Balspel 1967

Curator: Right, let's talk about this piece: Aat Verhoog's 1967 etching titled "Balspel", which translates to "Ball Game." It's currently held here at the Rijksmuseum. What strikes you initially? Editor: The grass. It's a wall, almost, blocking any easy access to the action beyond. It's playful, yet... slightly menacing in its density. Like something from a childhood dream turned just a bit strange. Curator: The material is very suggestive, it makes one think about its availability and relative inexpensiveness for an artist at that time. Verhoog employed etching, a process involving biting into a metal plate with acid to create the image. How do you feel about this conscious production choice? Editor: Knowing it’s an etching adds a layer. The starkness of the black and white enhances the dreamlike, slightly unsettling quality I mentioned. And that very physical act of creating – the biting of the plate - is something the viewer will inevitably participate in when viewing. Curator: Indeed, and it prompts us to consider printmaking beyond mere reproduction. Look closer, the lines almost suggest factory-produced uniformity, while the figurative landscape gestures at leisure. It’s almost as if to remind us that one had to produce in order to acquire access to a past time of such leisure. Editor: Hmm, the uniformity you pointed out makes me see the figures in the upper register as somewhat ephemeral; as if at any moment they will merge into their environment. Almost ghostlike... playing out these actions with the foreboding implied by the dense darkness below. Curator: The contrast between the dense, textured foreground and the more delicate, open background really pushes you to analyze what he's trying to say about Dutch culture. Or how this artwork, displayed today, challenges the art market’s hierarchy. Editor: Right. And the grass almost seems to be a crowd. A crowd watching a performance they don’t understand but participating and judging regardless, trapped in perpetual judgment while trapped in its own material production. The figures are vulnerable, suspended above it, literally and figuratively. Curator: So, in viewing this work of art that brings so much thought to mind, are we perhaps also figures acting out these acts, caught between being productive participants but also at odds in how and why this productivity functions as it does. Editor: Precisely. It's made me think about how we, as observers, project ourselves into the scene, our anxieties, our own relationship with work and play. Thanks! Curator: The pleasure was all mine. Thanks for your valuable inputs on production as it plays into meaning!