WB, Death Room Interior, 1985

K at work in the Coalmine Fürst Leopold Wulfen

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1985, December: Accompanies Waldo Bien during his work on the sculpture "Death Room Interior" in the coal mine Fürst Leopold Wulfen, Dorsten, BRD. K produces chalk drawings on the layers of coal in the mine shafts (early animal studies) and frottage (F.I.U.archive). (See Waldo Bien, by Patrick Healy, Wienand Verlag, Köln, 2000.

same time Bien shows the work "Thirty-two studies for Grey" in the window of the gallery, which is related to a game of chess Duchamp played with Michel Strasbourg on the 4th of Sept. 1924.

For this occasion Virgil Grotfeldt is flown in from Houston. Acquaintance with David Lebe and his "light drawings" (FIUW1986, January 23: Joseph Beuys dies in Düsseldorf.

In the same year the photographer Oscar van Alphen makes photographs of Kloppenburg and The Archive as part of an assignment of the City of Amsterdam (portraits of Amsterdam Artists and their ateliers).

1986, 4th of January: NRC HANDELSBLAD, by Bas Roodnat: ‘FINALLY, AFTER 15 YEARS OF BKR, AN EXHIBITION’, "IF ANYTHlNG COULD PLEA FOR A WELL FUNCTIONING BKR IT MUST BE THIS EXHIBITION. It is magnificent work... A reality he perceives in a sort of trance, when dreams are dreamt and drawings are made during the silent nocturnal hours. It took a long time for him to master this technique of "self-elimination", so that the richness of beings that populate Kloppenburg's unconsciousness could take their places on the brown wrapping paper, unhampered by his "physical resistance". Something of Kloppenburg's working environment takes shape in the hall in FODOR, where some of his belongings are standing and lying on the floor. A cupboard with sixty drawers, out of which grow the horns of a cow. On top of the cupboard an old clock, a bunch of bananas, a hatbox, the skeleton of what looks like a cat (hare, red.). On the wall some pastel sketches and a weathered school plate with animals from Australia. There is a worn out easy chair covered with the Dutch flag. Furthermore; cardboard boxes, a flannel blanket, trays with hundreds of pieces of crayon, a bunch of branches and lots more... At night over all this shines the light of a lantern or the moon which creates an ambience in which the fantasy creatures like to appear... IT IS MAGNIFICENT WORK!"

1986, Friday the 7th of February, 20:00h: Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, RAUM 3, the F.I.U. office in the atelier of Joseph Beuys; Beuys-class meeting. Present from Holland: Bien, Kloppenburg, P. Heynen and Liesbeth Takken. Liesbeth Takken will write about this in the magazine DRIEGONAAL (Impression), spring 1986, illustrated with two pastels by K and Bien's 'Death Room Interior'.

..."While the Kunstakademie is open to the public for another yearly "Rundgang", open classrooms with works of students, one door remains closed; In RAUM 3, the atelier of Joseph Beuys, many ex-students have gathered. The provocation that has to do with the work of Beuys has led to the 'Erweiterte Kunstbegriff' (the extended conception of art), and this has not come to an end. His death calls for more: the foundation of the FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY (for creativity and interdisciplinary research), clearly bearing the stamp of his personality, is now in need of an actual continuation... It appears from the meeting that (so far) no corresponding concept has been found as an answer to these questions, which is not strange considering the fact that only few have caught on to the social impulse of Beuys and pass it on."...

1986, 3rd of June - 5th of July : Solo exhibition in Gallery d'Theeboom Amsterdam, with large number of pastel drawings.

1986, October: Exhibition "Fifteen Contemporary Artists from the Netherlands", IMF International Monetary Fund Art Society, Washington D.C. USA (Catalogue with introduction by John Hallmark Neff). Previous to this, the exhibition was shown in castle Rhoon, NL. K's participation consists mainly of large pastels. Bien contributes his sculpture "The BANK". The exhibition is curated and organised by Cathy Hemmer.

NOTE: It is through this exhibition that Bien and Kloppenburg get to know the work of Virgil Grotfeldt from Houston, TX, and vice versa. This is the start of the collaboration with American artists on multiple F.I.U. projects.

1986, VENICE: K accompanies Bien to Venice in connection with the presentation of Espace 251 Nord during the Venice Biennale <Portraits de scene a l'ile aux phoques>, Casa Frollo, in which Bien participates with two works. Acquaintance and friendship with Luk Darras, the Belgian Cultural Attaché in Rome, and his wife Barbara, with Laurent Jacob, René Depres, Johan Muyle and many other Belgian and French artists with whom Espace 251 Nord, Liège collaborates, and with the American writer Peter Noon and the art critic Eric Amouroux. A mummified cat, found by K in Venice on the cemetery Santa Clemente and carried around through the city in a plastic bag together with an olivebread, wineglasses and cigarettes, etc., is x-rayed by customs later on the way back which causes consternation. Bien incorporates the x-ray picture in the work "CASSATA". Furthermore: Photosequences by K of "Venetian Water-Runes" (pictures of water reflections in the Canal Grande). There is also a work session of three days (two nights) in the caves of the sunmountain in Maastricht, during which the nuclear reactor of Tjernobil explodes in the world "outside" and causes the first large-scale nuclear accident (New Age). Bien, Kloppenburg, Eliane Gomperts and Pieter Heyen are working inside (section A wall) on a series of bass reliefs in the walls of the marl caves; RIJKSKUNSTDEPOT.( During the war the caves where used for national art storage)  Kloppenburg creates an ATLANTIS relief. Publication with black and white photos (by EG and WB), category A nuclear-free, edition 100, 3rd of May 1986, FIUadam.

