On the 3rd November, 2023, the Publik Universal Frxnd met Louwrien Wijers at her studio in the town of Ferwert, Friesland, to record a conversation on her work with language. During the production of the Frxnd’s recent performance work ‘Not Yet’ (2022), made with 11 panels from Wijers’ work ‘Tomorrow’s Language’, the question emerged of what does it mean when language crosses generations and time? What does it mean to imagine language as sculpture, writing as sculpture, and how that might connect to a different way of thinking about making art? The following is a transcript of their conversation released in two parts.

This interview will be released in two parts:
Click here for part 2

Part 1

Beginnings

Publik Universal Frxnd – I have a feeling that the people that will read this interview or conversation, maybe they won’t know much about your background so I thought it would be better to start with a little basis.

Louwrien Wijers – Oh very good of you!

So you’ve spent your life writing, that’s been an essential thing the whole time but you said you always consider yourself more as an artist.

Yes more a sculptor really, funny enough. But it’s difficult. I mean, immediately when I was writing, I understood I was not a writer. But when I was writing, young, really young, I understood that writing and me were one, you know? So how do you then get on with writing? 

Because you’ve been writing in lots of different contexts also.

Yes

I guess maybe the largest amount of writing is in this journalistic context for newspapers. Because that was something that you were doing.

Yes but you see I hate to be called a journalist. 

Sure, sorry.

No, no. Because my experience was when I was sitting at the table, big enough to have a piece of paper and a pen. I was maybe five, six, seven years old. I understood that this was it, you know. That was the top. But then art came along and I liked art a lot too. So then I started writing about art for the school paper. 

For your high school?

High school, yes.

Okay, and what kind of art were you writing about? 

Oh, any exhibition that went on. I went there and I wrote about it. 

And where was that? 

In Winterswijk. I went to school in Winterswijk. I was born in Aalten. Aalten is one and a half kilometres from the German border in the East, and Winterswijk is almost the same, but a little more to the East.

So you’ve been writing about art since you were a child?

Yes, yes. Because I didn’t want to go to art school. And then somebody in my classroom said, if you want to know about art, go to the studios of artists. That’s the place where you can learn about art. 

Why didn’t you want to go to art school, actually?

Oh, I hated the way people went there, and then two or three months later, they looked so funny, and they really did such strange things. I thought, I don’t belong there, that is not my, really not, not my cup of tea.

[Laughing]

And then, okay, then I thought, if I have to go to the studios of artists to learn about art then I should do something about my writing because the better you write, the better you can bring it to people. So my uncle had a newspaper and I asked him to make an appointment for me with his editor. So the editor said, “You want a job in journalism. You shouldn’t do that.” [laughing]. He said “you’ll be so busy, you’ll never have time to go to your mother’s anniversary. It’s terrible.”

Oh, wow.

And then I said, “but still I want it”. “Yeah, OK.” He said, “there are 18 places where you can, what do you call it, write a letter where they have vacancies”. He said, “but there’s only one place that I would tell you to go to. That’s Groningen. Nieuwblad van het Noorden in Groningen”. Okay, I went there. And then, I got it. Oh yes, then the first day in the newspaper, it starts at 7 o’clock in the morning, I was there quarter to 7. And the editor was there already and he writes about art. And I said, “I want to write about art”. And he said, “to write about art is for very few people. You are here less than the dirt on the shoes of all the editors. You have to do everything”, and that was it. 

So he basically said no.

He said, no, art was too far away for me, he thought. 

Oh no! you needed to do all the lowest jobs and work your way up. 

Yes, and work your way up, yes, yes, yes. 

And so is that what you did? 

Yes. Oh, it was so, once in six weeks, I was allowed one Sunday free to go to Aalten to see my parents, and that was all. The rest of the time I was working until three o’clock in the night, you had to bring your piece and then at seven o’clock you started again. It was incredible. But the beautiful thing is that somebody, the editorial chief of the Redactie, what do you call it? 

The chief editor? 

Yes. He’s helping you. So you write a piece and he says “that can go, that can go, that can go.” Because the director, he counts the words because he has to pay by the word. And so you learn writing really very, very well because they take care of you. I had somebody who really took care of me. So in the morning you sit there, you get a heap of texts that have to be, what do you call it, corrected, made good, edited for the newspaper and it has to be ready, at 9:30, it has to all be upstairs to be printed. So it’s a really good training. 

So how long did it take for you to then start writing? To be able to graduate, to become an art writer in the newspaper?

Ah yes, first I thought, okay, I’m here now. Normally you had three years to be a learner in journalism, but after a year they gave me, okay, you can be a member of the, what is it, the Redactie staff? 

Yes, the editorial team, I guess. 

