Prior to making the work Touche-à-Tout, I made the installation In de Rarekiek (2011 - 2012) - a life-size peepshow box of nine meters long, four meters wide and two and a half meters high, inspired by the historical peepshow box (in Dutch rarekiek). My initial idea had been to travel with this box, inspired by the historical traveling peepshows, but the installation was too large and too heavy to travel with. I decided to develop an installation suitable for travel, something I could carry myself. This installation would come to be called: Touche-à-Tout.

Only after having made In de Rarekiek, I realised that in relation to media archaeology, there is a strong connection between the rarekiek and the Internet. Internet can be seen as the present-day rarekiek. A rarekiek shares a great resemblance to the Internet in terms of its informative and entertainment value; and moreover, they are both boxes one looks into to perceive a representation of the world. We virtually travel around the world via the web. We collect information, true and untrue, fact and fiction. The computer, the Internet, our smartphones; they have become our television, our encyclopaedia, our cinema, our camera, our social life etc. It arouses a great sense of curiosity, inviting the participant to look beyond the single reference, into a labyrinth of information sources. But the Internet creates a heightened sense of longing – a longing for human interaction, as well as a longing for more information. It is extraordinary how the Internet acts as a liberator, while simultaneously holding participants hostage within its parameters. But as much as I appreciate the Internet, it does not provide an encounter with an intimate, marvellous, physical world. These contemplations inspired me more so to set out and explore the world looking for wonders and using all my senses.

I built a carrier that could house smaller works that I would make all over the world. Hence, over the course of a year – from November 2014 until November 2015 – the installation Touche-à-Tout grew and expanded during a journey around the world. Traces of the journey from Asia to Oceania, from North America to South America and from Africa back to Amsterdam, became visible in the work. At every place visited new elements were added to the installation and to the accompanying performance.

Initially Touche-à-Tout was constructed as various boxes, a chest of drawers made in Amsterdam and a bell-board (a box with speakers inside and brass doorbell buttons on the outside, connected to my computer to play my sounds) made on the first journey to Argentina. The boxes, the chest and the bell-board fit into each other and can be stored in a black square suitcase, which is transportable as luggage on an airplane or a boat. The installation grew during the voyage. It could expand and unfold and its form was alterable. Traces of the travel became visible in the work. The drawers of the chest got filled, photographs, videos and drawings were made, sounds were recorded to be played by the bell-board and three-dimensional sculptures started to live in the boxes. Every site visited has served as inspiration for new works. Every time the installation was presented, at different sites around the world, it was accompanied by a visual and musical performance, which also transformed along the way.

By making the installation Touche-à-Tout, by traveling and performing for one year (2015) all around the world, I embodied my most important source of inspiration. I became a rarekiek woman.

From an early age I have been drawn to many different subjects and I have wanted to keep expanding my interests throughout the years. The result was that within the arts, I never chose just one medium, but amongst others, engaged with music, performance and philosophy. A predominant notion in the West, especially in the academic world, is the belief that focussing on one subject, one medium, one question or issue, concentrating on one thing, will help obtain the best results. In the book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell[1] states that to become very successful, it is amongst other things necessary to spend 10.000 hours performing a specific act. In 2003 my Master’s thesis[2] drew on the idea that divided attention should also lead to excellence or at least to convincing art. The years that followed became a personal challenge to find ways to combine my different interests and varying perspectives and to have them strengthen each other.

I looked for a term that encompasses the irony and clumsiness of the so-called all-rounder. In English this would be ‘Jack of all trades’ and ‘master of none’. In almost every language a comparable expression exists, many of which are quite the opposite of what a Renaissance Man or Homo Universalis stand for. The expression Homo Universalis presupposes geniality whereas ‘Jack of all trades’ tends towards (superficial) generality. The image of someone who cannot help but reach out to touch everything possible, this is what the French ‘Touche-à-Tout’ embodies and why it serves not only as a title for my installation, but as a representation of my own metamorphosis, my coming to realise my personal identity. This project is my pursuit of the whole, a personal celebration of the coherence of tangled complexity over the orderly structure of specialization. 

The focus of In de Rarekiek was mainly on sight, by ‘looking’ at the world, but with Touche-à-Tout all senses are stimulated. To this end, my use of media is very diverse. The piece contains flavours to taste, scents to smell, objects to touch. There are sounds to be heard, but also to be made. The viewer automatically becomes part of the installation, becomes part of my microcosm.

Touche-à-Tout serves as a reflection upon the world as a dynamic whole, where borders fade, cultures pollinate each other and knowledge is shared. Like the Internet, many things happen simultaneously; it is an arbitrary collection without a filter, a web that connects the whole world.

The installations Touche-à-Tout, In de Rarekiek and Brain-net are presented together on the website [www.touche-a-tout.nl] designed by Merel van den Berg. The information which was gathered here during my travels was brought together in the artists' book  'Touche-à-Tout, some frames to the wonder of the world, featuring some of the wonders of the world', published by Onomatopee in 2018, Eindhoven, NL

[1] Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell, Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
[2] Sexless Art, Master in Fine Art Thesis, followed at Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design, 2002-2003.

