Hadassah Emmerich's wall painting
Mieke Derickx was never averse of experimenting. When artist Hadassah Emmerich painted the walls of the Student Services Centre (SSC) from top to bottom in gigantic plant motifs in 2006, it wasn’t to everyone’s taste.
“It was her first official assignment,” Derickx remembers. While Emmerich was at work in the renovated university library on the Ezelmarkt, Derickx heard things like “Take that paintbrush away from that child,” “Much too wild” and “It’s like being in a squat,” mainly from SSC employees. “I stuck to my guns.” Derickx shrugs her shoulders: “There is always someone who thinks something is ugly. Well, then, don’t like it.” Fortunately, the mumblings became less and less.
And then came Derickx’s experiment. “Sometime later, I told – especially the critics – that the walls were to be painted over. I thought: I will just drop a word. I wasn’t even planning on doing that. Oops, they thought that was terrible.” She laughs. “You see how tastes change. Now people are actually proud of Hadassah’s work. It is even used as ‘branding’. If a piece of the mural comes away, then it is the people from SSC themselves who repair it.”
Jan van Munster's Brainwave
Brainwave, a luminous ‘convolution of the brain’ on the ceiling in the central hall on Universiteitssingel 40 “is at the very beginning” of her career as a curator. “I had put Jan van Munster forward to the Arts and Heritage Committee. This Dutch artist made a light sculpture for us in 2000 that has become part of the interior. Some people don’t even notice it, it looks just like a modern lamp.” Van Munster had an EEG made of his own brain activity, which resulted in a pattern of lines – his inspiration for the object.
The choice of Brainwave brings Derickx, who is a graphic artist herself, to her first years as curator: “In or around 1996, I was asked to become a member of the Randwyck Arts Committee. At the time, I worked as a research assistant at Medical Sociology and thus came in contact with a few committee members. It was a club of fanatics, with Gerjo Kok (retired professor of Psychology) and Hans Philipsen (former rector). It became more and more serious too. We had a nice budget for purchasing art, at the time it was a reasonable percentage of the renovation or sale of government buildings, the so-called percentage regulation.”
The city centre has a smaller art committee in the library and there was also a group that dealt with museological collections from the Jesuit inheritance. Now there is a single Arts and Heritage Committee at the UM. Where Derickx was a volunteer member in the early years, the curator positions (there are three) are now compensated for a fixed number of hours by the UM. The purchase of art is financed from the housing fund and partly by the Executive Board.
“The university has grown, the collection has grown, it has slowly dawned on faculties what we do. Employees know how to find us when they have questions about works in their corridors; they even initiate their own exhibitions and we get tips and criticism. I take them seriously.”
She remembers the ‘little row’ about the gateway on the Grote Looiersstraat, at the entrance to the university library. Czech artist Borek Sipek created a gate with glass-blown flowers. “Students felt that we should spend the money on laptops and lockers. In reaction, we made a film about it, for on social media, in which we had students, passers-by, but also Sipek himself talk about the work of art.”
Scans by Florentijn Hofman
On more than one occasion, Derickx managed to rope in a big name for the UM. Such as photographer Robin de Puy, with her project Screening Diversity, a series of portraits for the renovated square building at Tapijn. But Derickx takes us to a different work of photography, in Randwyck: Scans by Florentijn Hofman (you know, from the enormous yellow rubber duck).
The portraits of Scans can be found on the outer wall of Oxfordlaan 55. It’s not just because of Hofman’s creativity that she chooses this work. She also wants to provide insight into the process: how the need for a piece of art arises and how it is discussed with the ‘users’. “We tried to find out what the employees on the Oxfordlaan (which includes the Faculty of Psychology and research centre Scannexus) wanted. Even though some people say that they know nothing about art, the good thing about such joint consultation is that we reach a consensus. This occurs because the right questions are asked: what is the object of the art, what colour should it have, what effect should it create, et cetera.”
It should definitely have something to do with MRI scans. Also, it would be installed outside against the grey concrete facade, because “that would create more openness”. Unfortunately, all the money was used up when the building was completed, says Derickx. “Purchasing art is the first thing to be scrapped when building costs go beyond budget. Fortunately, a small fund of about 25 thousand euro was found.” Not a huge amount, she says, but Hofman knew what to do with it. Together with photographer Inge Hondebrink, he portrayed a number of volunteers, with their head and hand on a copying machine: “Pressed down flat, but at the same time as if they were trying to press themselves out.”