Public space brims with images (attractive, vulgar, quaint, boring) and is awash in writing (bold declarations, snarky assertions, imploring injunctions, inanities) turning people into captive audiences, voluntary or not, for it all. What comes before a message? A sketch maybe, a doodle even—the scratchy marks of testing out a pen before starting the impassioned note to self or cool call-to-action memo for teams at the office. Even a chief executive officer might have a few stars and chevron patterns cramming up the margins of a legal pad. Such things are taken as a quirk of personality, maybe at best a bit of marginalia for the psychoanalyst to have a look at while musing on the knots of your more obvious issues.
The Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker takes such things, the “visual garbage” of the world, as she’d say, as her subject matter. A lot of ink was spilled back in the day trying to figure out what abstraction was “about”: What if it was all fluff? Van der Stokker, who’s well known for making large-scale wall paintings, murals, and sculptures considered cute or girlish, dares to suggest in her work that powdery pink clouds and buttercup yellow splatters—always rigorously plotted and carefully executed by a skilled team—are radical successors to the hallowed drip or slashing brushstroke that male painters were worshipped for in the twentieth century. It’s all about the doodle (or the gesture, as modern art preferred to call it) as a foundational step toward imagery.
Van der Stokker is interested in this “nothing.” The zen beauty of it. We might say that it’s her primary medium, and the painting or doodling supports the rendering of nothing, or of what we wouldn’t take a second glance at until she shows it to us as something worth seeing. She turns the suspicion that the artist is up to nothing, and has nothing to offer, into what she calls “the scandal of effortlessly painting nothing.” Here then is her “Nothing Wall” for everyone to take something, anything, or nothing from looking at it.
Public art sets out to be a social good, but it can also be obtrusive, even annoying. Someone, and probably not you walking past this wall, decided this should be here for a while. Schoolchildren paint them sometimes. The public-art image might try to address an issue or topical concern, perhaps solve a problem. Lily van der Stokker thinks it’s ok if you think these are mindless scribbles, messy and chaotic, without content, or even worthless. But then, what is worthwhile? Perhaps it is for something to have prompted you to wonder so in the first place. And then you might, just like the artist, draw an instrument from that old cup of assorted pencils and ballpoints and try to draw something out.