1986, 18th of October: article in NRC HANDELSBLAD, by Garth Seilbing; Jacobus Kloppenburg "THE DEATH OF YOUR MOTHER IS THE DEFINITE ABNABELUNG (cutting of the umbilical cord) ", with a picture of K (on roof of Archive) and a picture of mother... on account of her death... "For years my mother was the only one who knew that I made these drawings... She judged my drawings in a completely independent manner." Did she not mind him working until deep in the night?

..."She didn't particularly like it. When she had gone to bed I would darken the window of the atelier so she was unable to see whether I was still working. I would lay some rolled up blankets in my bed, and in the morning when one of my friends came over she would say; "Kok is still sleeping". Sometimes it was terribly difficult to get into bed without being seen. But there were also periods that I worked for days in a row. She would call me from the garden then and put my food in a bucket which I would hoist with the use of a rope... One day I had found a sack full of rags on the Waterlooplein. I took it home and spread them on the floor to show what fascinated me. She understood, but I left those rags lying there while she was trying to create order from chaos. Agatha Kiljan was her name, a powerful name, with all those i's and a's."

Working on objects using Volkswagen parts, 1985

Door to Room 3, Beuys atelier and FIU office, Düsseldorf Academy, 1984

Volkswagen objects, 1985

With Katharina Sieverding, Düsseldorf 1986

Customs X-ray of Kloppenburg’s luggage, Venice Airport, 1986

On Archive rooftop, 1986

Dutch Portrait, 1986

Invitation d’THEEBOOM exhibit, 1986

Venetian Water-Runes, 1986

Fighting for the arts, 1987

1987: 'Verlags Buchhandlung Sautter+Lackmann, Hamburg' publishes "IM KAMPF UM DIE KUNST' (Fighting for Art) by Ron Manheim. "Die Diskussion von 1911 über zeitgenossische Kunst in Deutschland" (The discussion on contemporary art for 1911).

1987: (spring, exact date unknown) exhibition: CLOPPENBURG, Modern Art Archive, West Berlin. NOTE: On invitation of critic Martin Ballot. MB had visited the Archive in Amsterdam the previous year and studied the pastel drawings. Kloppenburg travels to Berlin, 114 Osloërstrasse, with a roll of pastel drawings. Photo sequences in DDR transit zone. K himself has spelled his name with a C on the poster: CLOPPENBURG. At the same time Bien is in Tasmania, shares the bed with Frieda Beukenkamp, zaps channels on satellite TV and suddenly comes across a program with dozens of Kloppenburg pastel drawings used as intermezzo images. He phones Kloppenburg in Düsseldorf, who is unaware of the TV broadcast, but does know that a pastel drawing has been stolen in Berlin.

The BKR, Visual Artist's Arrangement, is cancelled.

NOTE: In the 17 years that Kloppenburg made use of this arrangement he created approximately 60 constructivist artworks acquired by the government within its framework. At present some of those have become part of public collections, housed in government buildings (e.g. the Ministry of Justice), the Holland Collection and museums. The survival of all the other works is uncertain. F.I.U. research concerning these BKR works is hampered by the impossibility of tracing the location of the BKR archive and its photo registration of acquired artworks (2004, November). The Municipal Archive of Amsterdam contains only the economical reports of the acquisitions, without mentioning acquired artworks.

1987, February: Exhibition of the American artist VIRGIL GROTFELDT, Houston TX, in Gallery d'Theeboom, Amsterdam, where Bien and K have also exhibited. Beginning of personal acquaintance, friendship, co-production and interdisciplinary research within the F.I.U. framework. Full information on this in the following F.I.U. Amsterdam publications; Waldo Bien, by Patrick Healy, Wienand Verlag, Köln 2000, and: Virgil Grotfeldt, by Patrick Healy, Wienand Verlag, Köln 2003. Grotfeldt's acquaintance with the work of Kloppenburg and his ARTCHIVE FOR THE FUTURE results in first reports of it to Walter Hopps, Founding Director of The Menil in Houston, Texas.

1987, 2nd of February - 8th of March: Solo exhibition in Rotterdam Artspace; "THE WRITING TYPE FLYER" (invitation with portrait of his deceased mother, laid out): "for Agatha". The exhibition consists of a group of pastels and A4 size drawings, a worktable with objects and two chairs from The Archive. The title of the exhibition is derived from an object from The Archive;... an old typewriter with two roof tiles on top of it, like bee's wings. It is one of the typewriters from the old home, on which the letters and bills were written and on which he often worked playfully. As such, typewriter "drawings" and "soundtextlines" emerge, in which he frees the fixed mechanics of the typewriter and allows the letters and numbers to fly and dance across the paper in a new cosmological context. (FIUWAC 164-2000). He plays the keyboard like a pianist (Glenn Gould). What has been "soundwordedtypedrawn" should not only be viewed and read but especially heard and listened to.

