Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Bertus Mulder
Dutch; 21st-century
Utrecht, The Netherlands: Madridstraat 1
74%
Het Gebouw. 2005 (with stanley brouwn)
brouwn, a conceptualist, designed the building and Mulder, an architect, executed the design. The gridded repetitiveness of the structure is belied by the fact that its dimensions are in "sb-feet," the bespoke unit of measurement brouwn devised based on the length of his own foot. This disparity between the artwork's austere presentation and the flighty imprecision of its conceptual underpinnings is characteristic of brouwn's practice. What's essential about the piece, and also what aesthetically damns it, is that the ethereal presence of brouwn's measurement system removes one's experience of the building from the history of architecture and places it into the history of ideas. As a work of International Style-pastiche it's competent and playful but unremarkable; as an instantiation of one man's private reflections on his own body, sanctioned by several decades of artistic experimentation, it's insane. But as a building, which it inevitably is, it can't step outside of the shadow of Mies and Meier and Johnson et. al., no matter how hard its conceptual elements work to skirt their influence. And so brouwn's gesture of romantic self-indulgence — impersonally personal in a way that almost aches — is stymied by histories of form which it shouldn't have had to deal with. Whence modern art's necessity of formal novelty. (TFS, 2026)