Lured away from our trusted system of looking
Hans den Hartog JagerWhenever I look at Ilona Plaum’s work, I always feel like I am entering a world where rules apply that I am not yet familiar with. Let’s look at W5_2023 (2023) — and brace yourself. We see a plant, the green-and-white leaves of which appear to be partially growing through a sheet of white paper. ‘Hanging’ around this white sheet are a light-grey, a dark-grey, and a black ‘sheet’, although these are probably not ‘sheets’ at all. They contain no depth and are parallel to the surface of the image, as if wanting to have nothing to do with the illusion. Oh, wait… underneath the white sheet I also spot a greyish-green rectangle, which I first mistook for the white sheet’s shadow. And then there is this light-green ‘floor’ marked with crosses, thereby suggesting some sense of depth, parallel to that of the plant. But is that ‘plant’ even a plant — or is it, on further inspection, fake, painted, a construction? Did you notice, dear reader, how the number of quotation marks kept increasing in the sentences above? What are we actually looking at when we see W5_2023? A collage? A cubist construction? A trompe l’oeil? Or is it simply a photograph?
And more pressingly: What on earth is Ilona Plaum trying to communicate?
While researching Plaum’s work, I read up on perspective and illusion and came across and anecdote in the book Art and Illusion by the famous art historian Ernst Gombrich. During the Second World War, Gombrich had been assigned to work at the BBC’s so-called Monitoring Service, which listened in on all kinds of radio signals, most importantly those transmitted by the enemy. As these signals were frequently jammed, parts of the message would quite often be distorted, or missing. Gombrich and his colleagues were therefore forced to largely interpret or complete what they heard themselves. It was there, Gombrich writes, that he became aware of just how much human perception is subject to each individual’s personal knowledge and expectations. A monitor who freely interpreted the sounds, but paid too little attention to what was undeniably there, was unreliable. But the same applied to colleagues who stubbornly clung to their first impression, an impression that, according to Gombrich, is always partly generated by who you are, what you have learnt, and what you expect from the world. Those who were unwilling, or unable, to listen beyond that personal reality, missed out on many opportunities. The most important insight Gombrich came to at the BBC was how difficult it was to look beyond one’s own reality. Each of us is imprisoned in our own perspective and mind. But to discover the exact nature of that prison we need the help of others. Only they can help us break loose from our conditioned gaze, if only for a moment.
Ilona Plaum, for instance.
Her photographs of plants, of seemingly transparent abstract colour blocks, of bones and branches against austerely painted backgrounds, invariably examine the deeply conditioned ways in which we see the world and interpret it — the illusion. For this, Plaum meticulously seeks out sites where looking and facts and faith collide. An example of this is how we collectively believe that the third dimension can also be shown on a flat surface. How our brains casually ‘complete’ flat images, unsubstantiated by any visual proof. Our deep-rooted desire for visual unity, for balance, even though that is obviously being distorted right in front of our eyes. And that is what makes Plaum’s work so good: her photographs confront us with the limitations of our own conditioned gaze. With how our way of looking is embedded in coercive patterns that we rarely think about and often, secretly, don’t even want to break free from. And: how liberating it is when we do.
But for that to happen, we first need to become aware of the nature of our prison.
Just to be clear: our system of looking, our Western system of looking, is less universal than we often think. It is not in our genes, not hereditary, but culturally determined — and, what’s more: it is based on an extremely concrete invention by the architect, engineer, and artist Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), dating back to the beginning of the fifteenth century. Today, people who look at paintings made before Brunelleschi’s time, including those of famous painters like Van Eyck, Giotto, Cimabue, or Duccio, are often surprised and mildly amused by the curious, in our view naïve, methods these artists used to depict space. Landscapes were often created with irregular stacks of houses or trees, the same person could pop up in several different locations in the same landscape, and painters frequently applied various different perspectives to a single image, creating the illusion that you, the spectator, are able to see both above and underneath a building from one and the same viewpoint.
That all changed at the beginning of the fifteenth century, with Brunelleschi's invention of linear perspective. This system is based on the assumption that depth on the flat surface can be suggested by adding one or more vanishing points where the sight lines of the depicted space converge. Brunelleschi's method was crystal clear, easy to follow and, most importantly, measurable — it allowed people to render the exact lengths, heights, widths and dimensions of a three-dimensional space and subsequently reproduce these in reality. His invention made a tremendous impact on architecture and art: Brunelleschi's linear perspective was like a magic formula that could be used to transform any three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional depiction, thereby creating a perfect illusion of depth on the flat surface; so exact, indeed, it appeared to contain the power of objective truth. And it does work, of course it works, as demonstrated by the numerous artworks from the past six centuries depicting such spaces, varying from Masaccio's Holy Trinity (1427) to the works of Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch. Or, in one of its finest examples, the corridor built by the architect Francesco Borromini at the Palazzo Spada in Rome: a long gallery with pillars on either side looking onto a garden with a sculpture at the end. The whole thing appears to be at least 25 metres long and sucks you in, into the depth. In reality the corridor is only eight metres long, the rest is linear perspective and illusion. The space Borromini suggest does not actually exist. And yet you may be entirely convinced of its existence, simply because he followed Brunelleschi's laws to the letter.
