Ever since it was housed in the former church built for the Vrij Gemeente at 6-8 Weteringschans in Amsterdam, Paradiso has been aware of the building's historical and architectural value. The meetings of the Vrij Gemeente were characterised by dogma-free religious inspiration, attention to other religious views and the dissemination of a morality based on humanism. Following an extensive restoration, a plan was devised in the Spring of 1993 to replace the lost stained glass windows with new pictures. The sixteen original windows that were destroyed in the 1960s featured portraits of prominent figures associated with the legacy of the Vrij Gemeente, including Spinoza, Kant, Lessing, Goethe, Emerson, Marcus Aurelius, Juliana van Stolberg, Dante, Thomas à Kempis, Zwingli, Maarten Luther, Socrates and Jesus Christ.
The artists Hans van Houwelingen and Berend Strik were asked in 1995 to design new stained-glass windows for Paradiso. The idea was that they would design a series of windows on the ground floor of the main concert hall with "allegorical representations, in which the parameters of human existence are depicted and structured." In the formulation of the commission the following themes were mentioned as guidelines: love, war, capitalism, nature, the body, death, the immaterial and the machine. The artists set themselves the task of pursuing, in the shadow of these great existential themes, contemporary developments that raise new ethical and moral issues. In short, they went in search of today's morality. In their commentary on accepting the commission they wrote the following text:
"With the end of the era in which ideology and belief represented social constants, the lack of a collective mind means that formulating existential truths for a public has become a tricky business, Individualism implies that every option for representing morality is compromised by the many possibilities for making other choices which are equally valid. For a long time the arbitrariness that arises because of this has played tricks on us. With everything which can be thought up, the question arises as to the extent to which this personal thought could represent a universal value. Although we can never fully get round this, the designs should nevertheless be as little as possible a statement by two individuals, two artists, but - as the commissioner puts it - a structure that is of all times and places.
Time, too, is a difficult factor. The world is too fast for stained-glass windows. An image that is eloquent today can no longer be recognised tomorrow as it lacks topicality. The cruelest dictator, seen by the whole world as the personification of evil, is quickly outstripped by current events when he sits imprisoned as a pitiful old man in Scheveningen Prison. A time span is needed in order to assay a topic.
Moreover, representing morality, even when it concerns the modern era, inadvertently proceeds within a religious tradition. The fact that throughout the ages stained-glass windows have primarily represented religious morals even makes this inevitable. There is a danger of a pedantic situation arising if, in the wake of this, answers to existential questions are sought. Who are we to proclaim the truth in a church or a pop temple? For this commission it was therefore crucial to find a procedure that legitimises the pictures on our windows. Omitting ‘the truth', we think, is best compensated for when the unavoidable personal interpretation is supported by reality. We went in search of existential topics that raise new ethical issues, on the condition that we ourselves are witness to these developments, so that the accent comes to lie not on truth but on reality. We set ourselves the criterium that no image on a window may be chosen arbitrarily and that each image should be the result of an idea borne out by reality; hence the decision to use photography. We want, in other words, to take part in what we're talking about, so as to avoid the arbitrary. The intention is to study sixteen themes and, one by one, to look for a situation in which our idea manifests itself as reality. It is a search for extreme situations in today's reality, whereby new moral questions are raised."
The plan is now to parallel the documentation of the art project by asking a number of writers/philosophers to immerse themselves in the same themes, and to publish the whole thing as a book. We would like the authors to deal with the topics from their own point of view; they do not have to choose the same line of approach as Strik and Van Houwelingen. The essays will be collected as a book that offers a sharp picture of the times, an account in text and images of current existential values. Or an anthology about contemporary morals. The stained-glass windows so far made by the artists are briefly described in the following paragraphs.
Window 1: The Mother. The mother in this window is a successful, heavily pregnant business woman. Not a holy virgin but a modern woman who makes essential and existential decisions. A woman who manages to fathom existence in essentially paradoxical circumstances. The woman depicted is a senior manager of a successful Prague business, who has resolutely chosen for motherhood.
Window 2: Love. An attempt has been made to use a CT scan to trace love in the bodies of two lovers. Love is located somewhere between science and myth. This window is about the twilight zone of love.
Window 3: Creation. Dolly the sheep with, in the background, its creator in the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. The first living creature cloned by man.
Window 4: Labour. An exalted, Socialist-looking portrait of Peter Giele who died in 1999 and had elevated hard work into an art. He is holding a heavy sledgehammer - a symbol of labour projected at his own funeral. A window that stands for the decline of the work ethic.
Window 5: Marriage. This window depicts the very first ‘gay wedding', which can be seen as one of the highpoints in the development of human rights. Same-sex marriages became legal in the Netherlands on 1 April 2001.
Window 6: The Portrait. June 2001 marks the date when the human genome was regarded as complete. Each living being carries a unique DNA code, which is referred to as a genetic fingerprint and can be used not only for detecting diseases with a genetic origin, but also against perpetrators of crimes or fathers who deny paternity. This window is a DNA profile of Hans van Houwelingen. The forensic laboratory in Delft translated his spittle into an internationally recognised DNA report. Hans van Houwelingen's identity is captured in his DNA, a realistic self-portrait of the artist.
Window 7: Death. This depicts a woman pressing the camera button to record the moment of her death by euthanasia. Control over her life is linked to the control of this window. A window about the right to self-determination in matters of life and death.
Window 8: The Church. This window is about the reshuffling of the religious field of influence. A collage of faces of saints taken from old stained glass windows in innumerable churches. Literally it is a recycled window, figuratively a repositioning of Christendom.
Window 9: War. In our times it seems that the human body has evolved into the ultimate weapon: the suicide bomber. The body has become an effective means of combating the Western technological war machine. A martyr's poster of a Palestinian suicide bomber is translated into a stained glass-window. Before they die, suicide bombers like to be photographed in front of an idealised background.
Suicide bombers are regarded as martyrs or murderers, depending on one's point of view. It is the paradoxical tragedy of war. The location - a former church - suggests a similarity with pictures of the lives of Christian saints and martyrs. Without explicitly taking up a position, this stained-glass portrait of a suicide bomber has human, political, cultural, psychic and religious dimensions. The intention of this window is to highlight the ambiguity of phenomena, ideas, behaviour and achievements during times of war.
Window 10: Nature. Today almost all paleontologists agree that climate change was the reason why the dinosaurs became extinct. That spells trouble for man! In our times, too, the climate is undergoing a major change, resulting in a serious disturbance in the balance of the earth's ecology.
The rain forests in Brazil and Indonesia are rapidly shrinking. Plants and animal species are disappearing. Biodiversity is declining. The most vulnerable areas are tropical rain forests, coastal regions and inland waterways. Global warming is leading to the melting of the icecaps, which will have major consequences: rising sea levels, less ice, more rain and floods, higher temperatures, heatwaves, droughts and hurricanes.
Al Gore has put global warming at the top of the list of popular subjects. Sustainability is the new fashion, CO2 the new enemy. Film stars fly all over the world to talk about saving the earth. Who wouldn't fall for an environmentally-conscious flirt from Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie! Are they the impetus for a new lifestyle or the last dinosaurs?
|
|
