For the last 12 years Dutch artist Marcel van Eeden has been making a drawing a day based on an event that took place prior to the year of his birth, 1965. Exquisitely rendered, van Eeden's drawings in graphite pencil function as a kind of diary in absentia - as the artist explains, 'The first and most important thing that fascinates me is that I wasn't alive at the moment the picture was taken. Then I can see the moment, I can see the light that fell, and even though I didn't exist at the time, I can recreate that moment.'
Each day a new drawing appears on van Eeden's personal wesbite, inspired by whatever has interested him on that particular day. Based on images from old books, magazines and newspapers, the drawings record the world of his parents and grandparents, accumulatively documenting the first half of the twentieth century. Van Eeden's monumental aim is to draw everything - he has said he wants to make a drawing of every photographic image that preceded his birth; it is also to build up, as he puts it, an 'encyclopedia' of his death, as if by recycling and preserving the time before he existed he might also imagine a time after he is gone.
This some might say absurdly obsessive self-appointed task - van Eeden has now produced close to 4,000 drawings - contains within it a sub-section of 140 drawings based on the life of K M Wiegand, which were shown at this year's Berlin Biennale. Wiegand, a name van Eeden stumbled across in a book, was it turns out a real person, who worked as a botanist in the early part of the twentieth century and died in 1942. But rather than documenting Weigand's life, which was by all accounts unremarkable, van Eeden has created for him a fictitious one which depicts Weigand moving from one centre-stage role in history to another: he marries Elisabeth Taylor, he fights in the world boxing championships, he's caught hand in hand with Rita Hayworth, he's a young abstract experssionist who's just sold some works to the Whitney, he's Jackson Pollock, he's a renowned photographer, he's a US Commander in the Pacific, a world-class actor, the subject of New Yorker-esque cartoons... and so it goes on.
As Massimiliano Gioni says in his introduction to a new book of Van Eeden's drawings, published by Hatje Cantz, 'This visual universe seems affected by a radical form of iconophilia, an unstoppable urge to consume images and at the same time, by doing so, save them from oblivion.' It's also a way of questioning what is remembered by history and why, and of resurrecting past events which might otherwise be forever lost and forgotten.
Rebecca Wilson
Marcel van Eeden: K M Weigand - Life and Work
Published by Hatje Cantz, 24.80 euros
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