"K", press release for the exhibition by Waldo Bien, with first public description of the Artchive for the Future and K's working method;... "Since 25 years K has been working incognito on the ARTCHIVE FOR THE FUTURE. Who enters it will desperately search for the order that is so characteristic for an archive. The whole gives the impression of an ill-assorted collection of luggage for the coming migration of a nation. Stacks and heaps that seem to be waste give an impression which fails every social definition. But this chaos is misleading; Behind the symptom hides a carefully assembled whole, in which K registers even the smallest change immediately, as if it were his own body."...

1987, September: Article in JONAS magazine, theme "The Spiritual in Art", by Petra Weeda, with picture of K on cover, featuring Rothko, Mondriaan, Newman, Klee, Kandinsky and others. Title: The work of Jacobus Kloppenburg;  "In Tarkovsky's movie Stalker, three men embark on an excursion to a remarkable, restricted area subjected to an obscure danger. This "no man's land", where there is not a living creature to be found, is at first sight dominated by a luxuriant green vegetation, until ruins of buildings show up in the landscape. The green surroundings then make place for shallow motionless water surfaces, occasionally disturbed by a falling drop only. At the bottom of the crystal clear pools objects can be discerned; pieces of plastic, syringes, revolvers, corpses. Frozen leftovers from a civilisation that seems long gone but is still ours. It is through the intervention of the water surface that these things are alienated, and the distance to them becomes insuperably great. A similar sensation, of objects taken out of their context and therefore alienating, came over me when confronted with Kloppenburg's atelier, but mirrored; here the sunken world of objects has come to the surface and  its reality is rendered unavoidable yet just as alienating." ...K is a master in the maintaining of contradictions... His susceptibility to two worlds, expressed by his "exercises with an undirected hand" and his geometrical drawings, with which he provides himself with rational insight. His optimism ("those gloomy medieval images of Dante are far removed from me".) …"[my]...experiments must have a social meaning, otherwise one would only be involved in some individual mythology. One should develop a kind of writing that is legible for everyone, as Beuys has done. But this does not mean there is a norm for such a thing. If it would seem as if there is, it is the task of the artist to break through that expectation immediately…

1987, September - 11th of October: Gallery De Wiemelink, Doetinchem (pastels, drawings, Volkswagen doors and windows and objects). Press: Georg Schlimme van Brunswijk; "Who intends to be an artist these days does not face an easy task. He has to react to the past with a new mentality, and, to that end search for a free and undogmatic expression of inner experiences, which has to articulate both the concealed, lyrical and mysterious experience of nature, and the fantastic catastrophe of the technical world and the grinning fears which the modern  drama of life produces. Not to speak of the geometrical structures, the twirling bodies and light figures, that evoke associations with experiences between Eros and death. What can a creative artist do with the unconscious perceptions calling through meditation from the sunken stock of the unconsciousness for a place in the tissue of forms and colours available to him on the surface of line or paper, in order to give a mature response that appeals to the spectator? The material he has at his disposal for this purpose; paint, brushes or a pencil, in its banal worldliness seems to be miles removed from what appears to the painter and draughtsman during his best moments from the field of cosmic revelations of a world of shapes with ghostly dramatic contrasts... Those who have been willing to follow me this far I would like to recommend to go and see the work of the Amsterdam painter Jacobus Kloppenburg in De Wiemelink. They are fantastic compositions in pastel on sheets of brown wrapping paper... in brief, here one is shown a bizarre but meaningful population from a fantastic Arc." (article with photo of pastel; newspaper and date not (yet) identified)

1987, 9th of October - 14th of November: solo exhibition, The Becker Building, Philadelphia, USA, as part of a "homage to Marcel Duchamp" with a few dozen pastel drawings and objects. At the AC). Lebe makes several photographic portraits of this meeting. In Philadelphia K collects the bookkeeping documents of a bankrupted restaurant and creates the work AMERIKA from it (FIUWAC). On the way back, a working visit is paid to Iceland. FlU meeting with Thomas and Totta Johnsson in Reykjavik, and landscape research. (F.I.U.archive)

1987, December: Article in ELSEVIER, volume 43,  no.49, by Anne Claire Vogtschmidt; "I believe I am somewhat difficult socially." Two pages with two pictures and a special screen print offer for collectors. ..."With a sensational and well received exhibition in Museum Fodor in 1985, K joined a small group of artists who developed a complete style of their own, away from current fashions." ...K himself;  "I've always been very close with the children. An unbelievable experience... It was all so uninhibited and vivacious, what they would draw as well. I got stuck with my work a bit, for I thought I could make geometry more flexible, but I lacked the necessary freedom.  I felt the need for something more individual, a creativity less restrained. This was what the children were doing. I entered a sort of crisis and started all over, in their way. I just started to scratch lines, as a sort of self-release and orientation, very thoroughly, without any preparations. I still have those things, and indeed there is nothing on them."

