Oorebeek again made an atypical decision. He did not choose one of the techniques that allow for immediate production and dissemination, like the photocopy or the stencil, but instead he opted for the rather conservative technique of lithography. He did not strive for a straightforward material reduction or what is sometimes appropriately termed “the Xerox degree of art”, but cautiously held back and made a far more ambiguous choice.¹³ Oorebeek persevered in one technique and in the use of a particular machine which calls for both manual and mechanical labour: the graphical reproduction of documents by means of the lithographic press. Lithography has a highly double character. Whilst being the least ‘artistic’ procedure of all print media – given that it is closest to off-set and contains the germ of mass production of daily printed matter – it nevertheless does require individual labour and input. As such lithography offered Oorebeek a critical solution for the dilemma that many pop artists, from Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol, wrestled with more or less successfully, or what Benjamin Buchloh termed “th[e] promise of a mechanistic anonymity within the process of pictorial mark-making.”¹⁴ Lithography shatters the individual and expressive creative process by means of mechanical procedures, ready-made images and serial production, but it never completely erases the traces of hand labour, artistry and creativity. The lithographic press is a machine; and yet is still operated manually and individually.¹⁵ While this according to Oorebeek makes lithography “terribly annoying and complicated,” at the same time it offers “enormous freedom, once you understand the complication.” Oorebeek’s basic conviction was that the required and planned procedures are not fixed indefinitely but can be played with and manipulated at will. He refused to let himself be curtailed by an objective procedural straitjacket, and thus granted himself the freedom to deal with it subjectively, from within: “You need procedures. But in my identification with the medium I have tried precisely not to be objective, but to exploit it subjectively. Through instrumental use you generate a sort of objectivity. But if you really get inside the medium, and let it run riot, as it were, then you allow for irrationality.” The artist was apprehensive of ending up in an arid administrative dead end through a strict follow-up of strategic planning and transparent procedures: “It is true that the procedures used are often not immediately legible. But I have always told myself that I have the right to opaque procedures. If I had been only concerned with the visible, the instantly visible, then the affair for me had really become too obvious, too administrated.”¹⁶

This precarious balance between procedural perseverance and personal intuition, systematic consistency and individual arbitrariness, is to hallmark Oorebeek’s artistic strategy up to the present (and is for example strikingly expressed in the programmatic slogan “blackout what you like” of the BLACKOUT series which Oorebeek embarked on in 1999).¹⁷ Before his use of the medium of print however gained the necessary maturity, Oorebeek came to realise that elaborate efforts did not suffice. What was required was a good balance between idea and execution. The thought that simplicity lies at the basis of every artistic success – or, as in the words of Sol LeWitt, that “[t]he ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple” – again not only counts for conceptual labour alone.¹⁸ The making process is also well-served by simplification. Oorebeek however did not embark on a modernist reduction of the medium – by bringing it back to its plain, physical characteristics – but on a fundamental investigation into the conventions contained within the latter.¹⁹ He did not in other words strive for the ‘essence’ of printing, but attempted to disclose the material constitution of that primary cultural mechanism for the production, manifestation and distribution of words and images – how it has been ‘set up’. And the lithographic press to that end provided, at least initially, the appropriate technical and conceptual tools.

The Wacky Printer

The first years of experimentation with printing and the technique of lithography were not particularly successful. Oorebeek made a lot of work, and even showed regularly in galleries and museums, but did not find satisfaction in the result. Today the artist puts that down to his relentless desire to “step outside of the limitations of the medium of lithography, to allow the medium to run riot.” His ultimate ambition was to attain a ‘form which was no longer lithographic, but which was constructed out of lithography, out of lithographed elements.” This striving culminated in 1986 in a series of paper vases, composed of strips of paper cut from a four-colour lithograph of 2 by 1 metres, which depicts a slowly spreading area of water.²⁰ The vases, which were exhibited in a group exhibition of young Rotterdam artists at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in 1986, are a true technical tour de force. Due to the cut up strips of the lithograph, they possess an exuberant, baroque motif. After the exhibition Oorebeek developed a certain annoyance towards the vases’ “high degree of artificiality.” His express wish to let printing run riot had merely led to excessive experiments of which “the return was not there in terms of content but merely formal”. The sculptural vases made the artist realise that “the advent of the wacky printer” was far from productive since it forced him to indulge in nothing but production.²¹

