Taking charge of reality

In a way, how we perceive reality is thought for us through classification or (political) institutionalization. This affects even the simplest of objects or ideas that we use in our daily lives. Everything plays its symbolical role in this world, and this role you can discuss, or even appropriate. Artists, like Catherine Czudej for example, have found their way in constructing another approach to reality. By destabilizing and displacing common objects and conventions with a humorous approach, Czudej inverts and manipulates the familiar, and at the same time reveals a critical analysis of the conventional and the dominant.

The world that Van Zanten’s constructs also moves forward to a certain reality. It is a moving reality, between controlled and uncontrolled. It takes its place more or less between a floating and unnamed cosmos (which reminds us of the Abrahamic personage of ‘Adam’, who named the world around him), and our fully constructed world, where all connections are social, political, linguistic constructions with consequences. He shapes a world where things can happen through both individual and collective intervention. Things are in constant movement and are allowed the time, space, and freedom to develop as they come. “My reaction on the institutionalization of feeling and symbols became visually as a kind of ‘prepared- objet trouvé ‘in an arranged space. Something between controlled and uncontrolled- before and after the version of reality; a between space.”

Arranging the accidental

Even though the term ‘objet trouvé’ (found object) suggests that the accidental status of the object determines how it is to be understood, it is often so that the objet trouvé, presented in an art space, works more like a mold. It is as sticky as flypaper, as it attracts and draws all relations it can participate in, near. The ‘objet trouvé’ is not as arbitrary and inconsequential as it seems to be. By combining these concepts of the arbitrary with something that is prepared, arranged, and thought out, van Zanten’s work results in a dynamic that moves between the static and the fluid.

This idea materializes most clearly in his work around soundscapes. During his residency, van Zanten worked together with friends and musicians, organizing jam sessions. When I visited him in his studio at LEO XIII, the place looked like an experimental recording set, with instruments scattered around. “Today I’m focusing on the way improvisation and sound can contribute or interact; performing together to create a free space for understanding and thoughts.” The sessions resulted in In a Moment or Two We Tune In, a site-specific performance, from which a summary can be found online. With In a Moment or Two We Tune In, van Zanten embarks on different types of interaction that sprout from improvisation. Improvisation, both during the jam sessions and his performances allow for play within or even without a framework of set rules. In a Moment or Two We Tune In is the attitude of the experiment, as van Zanten creates a mental space for things to happen, and the public to interact. It is in this freedom that a fluid reality is created, between the lines of the accidental and the staged.