The Touche-à-Tout performance changed according to the site where I performed and to the new experiences and thoughts, new sounds, new compositions. I would always perform together with the installation using the -to play sounds, play spoken fragments, have a dialogue with the installation or sing along with it. I would wear my golden costume, which also changed as I got further into my journey; new coins were stitched to the fabric. I could use the jacket and the coins dangling from it to make a tambourine like sound to match a kick coming from the bell-board. In Australia I virtually sat inside a giant old school Sony TV, in Colombia I performed on a Caribbean beach hiding from the rain with the local children, singing my songs to them. I would invite the spectators to interact with the installation, to touch things, to press the buttons, to taste, to smell, to play.   

A part of the spoken text touches upon some of the questions I ask(ed) myself:

It may seem logical to you that I speak English, but to me this was not a decision I took unquestioned, for not only do I speak English now, I also spoke in English as I was performing in all the other countries I have been to, even though there were always quite a few people who didn’t understand me. With this installation I can communicate with people without having to speak the same verbal language. I can have people smell, touch, see and listen to things. Then again, I love languages and I like the idea of a ‘world language’, in fact, I support globalization, in the sense of it representing collective or shared understanding and knowledge. 

I started to wonder, is English an optional world language? 

I knew that factually Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world, but I had actually thought that English would come in second, yet I wasn’t sure. So just like most of us do nowadays: I did a quick check online. 

I found out that Spanish speakers surpass English speakers by approximately 70 million people! 
I am bad with numbers, find it hard to recall them, so I had to write these facts down; 

There are over 7 billion people in the world, of whom almost 2 billion speak Mandarin and a meagre 335 million speak English. But do these numbers only represent native speakers? Do they include people who speak English as a second or third language?

And this is where I get lost on the web, or in my case, on Wikipedia (my very favourite part of the web).

By now I am on the ‘English-speaking world’ page and the numbers are all different again. This difference is exactly what I like about the Internet and Wikipedia in particular, the content changes all the time, it is non-static.

I click on ‘English’ as a language. And on the English page I find the link to English words of Dutch origin (this catches my attention). There is a whole list of English words of Dutch origin. Every single word in this list is clickable again, you can keep clicking… linking, connecting. 

So I click on the English word ‘geek’, which stems from the Dutch ‘gek’. On the geek site I click on ‘geek show’ then ‘freak show’ – ‘kunstkammer’ – ‘microcosm’ – and as you maybe can imagine, I am surprised at how I am suddenly in the midst of where I am constantly looking; at microcosms, wunderkammers, collections. 

I had been questioning for some time now, how can I carry the world on my back?

On the microcosm page I find a word, which is new to me: ‘epitome’, and I read that it is a synonym for embodiment. And just out of curiosity as to where clicking on embodiment will take me to, I end up at a page with all sorts of embodiments; embodied cognition, embodied imagination and so forth, none of it grabbing my curiosity really. At the bottom of the page is a band called Embodiment 12:14, a Christian Australian metalcore band. My search ends here.

This is pretty much how my mind works too, how I make art. I start one thing and I cannot help but have it start the next thought, action, song etc. And everything in that accumulation, in the whirl I find myself in seems equally interesting and important. I don’t choose. I choose everything!

I find it fascinating how scientists keep zooming in. But I keep wanting to zoom out. 

“For the last few centuries, the Cartesian project in science has been to break matter down into ever-smaller bits, in the pursuit of understanding. And this works, to some extent. We can understand matter by breaking it down to atoms, then protons and electrons and neutrons, then quarks, then gluons, and so on. We can understand organisms by breaking them down into organs, then tissues, then cells, then organelles, then proteins, then DNA, and so on. But putting things back together in order to understand them is harder, and typically comes later in the development of a scientist or in the development of science.”[1]Says social scientist Nicholas Christakis.

I love the Internet, but it has its shortcomings. You don’t have to travel anymore to find out what happens on the other side of the world. But I do want to travel, I want to take in all the information and wondrous things out there through all my senses and not just through a cold and distant screen.

“I had a presentiment that the “travelling” phase of my life might be passing. I felt, before the malaise of settlement crept over me, that I should reopen those notebooks. I should set down on paper a résumé of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me, the question of questions; the nature of human restlessness. 

Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensées, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room. 

Why, he asked, must a man with sufficient to live on feel drawn to divert himself on long sea voyages? To dwell in another town? To go off in search of a peppercorn? Or go off to war and break skulls?

Later, on further reflection, having discovered the cause of our misfortunes, he wished to understand the reason for them, he found one very good reason: namely, the natural unhappiness of our weak mortal condition; so unhappy that when we gave to it all our attention, nothing could console us. 

One thing alone could alleviate our despair, and that was ‘distraction’ (divertissement): yet this was the worst of our misfortunes, for in distraction we were prevented from thinking about ourselves and we were gradually brought to ruin.

Could it be, I wondered, that our need for distraction, our mania for the new, was, in essence, an instinctive migratory urge akin to that of birds in autumn?

All the Great Teachers have preached that Man, originally, was a ‘wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world’ – the words are those of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor – and that to rediscover his humanity, he must slough off attachments and take to the road. 