The turning point came shortly afterwards, with HAND SHOULD HE MASK of 1987. This work, which is included as the first plate in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum of 1988, consists of a canvas of 2 by 1m80, on which three bands of lithographed pictures with text have been stuck. The text originates from a letter from Federigo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, to his agent, in which he commissions a work by Michelangelo. In recent art history this letter marks the beginning of the idea of art as an autonomous activity.²² It no longer matters to the duke which or what kind of work is to be made, so long as it has been made and signed by the master himself: “And should he by any chance ask you what subject we want, tell him that we desire and long for nothing but a work of his genius, that this alone is our particular and foremost intention and that we do not think of any one material rather than of another, nor have at heart one subject rather than another, if only we can have an example of his unique art.” Oorebeek however subjected this passage to a remarkable printing procedure, in which irrationality and chance played a prominent role. When he first printed the passage in green, and then a second time in red, after he turned the paper by 180°, an unforeseen but particularly significant shift in meaning took place. Because HIS UNIQUE ART of the left band – now upside down – came to lie in the middle strip against AND SHOULD HE BY ANY CHANCE ASK, the enigmatic phrase HAND SHOULD HE MASK suddenly appeared in that middle area. Whereas the original text symbolises the growing importance of the master genius, Oorebeek, by a simple and first and foremost accidental manipulation of the printing process, obtained the opposite. The literal ‘reversal’ of a graphic given – in this case a bare sentence – resulted in a phrase which instructs the master to mask his hand. This command undoubtedly resonated within Oorebeek’s artistic development, because it paradoxically clashed with his previous, personal way of working, and it exhorted him to precisely consider its consequences. Both on a material and a semantic level HAND SHOULD HE MASK is a wordplay on the ‘double’ nature of lithography, namely the ambiguous relationship between mass and individual production. Whereas the work encompasses a unique and singular ‘canvas’, it is composed of an edition of 12 identical prints. These prints are at the same time mechanically and manually produced: they have been printed on Oorebeek’s own lithographic press and have afterwards been pasted onto the canvas. At least as significant is the fact that the work is no longer marked by the compulsive desire to step outside of the boundaries of printing but operates within the latter’s spatial and material domain: the flat plane of a piece of paper. The most important movement within the work undeniably resides in the return to the second dimension, in the ‘flattening out’ of Oorebeek’s experiments in the printed universe, once again. In contrast to the vases, the result does not literally stand in the space, but operates within the two dimensional picture plane and interacts with the specific manufacturing process of its own medium. The effect is that the text HAND SHOULD HE MASK is no longer ‘legible.’ It consists of a dancing pattern of signs, from which the sentence in question and the title of the work emerges some sixteen times – be it horizontally or upside down.

HAND SHOULD HE MASK is the first in a series of works in which Oorebeek elaborated and refined the manipulative exploration of the artistic signature, the sign quality of the letter, the textual and visual space of printed media and the materiality of the printing process. In retrospect, these works, each of them dating from 1987, and included in the Boijmans catalogue, strongly prefigured Oorebeek’s later artistic programme. It is in the very least remarkable how the artist, in a series of 11 works – of which I am going to describe but five in the context of this text – was able to regain clarity about the direction and ambition of his work, all the while redefining it and launching it for the future.

