Goede Bodoelingen en Modern Wonen / Good Intentions and Modern Housing
Hans Eijkelboom
NAi010 Publishers
Softcover
208 pages
220 x 265 mm
2010
ISBN 9789056627584
Photographer Hans Eijkelboom (1949) is fascinated with the clash between the high-flown visions of modernism and the sometimes dismaying realities of the Bijlmer district. Good Intentions and Modern Housing: Photo Notes on an Amsterdam Suburb reports on Eijkelboom’s journey of discovery through the Bijlmer with his camera as his ally. Eijkelboom sees the Bijlmer as ‘the most international place in Amsterdam’. In an introductory essay, the art critic Hans den Hartog Jager says, The struggle between good intentions and stubborn realities is characteristic of the Netherlands, and perhaps of the entire Western world. This is not the Bijlmer; this is all of us.’
About the Artist
Hans Eijkelboom, born in Arnhem in 1949, is a member of a generation of Dutch artists who played a key role in the establishment of conceptual photography in Continental Europe. His initial forays into photography had a strong performative bent, and almost exclusively involved one type of autoportraiture or other—“the presentation of self in everyday life,” in Erving Goffman’s felicitous phrase. These works were clearly informed by the efflorescence of 1970s Dutch performance art, all the while keying into the emerging discourse of post-1960s identity politics—the photo triptych De Drie Communisten (The Three Communists, 1976) presenting the artist dressed up as a Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist respectively, speaks volumes in this regard—though infused with a deadpan sense of humour all too often lacking in subsequent identity-based art practices. (Comedy, in his ongoing encyclopedic project, is a function of the illusion that dress cannot ever guarantee true distinction.)
About the Publisher
NAi010 publishers specialises in developing, publishing and distributing books in the fields of architecture, urbanism, art and design. Resulting from the merger of NAi Publishers and 010 Publishers as of July 2012, NAi010 publishers is the largest internationally orientated Dutch publisher in the fields of architecture, art, photography and design.
