She would like to know how to
express that lust in this passing age
Hold it against her , face
to face, body to body, close
together. She says she speaks
of that time between things, between the
people, which other people
throw away, which is of no interest to them
to them...........
Marguerite Duras ( Blue Eyes, Black hair, page 57 )
You have to be careful with Yvonne Mostard’s sculptures. At first sight especially they
tempt you to baroque words and grand stories. They induce you to search for such
words, get the books, listen to music, read poetry. You should write about her in German, actually. In the lanuage of the humanistic thinkers and romantic poets.
Use words such as Sehnsucht, Vergangenheit, Empfindlichkeit. Terms which suggest, evoke feelings, linger in the mind, are heavy and float at the same time.
Words which you do not really know how to deal with because they are not as exact as they want to appear, which lead your thoughts into a vague direction rather than say something about an aim. Such a text is appropriate, because it connects with what Mostard does when she quotes Rilke or derives the title ‘ In Thautropfen will Ich hinuntersinken und mit der Asche mich vermischen ` from Novalis or when she expresses a desire by the sigh “Ach wie wollt ich lustig fliegen `.
But such a text would be exaggerated, not refined enough and only illuminate one aspect. Because the sculptures often just stand there looking so ordinary something else has to come into the balance. Something as subtle as ‘the tender fabric of moods, urges, reflections, fragmentary melodies, vague visual images.... half forgotten events.... which continuously fill our souls, even when we are not paying attention, when we are dealing with something completely different, ` as Campert suggests. ( He read this in Vestdijk’s work ) . And while this remark may perhaps be equally inexact, it at least indicates the lighthearted appearance of a sculpture such as ‘Les très- riches heures`, the humour of ‘Mantle of Love` or the simplicity of ‘Palm of Victory`.
Who ever reads Yvonne Mostard’s notebooks, will find a combination of light and heavy in the comments, quotes, poems and fragments, a lot of seriousness and a slight touch of humour. You will find there a lear ned essay on how to read poetry alongside reflections on how you can approach life. Or death.
Tears are not just about grief and loss, they also form lenses through which you can get a different view on the things which, for instance, connect souls. The notes come from all the corners of European culture and many of them are from the past, histories which we may know and may have wanted to forget or which we may have cast aside because they seemed of little value.
But above all her texts deal with emotions. They appear continuously and elaborately. For Yvonne Mostard an emotion is not just a casual accidentally occuring phenomenon. It is the essential and active opponent in matters of life and death, love, intimacy, forgetfulness, mystery and femininity. That is her constant preoccupation.
And that the quotes she uses may be old-fashioned, stale or sentimental is beside the point. Mostard takes them back into the present. She studies and reanimates them, makes them her own, turns them into her own story and shapes that into a contemporary autobiography which gets more extensive with each sculpture.
‘Just as my themes my work process takes place outside the topicality of the day and I withdraw myself deliberately from our age of information technology and rapid processes`, Mostard writes about herself. By that she quite rightly does not say anything about how her art works and what its merit is. After all, that is not for her to decide but for the viewers. And they may find together with Susan Sontag ( to be read in ‘Ber nard Frize’, text Dominic van den Boogerd) that her art ‘leads to forming an opinion from a state of enchantment from which you cannot free yourself`which leads to a ‘style of knowledge`.
And even though she thinks she withdraws herself from the present she still contributes a lot to the forming of opinion and style of knowledge that are needed now. And that is her merit. And the value of het art.
Ge van Steenbergen - translated by Addy Obers