1987, December: Magazine CODE. Full page advertisement with a paleo-photo of B and K in front of the entrance of the marl cave; TO OUR INVESTORS (to explain our principles for 1988), Waldo Bien, Jacobus Kloppenburg. NOTE: The same picture will play a role in the discussion concerning the dubious restoration of two important artworks in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam some years later: the Barnett Newman painting, "Who is Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue" and the Beuys object "Pappschachtel mit Fettecke", and the public discussion concerning the ethics of restoration in general (See; Waldo Bien by P. Healy, Wienand Verlag Köln, 2000, which gives a full report about the affair).

Dec 1987 - Jan 1988: Solo exhibition in De Vaart, Hilversum NL (opening by Wouter Welling, art critic. Curator; J.A. Berkhof. Catalogue with text by Berkhof, cover with picture of K with tap.   K: "In school we had to run circles in the gymnasium. The sun would shine through the window and when I walked in the ray of light, I would stretch my hand towards the sun. The teacher tapped his stick on the ground and made me stand in the corner as a punishment. When I was 16, I abolished drawing. It didn't work out. When I looked at one of those almond branches of Van Gogh, I couldn't believe my eyes. I went there as much as 50 times, so perfect ... my character is full of contrasts, from very fluid to the exactness of a neurotic Swiss watchmaker. I work with watercolours, but also with millimetre paper ... I work during the night, balancing on the edge of sleep. The idea is to work ahead of yourself as it were. Even though you are normally slow in your reactions, suddenly you are surprised you can react so faultlessly and quickly. Sometimes the possibilities that offer themselves are much too fast. I can never work on one thing for very long, because I would get behind on developing my ideas. That is why a drawing is so beautiful, you can immediately record it. Reason then only watches from of the background, it offers direction but is not contemplative."

1987, December 30th: article in GOOI AND EEMLANDER, Red.; "DE VAART ALS LUSTHOF" (The Canal as Pleasure-Garden);  ..."the curious oeuvre of an artist both remarkable and colourful. His stove is being stoked with trash and wreckage that he also uses to frame his paintings. With a loving gesture he now and then caresses one of those do-it-yourself frames, which charms by its structure and tone. The life sphere of his house in the Jordaan is transferred to Hilversum. Across the ceiling a bald pine trunk with car windows for stabilisers flies like a rocket. In the middle of the front room a hairy pedestal is crowned with the wreck of a typewriter K decorated with two roof tiles for wings. In the window sill he placed side-windows from the old VW scrap-yard, which he paints.  He rescued cast-off chairs from the dump and fire and transforms them into sculptures.  That the painter is capable of joking is shown in his illustrations of the golden section - a breadknife in a white loaf of bread… a revelation."

Invitation card for Rotterdam Art Space exhibit, with the Flying Type Writer, 1987

(Invitation card) and, on the other side, the laid out body of his mother.

Walter Hopps in front of his office at The Menil, Houston TX 1989

Johannes Stüttgen’s complaint about the destroyed Beuys Fatcorner.

Chief Volkswagen, 1986

Stamping K on the invitation cards, on the sunny side of 2nd street, Philadelphia, 1987

Minute nap, Philadelphia, 1987

Invitation card for The Becker Building show.

Liege, 1987 (with monkey)

Invitation card for The Becker Building show.

Selected objects from the Artchive for FIUWAC, 1999

Elsevier article, 1987

Three black items, 1988

Crime Time edition, MODERN ART - WHO CARES?

Object with scale enlargement, 1985

FIUWAC 262-2001

1988, 16 July - 4 September: Exhibition. Borderline Commune di Monteciccardo Pesaro, Italy. Kloppenburg participates exhibiting a surrealistic object, a display case containing the skeleton of a mouse and a doll's house chair (scale enlargement). NOTE: The work was not returned to the artist at the end of the exhibition and remains untraced. (WANTED: information to F.I.U. Amsterdam, please). MODERN ART - WHO CARES?

1989, 1st October - 3 December: Exhibition "Etats limités - archives des passions", Espace 251 Nord, Liège, Belgium, curator Laurent Jacob (with Bien, Kloppenburg, Johan Muyle, J. Charlier, Bijl, M. Francois, Robert Garcet, J.Geys, among others). K exhibits 'Lenin views it from above' (FIUWAC) and the sculpture "Three Black Items". NOTE: The 'perestroika' politics of Gorbatchov and the sudden change and relaxing in East West relations, the movement to European unification and the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union is part of the context of 'Lenin views it from above'. The work consists of a pastel drawing on a wooden panel where Kloppenburg shows father Lenin floating with a sickle and expressing socialistic pathos; he floats above a landscape of motoric drawings -the handwriting which he has stripped of any textual meanings- carrying with it a large scale possibility for new developments. K designs many new flags for the new Russian Federation, an assimilation of Capitalism and Communism, of Soviet-Star-Sickle and American Stripes (Triodos F.I.U.tures).

1989, 4th of January: Magazine BEELD. Full page advertisement with picture of B and K with crown. In the background a third portrait, Christ with a crown of thorns. Text in picture; "TO OUR INVESTORS" (to explain our principles for 1989) Jacobus Kloppenburg, Waldo Bien. Furthermore; Metropole, Galerie de Belgique... Bruxelles... (Triodos F.I.U.tures 266 and 267). Metropole is an initiative of L.Jacob, Espace 251 Nord.