My two most recent notebooks were crammed with jottings taken in South Africa, where I had examined, at first hand, certain evidence on the origin of our species. What I learned there – together with what I now knew about the Songlines – seemed to confirm the conjecture I had toyed with for so long: that Natural Selection has designed us – from the structure of our brain-cells to the structure of our big toe – for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert.

If this were so; if the desert were ‘home’; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert – then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and Pascal’s imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.”[2]

Bruce Chatwin, excerpt from The Songlines, 1987
 

[1] Excerpt from the article ‘Holism’ by Physician and Social Scientist Nicholas Christakis, Harvard University http://www.edge.org
[2] p 161 & 162 The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, 1987

For Doina Kraal:
Elle touche à tout

She touched me with her Brain-net. For an exhibition with the promising title Hanging Around, where I used to hang around quite often, Doina Kraal spun an ever-expanding web of threads in which she tied up all kinds of tiny objects. It became a magical whole with a title apparently referring to the internet. To me it soon started to represent the universe though – it has the same tendency to expand, with this coherence of things that have nothing in common but together are throbbing with life, strangely striving for harmony and beauty.

And then I saw her Touche-à-Tout.

It’s more of a cupboard than a trunk, with numerous little drawers and shelves, knobs buttons and compartments. A mobile version of the escritoire. I bend over to crawl inside and while I allow the sounds, scents, colours, shapes and movements to engulf me, I continue to discover other hidden options.

After half an hour I was convinced: the Kraalesque universe fits into a trunk, expansion included. She travels the world with it, adding to it so it grows and grows.

I’m travelling. In Zürich I revel in the works of Francis Picabia. In Salzburg I see the small violin that five-year-old Mozart played and I take the Sound of Music Tour – These are a few of my favourite things – sincerely meaning every word as I sing along loudly. In Vienna I watch two men dance the jive across from Heldenplatz and I adore Egon Schiele’s vibrant nudes. I would like to carry it all with me, this symphony of sensations. For me, for my loved ones, for everybody (I’m actually not a bad person). But I can’t.

Doina knows how to do it though. She takes whatever tempts her. She reveals what an artist is meant to reveal: her mind.

Touche-à-Tout is Doina’s never-ending artwork. All things that astound her, everything that fulfils her wildest dreams, it all gets its proper place – in such a way that you might think she never found anything but invented everything herself.

Err, everything?

But what about the void in that little patch of felt? The other hollow spaces are filled with perfectly fitting poetic objects. Here, however, I see an empty square the size of a box of cough drops.

What did it hold?

Well, this is where the Great Expansion settled just a little bit.

Doina talks about a small box of pills. A Chinese medicine rolled of compressed herbs. Little brown balls, unappealing but potent against all ailments, especially the ones residing in the regions of the human waist. The stomach, the belly, the bowels – take the pastilles and they will find their way to whatever makes you ill.

Doina had to have them. The minute balls were tough cookies though, they put up a struggle. But the prospect of having their own place in the Walhalla called ‘Artwork’ eventually won them over.

The cabinet became their wooden cradle. They were gently rocking along, into the wide-open world.

At least they thought so. They expected to.

However, they made a mistake. They became comfortable enough to reveal their true nature. Without the need to keep up appearances, they started to scent. Their perfume proved heavy and poignant. Too heavy, to Doina’s taste. Unbearably heavy, suffocating. The entire cabinet smelled of them. It was intolerable and so she proceeded to arrest and banish them.

Now the little balls are in another trunk, not the one with the dozens of drawers and the thousand possibilities. They are trapped in an oubliette in the company of chocolate rocks, resin little monkeys like to lick and many other unsuspected realities.

The difference between these other wonders and the medicine balls is that the other wonders will one day be candidates for a spot in the cupboard. They are stock, to be summoned as soon as something in the Touche-à-Tout runs out.

But the balls and their scent? They are forever convicted to oblivion.

I ask Doina if I can see them. I can.
From the bottom of her storage trunk she gets a white plastic box she had tightly closed and sealed with three layers of tape. As if she was afraid. Together we tear off the tape. Doina opens the box.

There they are. Nasty little buggers. They climbed up against the sides of the box that now is their home. They are on their way to escape.

Impossible? I wouldn’t be too certain. Anything is possible.

Does Doina know the film Escape from Alcatraz?

I should smell them, says Doina. So I extend my nose. Smell. Recoil. Their scent throws a mean left punch. Not necessarily filthy but really strong, like thirteen Yetis.

The little balls are locked away and taped in again. But something crucial has changed. I know now that the blank space in the felt belongs to them. And I will not forget them.

The balls are not there. And yet they are.

They exist in the blank space in a patch of grey felt.

They exist in my memory. They exist in this story.

JOYCE ROODNAT

Joyce Roodnat is a cultural commentator at the Dutch newspaper NRC. She is the author or a number of novels and has also written non-fiction, including a collection of essays about art and culture and various books about hiking. Her 2016 publication ‘Volgens Fiep’ is a collection of short stories and reflections responding to 100 drawings of Dutch illustrator Fiep Westendorp.