Yes, the team. I thought, okay, that’s nice. And then I thought I should learn English. Just writing in Dutch is nothing. So I should learn writing in English. And the best country for journalism anyway is England. And then I found out that there was a Dutch magazine brought out in England and they were looking for people to make that Dutch magazine in London. So that job I got, and I was in London, New Oxford Street. I loved it. 

And when was this?

The year is… ‘63 is the year that they shoot… What is his name? Kennedy, huh? Oh, I don’t know, first name now. That’s ‘63.

Of course, because then you were in London in the swinging 60s! So this practice that you had of writing about art, it was also quite… it’s quite specific how you were doing that. Did that come later? 

That comes later. So what happens… oh yes, so then this magazine, this Dutch magazine, it is no longer being made. So I have three months of money and what to do? Go to Paris, I thought, with that money. Because Paris is France, very important. So immediately I went to Paris. I had a big suitcase full of clothes. I put it in the Gare du Nord. I went into Paris and I came to Place de la Contrescarpe. Rue Mouffetard. And I saw a place and it said ‘hotel’, it was the Hotel de Carcassonne. I thought, oh, that’s where I want to live. Okay, I had a very nice room, stone floor, Iron bed, what do you call it? For water. 

A tap…?

Yes, a tap. Nothing special. Iron thing, rod, to put your clothes on. And that was a very small room. But I found out that the whole place was filled with Fluxus artists. 

You didn’t know that before? 

No!

Amazing. 

I just felt that, you know, something attracted me and I thought, oh gee, that is what I have been looking for, you know, this kind of art. Because in the morning they had coffee together and I was, I could sit there and listen to them and take coffee with them in a cafe very near. 

Yes, because you said with Fluxus, there was a kind of, for you it was a breakthrough in thinking about art? 

Yes, that whole thinking about art in the way that art was being made, I felt is not art, because my father was good enough to give me everything that you need to be a painter, you know, linen, paint, and two rooms that I could use as my studio. And then I started painting. I thought, oh, is that it? Oh, oh. Old fashioned. I can’t do it this way. It must be… It’s not today, I thought. 

And then when you saw what the Fluxus artists were doing…

Yes, yes. When they were talking about immaterial art, actually that Mental Sculpture that I have later on moved into, then I thought, oh, I found the place that I was looking for, the kind of art that I was looking for. I was amazed. Incredible. 

And so is that something which then changed your way of thinking about writing about art? I mean, when you were writing about art. 

Not my way of thinking, but I came back to Holland because my father was about to die. Yes, and then I went back to Amsterdam and then I was, no, I went back to Holland and then I went to Amsterdam and Rini Dippel of the Stedelijk Museum, I’ve always been taken to the Stedelijk Museum, from when I was small, since 1948. My uncle was living around the corner and I’ve seen the Stedelijk so often and I felt near to that. But then Rini Dippel of the Stedelijk Museum said, “ah do you know all these people?” I told her about Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, “you should write about art” she said. And she said you can write for the Museum Journaal. So that’s how I started writing for the Museum Journaal because Rini Dippel was such a sweet person.

Well, I mean also because you had all these connections, you’d been hanging out with these artists. 

Yes, that was the reason. 

You had this unique insight. 

Yes, incredible. So nice. And then I thought, oh, I should start writing. No, it was actually somebody who worked for the Algemeen Handelsblad, and he said, “oh, you can work for us”.

And then you had a bit more freedom to experiment with how you were writing then?

I don’t know. 

Because you were not writing art criticism in the way that would be normal to find in a newspaper. 

No, no, I hated art criticism. Yes, I didn’t like art critics because I thought they were not seeing what we could see. So I started writing what I saw. And then quite soon I had a lot of people who liked my way of writing. And also I was, I may have told you before, in journalism I found that many people write what they think they hear, but that is not very good. You should write what the person is saying. So I started with this big opnameapparaat. What is it called? 

A recording machine, yes, a recorder I guess. 

Yes, with the big wheels, disks. But I put that thing in between us when I went to talk to somebody. I try to follow the breath, exactly how people say things. And that was my other thing, that I wanted things to be exact and not in my mind or my way of doing. 

So then, because of course a lot of your writing, your published writing is the interviews and conversations. So you were writing these things for these newspapers and journals and then you started this style of writing that was descriptive, rather than, you know, you were doing your own kind of expression of describing art. That was a practice, and then were you also doing the interview at the same time?

Mostly when you start writing about something you have to interview a person and then from that you go to the studio, you ask lots of questions to the artist, because he has an exhibition you can write about the exhibition and you use all your material that you have on your machine.

And your way of doing that was to bring the machine and record it and then transcribe it. 

Yes always

Verbatim? Or did you then, I guess you would edit the… 

No. 

Not at all? 

No. So everything that was said was just… So just use the part where you like the way it was said. It gives much more… poetry. 

Yes. And letting things flow. 

Yes. And let the person speak instead of you always listening to yourself. You know? What the art critic does.