NOTE: the whole 'facture' of the picture with crown is coincidental; The picture was made in Brussels in the apartment of René Deprez and his girlfriend Anne, after Bien's opening at Gallery Metropole. Lying on the mantelpiece is a diadem and bracelet that the artists wear as a crown, a sort of playacting. Because the light in the living room is not appropriate for a picture they take it in the hallway. There, unnoticed, behind them on the wardrobe lies a rolled-up portrait of Christ. On seeing the photo it is decided to use it for an art production, a sort of cuckoo egg supplied as an advertisement with the art magazine Beeld, which caused surprise and even creative responses; The printer was asked beforehand not to cut some of the printed sheets with the advertisement, on which several magazine pages are printed at the same time, in order to make a special graphic edition of it. Coincidentally, on the magazine page adjacent to the right, a portrait of Joseph Beuys was printed, as an advertisement of TORCH Gallery, Amsterdam. Here Beuys exceptionally wears an icecap and not a hat. The text in the picture reads: Beuys Keeps Swinging. When picking up the uncut sheets at the printer's this remarkable coincidence is even enforced as it now appears that the two pictures of B and K with crown, and Beuys with icecap, have ended up on the paper, due to technical printing considerations, in such a way that one of the two portrait pictures would always be hanging upside down. The result is the double page edition with parabola text; "ACCORDING TO THE LAW OF GRAVITATION', (FIUWAC). In the same year the work is exhibited in Museum Fodor Amsterdam as a collaborative production.

1989, January-March: 1st African study-trip together with Bien to Rwanda, Uganda, Virunga Volcanoes- in the Kivu Lake District and the Forêt de Nyungwe. Photo sessions and geo-research for minerals and pigments (F.I.U.archive). (See article KM 1 1992, Wouter Welling, interview with Waldo Bien, pp. 30-31).

Assist Barbara Darras with design and building of a villa in Kigali, Rwanda.

NOTE: The artists are guests at the house of Luk and Barbara Darras in Kigali (see NOTE Venice Biennale, 86). Luk is now the Belgian Ambassador in Rwanda. Laurent Jacob, the director of Espace 251 Nord in Liège, is invited by Luk Darras to come to Africa and, if he would like, to bring someone along. Jacob asks Bien. The trip is planned, but shortly before departure Laurent Jacob cancels. But: 'Bien can also go without him and bring Kloppenburg, and he will call Darras to inform him about it'. Kloppenburg is enthusiastic, it will be his first trip to an exotic part of the world. Jacob's secretary informs Kigali that he cannot come, but forgets to mention he is sending two Dutch artists instead.

A previous meeting between the Darras's and the Dutch artists had taken place during pleasant hours spent at the 86 Venice Biennale. Now they turn up at the door unexpectedly (the Buddha smiles). But the welcome is nevertheless warm and heart-felt, even though the hostess is slightly surprised that the guests have been sent without any previous notification. The visit actually had a moment of destiny. Barbara Darras is an architect and building a villa on a hill in the city for a Belgian entrepreneur. The landscape conditions cause unforeseen problems during the practical implementation of the design. The workmen cannot read the drawings. The slopes in the landscape are different from what the theodilite of the surveyor indicates. Of course the guests are unaware of this. Kloppenburg notices some architectural drawings on the table and studies them attentively. He admires the design, and asks who the architect is. She explains the architectural difficulties. The rest was plain sailing: Kloppenburg immediately thinks about making a model. He has to work with what is available: empty boxes, polystyrene foam, toothpicks, sewing thread, plasters, etc. With the help of the model all problems can be solved. Meanwhile a close friendship develops. Kloppenburg creates sculptures in the resident's garden: Cactumbrella. He searches the markets daily, collects everything imaginable and unimaginable: waste of an African shoemaker, rocks and plants, all for The Archive. He has all the fallen leaves of a tree sorted and put into order (left or right turn). Eats a lot of Avocados, makes notes, asks the chauffeur to stop along the side of the road to measure concrete tiles that he noticed 'in a flash' when passing by as not being exactly square (73x71,5 cm), result: "African Geometry". Gives THRASHTHETICAL LECTURES underneath the southern starry heaven, comments on the collection of objects displayed on the terrace and the considerations of the day.

1989, 8th of July: Participation in the exhibition: "Beauty of Dying Nature - Art in Defence of Environment", MUZEUM LOWIECTWA I JEZDZIECTWA, Warsaw, Poland.

1989 10th of Sep - 8th of Oct: Exhibition in FELISON, Velsen Zuid, NL.

Press: HAARLEMS DAGBLAD, by Frans Keijsper (date not identified, terminus ante quem 8th of Oct.) Article with picture of K in working situation within the Archive; "...the entrance of an inner earth labyrinth. The trinkets that have been brought together here would make a practitioner wonder about his reputation as a collector in this world; a fifteen or twenty-year-long process of growth. Beautiful chaos; magnificent. This is how K manufactures his assemblages, drawing on a gigantic reservoir of cast-off objects, recycled with beauty and irony. An art with a double foundation, the way in which his actual atelier at the end of the hall also turns out to have a double bottom; A working space where every square meter has found a destiny.