The Enigma of Image and Type Setting

Willem Oorebeek has always had a personal fascination for the graphic quality and phonetic redundancy in Dutch spelling of the double letter O in his own surname. A double O, as the artist once discovered, makes an enthralling image and at the same time generates an “incredibly fascinating circular system.” AU PAIR (1987) originates from this given and consists of eight lithographed prints that are glued together on a cotton canvas measuring 190 by 240 cm and that together constitute a double O. Each O is composed of four sheets of paper and two equal parts, of which the four component parts are mirrored around a horizontal and vertical axis.²³ While AU PAIR can be read as an exclamation of amazement, it is at the same time just a pair of circles. At once a fascinating tension occurs between image and language, or between the graphic nature and the semantic potential of the work. With AU PAIR Oorebeek demonstrates that the enigma of this binary constitution is located in the domain of typography. While typography is essentially a graphic concern, it also has a semantic impact. Typography lies at the basis of the meaning we gather from reading the sequence or the ‘setting’ of letters which we call ‘text’. Typography ‘colours’ and ‘articulates’ in a material and physical sense the production of meaning which is contained in a text. AU PAIR in other words points out the importance of good image and type setting. Everyone knows that a text which has been ‘badly set’ is not as pleasant to read, and that an image loses all its expressive power when printed badly or too small. Both text and image are well-served by meticulous design and physical handling.²⁴

In this respect Oorebeek’s typographic experiments provide a subtle annotation to the radical claims of dematerialisation by conceptual art. Despite its explicitly linguistic nature, conceptual art never fully freed itself from the compelling conditions of the visual regime. When a ‘proposition’ or a ‘definition’ is included in respectively a book, a magazine or other kinds of printed media, inevitably a visually different result of presentation is produced.²⁵ The same goes for a different font or position. The ‘artwork’ unrelentingly clashes with the concrete visual territory of the printed page. And those differences as such generate meaning, since they resort from a series of decisions which either lie with the ‘producer’ of the work, or are imposed by the medium in which the work appears.

Oorebeek, who does not so much see himself as a typographer but as an aficionado of typography, has always been fascinated by the latter’s rich assortment of graphic signs. He is not so much interested in (the difference between) specific fonts, or in the formal distinction between this or that letter, but in typography as the primary vehicle for 'setting' text. His strategy is to "infinitely enlarge typography as a formulation of a problem,” by allowing letters to rise above their appearance in a book, above their regular appearance in the flat space of printed media. The letter O has always had his preference in that respect. Contrary to the other letters of the alphabet, the O possesses the slightest articulation on a typographical level. This distinct character of the letter O drove Oorebeek on in OPOLKA (1987). Again O’s, composed in identical parts, are put on a square canvas of 190cm sides, albeit now six of them and in a triangular formation, whereby the top and the bottom letters are vertically placed and the middle letters horizontally. Through a simple manipulation in the space of the printed picture plane – i.e. the mutual twist – the visual quality of the basic typographical unit comes to full expression. All semantic potential is purged from OPOLKA. The letters, originating from the Polka alphabet, merely perform an elegant dance in the picture plane.

In the catalogue of the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum OPOLKA is followed by the intriguing MUSCAE VOLITANTES (1987). The work consists of 12 separate lithographs on paper which have been stuck on a cotton sheet of 205 by 180 cm, with the work’s title printed in large capital letters below. Muscae volitantes, the Latin translation for ‘volatile particles’, refers to the little flecks we sometimes see moving before our eyes. These mysterious little flecks occur because of clouded tear fluid on the eyeball, causing the light not to enter the eye properly, and causing shadows to occur on the eyeball. We perceive these shadows as little moving flecks. Whereas the phenomenon muscae volitantes can be said to stand for the minutest aspect within human perception it nevertheless encompasses the outer limits of visibility. Whereas most people don't even notice these little flecks on the retina, the sudden presence of many of them could be an indication for the future loss of one’s eyesight. The work MUSCAE VOLITANTES thus can be read as an apt representation of the two outer limits at which the printed media impose themselves upon our field of vision. Whereas we can on the one hand almost be blinded by their massive presence in the public domain, most of the time we do not even notice them, let alone pay any attention to them. MUSCAE VOLITANTES in this respect provided the overture for Oorebeek’s later investigation into “the societal presence of printed images.” The artist rightly asserts that “today we are confronted with an extraordinary circulation of images which generates an enormous parallel world to reality. It encompasses a production which is almost greater than reality itself.” For MUSCAE VOLITANTES Oorebeek however did not yet draw from the “stream of images which is produced via printed media,” but limited himself to an abstract interpretation of the societal phenomenon via the depiction of a remarkable aspect of our physical perception.