Linear perspective soon changed from an invention, a ‘thought-up’ system for how to look, to a generally accepted reality that was only seldomly disputed. In the over four centuries leading up to photography, you would rarely come across an artist who dared to depict reality without the aid of linear perspective. As a result we tend to forget that this is only a system, a construct. Compare it, for instance, with how landscapes were depicted in Chinese art for centuries, hinting at neither depth nor shadow. However, for Western artists linear perspective became a guiding principle for further finetuning their illusions. This led to paintings that sometimes appeared more real than reality itself. So-called trompe l’oeil (‘cheat the eye’) paintings became especially popular as they not only demonstrated the incredible technical skill of the artist, but also emphasized the immense power of the illusion. Trompe l’oeils are the ultimate confirmation of Brunelleschi's method of looking — and of the artist’s creative power.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, artists began to doubt this system. The advent of photography had already significantly reduced the sense of wonder evoked by the painted illusion, as this same illusion could now be created at the push of a button. This also applied to abstract art and Matisse’s Fauvism, although the Cubism of Picasso and Braque most effectively revealed that Brunelleschi's linear perspective indeed had its limitations. With paintings that also attempted to do justice to experiences of the third and fourth dimensions, these artists implicitly demonstrated that linear perspective only works well under very specific circumstances. The spectator has to be standing in a fixed location, is not allowed to move, and all other conditions must stay the same to keep the lines of sight intact. As a result, linear perspective radically excludes two of the most important elements of real life: movement and time. It is therefore static, silent, deathlike. Added to that is the fact that linear perspective implicitly presumes that what is presented in the image, automatically continues beyond picture’s frame — thereby forcing the spectator to adhere to an even more restrictive, preconceived world image When, at more or less the same moment in art history, Modernism was also added to the mix — expressly stating that the world within an artwork is always a construct —, the painterly illusion, including linear perspective, finally appeared to have been severely compromised.
But nothing could have been further from the truth. Five centuries of linear illusion could not be erased just like that. However, it is very revealing that a great number of leading twentieth-century artists, including Picasso, David Hockney, and Gerhard Richter did try. In each of their oeuvres, the relationship between illusion and reality plays a crucial role. Richter’s paintings, for instance, often zoom in on the tension between photography, painting, and ‘the real world’. And Hockney, the most radical, has spent many years developing an entirely new observational system that allows him to, partly in the spirit of Picasso, also include elements like movement, time, and multiple perspectives. But they are not the only ones. In the work of Thomas Demand, Emo Verkerk, Lieven Hendriks, or Jochem Mühlenbrink, the deconstruction of the classical linear, illusory perspective plays an important role too. They do this, for instance, by reproducing the world in paper, painting images that cannot be seen with the naked eye, or playing with ordinary perception. They all dispute our classical ‘system of looking’, countering it with new, alternative ways of looking.
In the meantime, however, the linear gaze continues to be the standard
In my view, that is exactly what makes Ilona Plaum’s work so extraordinary. It already starts with the first glance: unlike the aforementioned artists, Plaum rarely takes the classical, ‘knowable’ world as her point of departure. As a result, that very first glimpse immediately leaves us confused. What on earth am I looking at? This also applies to her series of plants that challenge classical perception of reality in a wide variety of ways: illusion, depth, colour. Or take works like Upclose_W21_2021, or Autumn & Rhythm / W50_2020 and /W51_2020. Here we see a harlequin-like checkered pattern with black lines drawn across it, casting shadows onto the background — but what is lying in front of or behind it? How many layers of reality am I looking at? Or take the twelve works from the Common Ground series, each one featuring two branches lying crosswise on a painted background. Are these indeed branches — or are they bones? And does the cross-shape represent a stop sign prohibiting us from further entering the image? Is that why it feels so strange, almost uneasy, that the different layers are still trying to draw us into the image?
Especially because her works raise so many questions, Plaum instantly lures the spectators away from their trusty and familiar system of looking. But that is only the beginning: once you realize this work is governed by entirely different ‘laws’, you will also notice that Plaum has crammed incredible amounts of reality into it. It already starts with the medium Plaum has selected. Her work nearly always consists of photographs featuring sculptures or constructions she built in her studio, partially assembled from large painted surfaces. In these works, she plays with depth, perspective, illusion, abstraction and figuration, foreground and background — the longer you look at the work, the stronger the impression will become that it is Plaum’s main goal to combine as many illusory contradictions as possible in a single image. ‘Alienation’ is the magic word in this process. Plaum’s aim is to release the spectator from their prison of perception, and in order to realize this, she needs to break with as many conventions as possible.
Because that will set the spectator free. Or almost free.
Because ‘freedom’ also entails losing something to hang on to — when all that is familiar disappears, you must create your own, new frame of reference. How objective is a photograph of a painted image? Should Plaum’s work be interpreted as a rabbit hole of illusions? For example, the moment I realize that even the plant is not a plant, but an illusion as well – an image, an artwork. That is what makes Ilona Plaum’s work so miraculous. The further she lures you in to look, the more question she raises — and yet the spectator will not drown in a pool of noncommittal enquiries. Quite the contrary: her illusions are so powerful, and make the alternative way of looking so enticing, that you simply want to continue. At the same time you know that you will never have certainty — similar to how, during the Second World War, Ernst Gombrich also realized that he would never know for sure whether the words, sentences, and stories he discerned from the noise represented reality.
That is the essence of Ilona Plaum’s work: by breaking with existing laws of observation, by challenging familiar observational logic, and substituting these with new, alternative, and seductive modes of interpretation, Plaum takes us along in a new, open world. In this world a new space will open up in your head; a space that is strikingly empty and light, where existing laws no longer apply. Here you are suddenly able to free your thoughts and free your spirit, disconnected from all (spatial) laws and conventions. And even though it may sound pretentious, this touches on a spiritual experience — a comparison that, incidentally, is not entirely farfetched, as meditation and belief systems also frequently use techniques to break free from existing frames of reference to get rid of all the noise and, momentarily, become aware of what is truly important to you.
Space.
In order to build a new world, Ilona Plaum’s work seems to be telling us that we have to be brave enough to bid farewell to all the things we know. But look — actually look, look closely — at all the freedom and openness you will then receive in return.
Details Week 5_2023