1989, Oct - Nov: Following an invitation of L. Darras: Second Africa trip with Waldo Bien: Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire. Sediment research on the sources of the river Nile for Bien's Tableaux African and for K's African Trash Collection, herbarium and sketchbook journal (A4) for the Artchive for the Future, the Archetypical Lecture section (parcel post), photographic sequences (F.I.U.archive).

This study-trip was made possible by a subsidy from Karien ter Meulen Proost.

Exhibit at Espace 251 Nord, Liege, 1989

Laurent Jacob and Caroline

Design for Russian Federation flag, 1989

FIUWAC 166-2000

According to the law of gravitation, 1989. FIUWAC

According to the law of gravitation, 1989. FIUWAC

FIUWAC 243-2001

The TO OUR INVESTORS advertisement as it appeared in BEELD magazine, with Joseph Beuys, unforeseen, as neighbor. 1989

Cactumbrella, 1989

Kigali, Rwanda, 1989

Trashthetical Lecture, 2002, FIUWAC

Ingredients for the Trashthetical Collection, Rwanda 1989

1990, 23rd of Jan - 3rd of March: Exhibition, "K (Kloppenburg)", pastels and objects. Kunst-Uitkijk Deventer, NL. Opening with cello improvisation by Immanuel Klein.

NOTE: In the same year, 1990, K undertakes, after long preparation, new light studies and compositional corrections, multiple photo sequences of the ARTCHIVE FOR THE FUTURE (Kodak). He is assistet by the German artist Stefan Hoderlein, a student of ‘Becher and Becher‘ and of Nam June Paik,, Düsseldorf Academy.

The photos are necessary for the further development stage of The Archive, namely the disconnection or the elimination of gravity. K wants to let the mass of objects float, disconnect them from the bourgeois and social definitions of 'order and chaos', so that they can be perceived in an uninhibited way again. Gravity is eliminated by photographing the objects in The Archive (in this thought process the photos are sculpture) - such that one looses the sense of what is up, down, left or right. With the same intention objects are piled up, to strip them as much as possible from the determining spatial reference. The composition is a refined adjustment of measure, material, colour and texture in a perfect balance. Everything is now floating "in space", held together by unknown forces, a sublime energy. The same energy is to be seen in Beuys's sculpture "Isolationsgestell mit schwebende plastische Masse", in Barnett Newman's "Obelisk", on Michelangelo's ceiling paintings in the Sistine Chapel, but also, closer by and maybe not entirely coincidentally, in the work of the American painter Virgil Grotfeldt, in his "floating plants". K has the photos printed several times, also mirrored. This is necessary for the next stage, the creation of the so-called "SPIEGELPALEIS" (the Mirror Palace), the remarkable and mysterious reality that is caused by the symmetrical redoubling by the mirror, which Magritte escaped from in an original way with his painting of a man who is standing in front of a mirror and sees himself from behind. In the life of Kloppenburg this optical phenomenon is introduced by the mirroring water at the front door, Lauriergracht, Amsterdam Mirrorcity, and ... later, with intellectual depth … in the textile design patterns for EEYAA; the endless print pattern that is brought into being through the mirroring of simple drawings and that can be found on almost any wallpaper and textile, namely the endless repetition of a pattern that moves in every direction, and which is read, traversed and experienced by K as a spatial web, as universe. With the montage of the pictures a deviation or work error is introduced in the reflections, so that within this "in itself", uniform and infinite universe a topos, a specific place emerges.

In the nineties also a start is made with the FLAT-FORM studies with peelings of fruit; the fruit, after being experienced by hand as volume, weight and form of pure nature, is peeled and eaten. The peel of the fruitform is treated by incisions with a small knife and put under a weight to dry. The resulting flattened picture with a spatial origin, the fruit, becomes

 3 D FLAT-FORM, an extract of multiple dimensions. Melons, oranges, mandarins and bananas are processed in this manner. The avocado is the preferred choice, because of its taste and nutritional value, and because of its pear shape, concave and convex. Thus a large series of AVOCADO RUNEN or ARTVOCADO RUNEN is created. But footballs were also peeled, mathematically unfolded and rolled out. Runen refers to the unforeseen coincidence that causes spontaneous development of forms during the flattening process of incised peels, and the mystery of meaning of the resultant shapes, a strange sort of alphabet. The linguistic flat-forms are part of a complex platonic and esoteric manuscript. Also the utilisation of packaging becomes more constant during the nineties; of cookies, chocolate bars, bonbons, pizza boxes, milk and fruit juice packaging, etc., that become image medium (thus also 3 D FLAT-FORM) after being flattened and stripped of function and volume. There is also a subtle interference in text and typography; GRAPE JUICE becomes RAPE JUICE, 100% DIRECKT SAFT becomes 100% DRECK SAFT, which causes the positive load of the advertisement message to be phase reversed, + becomes -. K considers the interventions in text and thus meaning the most successful when they are hardly or not at all noticeable, but with respect to content nevertheless 'realised'.