The first time that Oorebeek literally drew from the kaleidoscopic supply of printed images and texts happened in TARTAN (1987), plate 10 in the Boijmans catalogue. Chance again played an important role. With the move to a new studio, a former wine warehouse, Oorebeek found a pile of catalogues for wine merchants from the early 1950s. The artist was astonished by the attractive power of the advertisements for wine and wine glasses and discovered in the images “a metaphor for the manner in which advertising and consumption work.” What intrigued Oorebeek most, however, was the “extremely transparent manner of these printed documents” or the fact that he could with each image trace how it had been “put together by hand” graphically and (print) technically. For TARTAN Oorebeek based himself on an advertising image for bottles and drew a pattern of seven empty wine bottles on his lithographic stone, of which two are coloured red, two are green and the remaining three are white. Oorebeek then stuck the resulting lithographic print in a grid formation on a cotton canvas measuring 200 by 190 cm. The result is simply spectacular, both visually and conceptually. Just like in Scottish tartan – to which the title refers – an illusion of depth is created through a merely graphic pattern. The differences in colour and the distinct positions of the bottles in relation to each other generate a space which is not perspectival, but which is literally and figuratively situated in the picture plane of the print. Besides, within lessons of drawing technique, a bottle serves as the elementary object for the suggestion of volume and space in the second dimension. At first sight this seems to explain why the bottles in TARTAN have no label, since the elementary volumetry of the object is better expressed this way. The absence of a label however also has conceptual repercussions. As the image is not dominated by the intrusive language of merchandise, such as the brand’s design, other and more fundamental aspects of the chosen image are touched upon. In comparison to his Pop Art precursors, Oorebeek did not only direct his attention to the elaborate iconography of contemporary mass production, mass consumption and popular culture, but first and foremost to the material politics of the ubiquitous visual media in the production, representation and distribution of that iconography. In TARTAN Oorebeek was after all not concerned with the representation of a specific item of consumption – contained within an advertising image of this or that wine bottle – but with the disclosure of the constituting elements of what previously was an image of advertising. He was concerned with “the idea of exposing the most elemental aspects of an image” and attempted to reveal how the image of a bottle – as standard packaging of a popular consumption article such as alcohol – is manufactured within the medium of printing. Starting from his mistrust towards the printed media – because they “evoke a reality which wants to come across as real” – the artist deconstructed the image, “in order to put it back together again according to the laws of intended transparency.” This graphical (re)construction or ‘montage’ of the image happened “according to the process of printing,” for which lithography provided both the conceptual framework and the formal means. The images were resolutely led back to the printed universe: “The medium that I pressed them through, has an express relation to the medium they emerged from.”

The traditional techniques and elementary procedures of lithography lie at the basis of the analytical bid of Oorebeek’s practise, since they have allowed him to precisely take apart the manufacture of an image and to subsequently present it anew. In order to re-print an image via the lithographic press, it first has to be formally dismantled so it can then be ‘reassembled’ within the confines of lithographic reproduction: “The analysis is concealed in the planning process that every kind of printing requires, such as four-colour printing. Planning is a kind of organising that is based on analysis. Otherwise you cannot put those phases together.”²⁶ The eventual return of the image is however not coupled with any kind of explanation. Oorebeek does not pursue an iconographic analysis and its attendant ‘reading’ in terms of visual content, but approaches images a priori as materially manufactured givens, as ‘forms.’ And as such they resolutely return.

