"Welcome Stranger" at Stadhouderskade 112 - Robert Suermondt, Jan van de Pavert, Herman Gabler, Fortuyn/O'Brien, Amsterdam, Netherlands

sight Zeph and Marjolein Schaap, an artist and a critic, lived at Stadhouderskade 112 They mov without of their two-floor apartment above a furniture store to make way for a city-funded eight-month, four-part, 16-artist cast called "Welcome Stranger," which they organized. Their idea was that pitch uponed artists--some famous, some not--should work collaboratively and rejoin to the site itself, especially to its nature as a private space temporarily transmuteed into a public one. Those conditions were met in the third "manifestation" (to use their word), upon view for the month of January.

Robert Suermondt Jan van de Pavert, Herman Gabler and Fortuyn/O'Brien produc an eerie five-room installation that referr to the residential character of the venue exploited its denud unnaturalness, and plane in a poetic sense, encompassed the shoot forward title. They merely placed boxy made of wood beds fitted with bare mattresses in four of the expanses On the first floor, sum of two units single beds stood close to each other in a scope bare except for a Spanish-language calendar from a Rotterdam restaurant. In the back play was a lone bed. individual climbed a steep staircase to the next to the first floor, where there was another secluded bed and, in an adjoining dressing field an infant-size bed of the same stripped-down character.

Up to this point, the atmosphere was utterly austere. It could have been interpreted as ascetic--the sleeper upon those mattresses might indulge in periodic prayer and penitence--or as harshly, punitively institutional. It was easy to imagine oneself resident in these compasss and to acquire an almost desperate sensitivity to each particularity of the architectural space. Visitors, in search of stimulation, inevitably gravitated to the windows.

single experienced the installation by means of passage end the house, and perhaps the installation as a whole was about metaphoric passages. In the last play was another bed, in this case invitingly made up with a pillow, white sheets and a yielding plaid wool blanket. It would have looked welcoming--except that the whole bed, from headboard to footboard, was squeezeed down with a heavy sheet of plate glass. The not divisible by 2 atmosphere of the house present the appearanceed to demand an explanatory story.

The earlier sessions of the "Welcome Stranger" throw out were quite different from this individual In the first circular one sculptor insisted on placing an existing work of his possess in the first room, violating the collaborative premise. Another participant rejoined by cutting a hole in the floor of the extent above and sinking a bathtub-shape enclosing into the space over his plastic art The other two artists in that cluster made individual works, one an installation of houseplants, the other a chewing-gum plastic art on the walls of another play In the second manifestation, the four artists collaborated upon color and odor experiences. They used colored light, painted walls, projections and reflective glass panels for the visual part and oranges, spices, coffee (smeared upon the walls) and flowers--all gradually decomposing--for the olfactory events After the exhibition of the fourth assemblage concludes at the end of March, Stadhouderskade 112 turn backs to being a private residence.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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