1990: Bien receives a Berlin scholarship and an atelier in Berlin Kreuzberg, Adalbertstrasse from the Fonds v/d Kunst. Visits follow from Kloppenburg, Grotfeldt, lmmanuel Klein, Gijs Frieling, Rob Moonen and others, and new friendships and working relations are made, such as with the (DDR) photographer Kurt Buchwald (known for his concept FOTOGAFIEREN VERBOTEN), Gundula Schulze (her exhibition with the title: "WALDO'S SCHATTEN" in the National Gallery Berlin, is a reference) and with the British painter lan McKeever, with whom B undertakes a working trip to Australia and PNG and whom they visit later in Dorset, England during the silex research with Kloppenburg (F.I.U.archive).

1991 September: PLATVORM 16 (published by the academy of architecture, Rotterdam) The cover is a panorama view of The Archive for the Future. Subject of the issue is the architecture of artist’s studios: K, Mondriaan en Van Doesburg.

1992: The owner of the properties Lauriergracht 111 (K's house) and 109 (Archive), Foundation Diogenes II, has formed concrete plans to change the houses into apartments. This encounters strong resistance of the artists/residents. Meanwhile the city of Amsterdam has become the sport of real estate speculators. The municipality wants to make space in the Jordaan for expensive apartments. Through the tightening of rules and regulations and a draconian parking policy the small independent entrepreneurs are forced to leave the city. An exodus begins that causes far reaching social and cultural changes. For Bien this is a reason to look for a future destination within the public domain for the ARTCHIVE OF THE FUTURE. First personal contacts concerning this with Hans van der Grinten. The film academy student Geert Jan Berkhof begins with a video project about the relation between the artists Jacobus Kloppenburg and Waldo Bien (ongoing).

1992, 9th of Feb - 8th of March;  Waldo Bien and K (Kloppenburg), exhibition in Gallery De Zaal, Delft, NL. K; Volkswagen doors, drawings and objects. Bien Placenta drawings. NOTE: Parallel to this exhibition there are two solo exhibitions of Bien; "Het Malaria Blok", drawings and watercolours from Australia and Papua New Guinea, in the Van Reekum Museum, Apeldoorn NL, ... and the exhibition "GEOMEMORY", in the gallery Ancien Établissement Sacré, Liège, Belgium, with the Kloppenburg portrait in whale oil, "Giant Lobelia's", made in Congo, on which one can see K amongst exotic vegetation on the slopes the Nirangongo volcano. In the press these exhibitions are reviewed together:

1992, 20 Feb: DE VOLKSKRANT, by Wouter Welling; "MALARIA, PLACENTA AND CAR DOORS", (exhibition in Gallery De Zaal, Delft, NL) ..."Kloppenburg is an open channel; he receives messages from far away places, where you don't want to get lost, and passes them on spontaneously with the use of 'écriture automatique'. Both (B and K) practise an irrational science in their own way." ...and "A chaotic warehouse full of objects" (Loerakker Gallery, Amsterdam); ..."The sculptures and drawings of Kloppenburg belong to a mythology, that, however strange this may sound, is easy to grasp. The figurations on his large sheets and small notebook papers do not require a definite form. Human and animal figures (or shapes somewhere in the middle) tentatively search for their temporary contours. They prefer the border regions as their domain. Still there is also a very exact side with Kloppenburg'. A small black and white photograph is dissected into forms very precisely. Mathematical figures appear in a wall installation in which they are represented by implements. Inside a milk white car window there is a map on which vague shapes roam. It is a magnificent metaphor for Kloppenburg's work; a  travel window through which a crowded no man's land is seen. The car doors come from Kloppenburg's RIJKSKUNSTDEPOT. The naming is by Bien: he displays a series of photos of Kloppenburg's gigantic collection of cast-off objects at Loerakker. His warehouse is only chaotic to the outsider. Kloppenburg's images have the same self evident power as ritual objects. The words "chaos" and "useless" mean nothing to him; within his installation everything falls into place."

1992, 15th of Feb - 14th of March: Bien-Kloppenburg exhibition TO OUR INVESTORS, Gallery Loerakker, Amsterdam. Press release by B, where he for the first time shows photographic registrations of the ARTCHIVE OF THE FUTURE. Two press articles appear:

Preparations for photo session, 1989

From the series: Mirror palace, 1990/2004

750 ml Rapefruitjuice, 2002 FIUWAC

Flintstone research with WB, Dover England, 1994

Giant Lobelia’s, on the slopes of the Nyragongo volcano, Congo 1989

TO OUR INVESTORS invitation card, 1992

1992, 29th of Feb: HET PAROOL, by Jan Bart Klaster and Catherine van Houts; "CAT'S CORPSE BETWEEN BREAD AND OLIVES". Full page with image of double portrait in whale oil. The article describes the collaboration between both artists. K; "I am a sponge. I loose myself in my surroundings. Waldo is more like a sword. A fragmentation bomb. He goes off." ... K...speaks a language that initially is hard to follow, but after a while it sometimes becomes possible to slightly follow his thoughts and associations, pronounced as if he were in a trance... Kloppenburg has built an installation that illustrates the complexity of his attitude in this sublunar world ... In fact all those drawings are drawers in which I put my objects ... Order and Chaos. I know this picture of Dostojevski's study. In the picture you see his desk with huge piles of books, sloping and high up against the ceiling. But in that pile he knew the way very well. ... I get of my bike and ask myself: "What is that?!" A broken record, which then forms a mixture of the immobility of the grooves, which is interrupted by the arbitrary fractures. Thus something organic, combined with something industrial. ...In Africa I picked up leavings of a shoemaker. That has a primitive savage quality, you immediately think of a vibrating spear in a tree trunk."