Now Better and Improved

The series of works from 1987 and TARTAN in particular provide a critical manifestation of Oorebeek’s handling of the medium of printing and the phenomenon printed matter up to this day. He himself continuously emphasises that “popular culture doesn’t act as the subject.” It is “much more about the way in which printed matter is used within that popular culture.” Oorebeek starts from a profound fascination for the contemporary use, seduction, and power of the printed word and image, or for the crucial role of the printed document as a material vehicle for contemporary mass culture and the inexorable stream of text and pictures which the latter generates. He consults printed documents which circulate in the public domain and which stem from official, administrative, promotional to popular sources and selects photographs, prints, advertising posters, election posters, publicity as well as pages from scientific journals, popular daily and weekly magazines and newspapers. Lithographic paper prints moreover no longer constitute the sole end product of his practise. Today Oorebeek transposes printed documents onto a variety of supports, which vary between paper, canvas, posters, carpets and magazine and book inserts. However, the original stakes have not changed. Up until now the “imageness of the image” has been the key concern for Oorebeek, and the nature of the printed image in particular. After thirty years of intense attention to the phenomenon of printed matter it has for the artist become “an automatism to see something according to its fabrication within the printed medium.” Gradually Oorebeek has explored the manner in which printed media act as material framework, support, and conduit for the public appearance and distribution of word and image. In an idiosyncratic fashion he approaches the sophisticated and at times hysterical conventions of precisely that profession which ‘designs’ that appearance and distribution or which produces the universe of printed matter. By now the artist ever more freely plays with the refined arsenal and manual competence of graphic design: extreme close-ups, fragments and details, stark graphic contrasts, silhouetted shapes, schematic simplifications and serial compositions. Oorebeek doesn’t practise graphic design himself, but re-subjects existing – which is to say printed – textual and/or visual documents to one or more strategies from that arsenal, and this by means of concrete manipulations of the printing process. Existing printed matter is in other words reprinted, printed on, overprinted, printed away, and so on. In the wide range of works that this has brought about, the conceptual preoccupations which Oorebeek formulated in 1987, such as the tension between private expression and mechanical anonymity (HAND SHOULD HE MASK), the semantic impact of graphic design (AU PAIR, OPOLKA), the societal ubiquity but relative perceptibility of printed media (MUSCAE VOLITANTES), and the material manufacture of the flat but suggestive image space of the printed document (TARTAN), are still at stake. They are, as the brilliant work Nu nog mooier, nog beter (Now Better and Improved) of 2002 proves, continually re-focused.

For his contribution to the 100th issue of the Belgian art journal De Witte Raaf, Willem Oorebeek subjected four pages, among which the cover, to four colour printing. Barely noticeably, Oorebeek bestowed upon De Witte Raaf, a journal that is infamous its persistent Spartan design and black and white printing, a certain brilliance and intensity...²⁷ The indirect effect of Nu nog mooier, nog beter was however all the more impressive. Through Oorebeek’s intervention, the journal that by now enjoys an iconic look and a strict theoretical status, suddenly received visual distinction. Oorebeek’s “elaborate, additional enrichment”, suddenly granted both the front page with illustration, the two pages with text and the last page with advertising, the status of an image.

In an era in which words and images are clamouring ever more loudly for our attention, Oorebeek uncompromisingly keeps on repeating that that attention is not easily won. It is a matter of printing and printed matter, provided that the latter is set and well.

* The title of this essay harks back to a statement by Oorebeek in conversation with the author about the cover of a newsstand magazine, which he described in Dutch as “gezet en wel”. The essay came into being after conversations between Willem Oorebeek and the author in the artist’s studio in Schaarbeek on October 29th 2007, January 8th, 15th and 22nd, and February 22nd 2008. All quotations originate from these conversations, unless indicated otherwise. The text moreover gained clarity thanks to the critical commentary and suggestions by Eva De Backker and Chantal Pattyn.

** Wouter Davidts (Antwerp, Belgium) is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning of Ghent University (UGent). In recent years he has published on the museum, contemporary art and architecture in magazines such as Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Archis, De Witte Raaf, Footprint, Kritische Berichten, OPEN, OASE and Parachute, and in books and exhibition catalogues. He is the author of Bouwen voor de kunst? Museumarchitectuur van Centre Pompidou tot Tate Modern (A&S/books, 2006). In 2007 he curated the show Beginners & Begetters at Extra City, Center for Contemporary Art, Antwerp. Este endereço de e-mail está protegido contra spam bots, pelo que o JavaScript terá de estar activado para que possa visualizar o endereço de e-mail

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