Bien continues the search for a public destination for the ARTCHIVE for the FUTURE.

1992, 21st of Feb: NRC HANDELSBLAD, by Janneke Wesseling, concerning exhibition TO OUR INVESTORS, Gallery Loerakker, Amsterdam; 

About K: "... High up against the wall a stuffed muzzled fox is captured within a white painted metal plate, which looks like a part of an old car or motor. The whole is framed by a metal bedstead with bars. Dozens of small drawings were hung by K in a rhythmical sequence and sloping on the walls. This gives a beautiful effect, it is as if the sheets dance across the walls. There are detailed sketches of dinosaurs, pigs, of bones and skeletons. Sometimes it seems as if K wants to illustrate the theory of evolution. Not a small task, but his work is also "about everything", as K mentioned to me. Equations, fragments of sentences, proverbs and aphorisms he scribbled in between, varying from "More Haste Less Speed" to "Art cannot Replace Trees"…

1992: Summer edition magazine KANALEUROPA (French-English) by Eric Amouroux, Paris, with review of the exhibition "Geomemory" (Liège), "To Our Investors" (Amsterdam) and "Placentablok" (Delft). Article with picture; "...tous deux couronnés est accompagnée d'un texte expliquant leurs options et leurs intentions en matière d'art"... ("both are crowned and accompanied by a text explaining their opinions and intentions in art").

City of Amsterdam acquires 6 Kloppenburg drawings for  the collection of the Stedelijk Museum.

1993: On request of the owner of spiritual centre OIBIBIO in Amsterdam, Ronald Jan Hein, Bien and Kloppenburg make new interior design sketches for various halls and offices; ARTCHITECTURE. The designs are realised in colourful clay stucco by Carl Giskes (FlU Adam) and his international team of clay sculptors. Oibibio is the proto-project of ecological building in modern Holland and the first public building with large-scale use of clay in natural colours. It causes a lot of publicity, admiration and imitation. The working atmosphere in the building however is highly complicated: the biological construction materials like reed, straw and clay and the organic design that can only be achieved by manual labour, sometimes rhythmically singing and by the light of candles, contrasts strongly with the engagement and working methods of ordinary construction companies (the plaster board lobby) who were also active in the building in large numbers. The confrontation between these two cultures and mentalities caused for suspicion, friction, obstruction and even straightforward sabotage by the ordinary construction workers. The clay building techniques meet with a lot of resistance, as the building trade lobby still associates it mainly with third world architecture and poverty, Uncle Tom's Cabin; They also appear to feel economically threatened by the BIO-BUILDING rivals in the field. Bien and Kloppenburg shift their workday to the night in order to work as undisturbed as possible in the carrying out and correcting of designs for the congress hall, yoga hall, and multifunctional meeting rooms. Their joint skills and Kloppenburg's insight through the years into the golden proportion and metamorphosis can be applied in a plastic design process; in this process form is not the result of an 'idea' (design), but the result of an anthropological analysis of the form, language and movement principles in a given space with a specific function. Kloppenburg devises the collective ideas and B mainly takes care of the practical execution. As a fee 10% of the total costs of realisation has been agreed on. After the well received result, however, insight into the bookkeeping is refused by Oibibio's board of directors so that outstanding fees can not be calculated. B and K call for the help of the judge, but he also fails, after long power struggles and in spite of his legal charge, to discover the bookkeeping documents. Eventually a settlement is reached in which the copyright is explicitly confirmed. After the bankruptcy of OIBIBIO in the late nineties, the interiors are nevertheless completely demolished, in spite of various earlier warnings in 2001. Another visit to the judge is necessary and in September 2004 a settlement is reached. AMEN. (dossier OIBIBIO, F.I.U.archive). Parts of the interior, the wooden Easter Island sculptures, are later found again as eyecatchers in the garden of a Dutch design bureau. MODERN ART WHO CARES? 

JacoMona, Düsseldorf 1992

With Oibibio director Ronald Jan Heijn, 1993

Oibibio

1993, 22nd of June - 11th of July : Gallery NOVA, Bratislava (Waldo Bien, Jacobus Kloppenburg, Joseph Semah and Michael Rutkowsky. NOTE: The artwork sent in by Virgil Grotfeldt for the exhibition did not arrive in Bratislava due to a logistical error. Catalogue with contributions by Miroslav Zeman and the artists (K participates with drawings) .

ART MUST GO ON ART MUST GO ON ART MUST GO ON ART MUST GO ON ART MUST

1993, 17th of Sept - 14th of November: Exhibition, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Acquisitions of art works by City of Amsterdam.

Acquisition of pastel drawings by Mees and Pierson bank.

1993, 9th of Oct - 7th of Nov: Gallery Loerakker, Amsterdam; Group exhibition "Not a Hand, but a Gesture" (curator; Leo Delfgauw), catalogue.

1994, January - March: Accompanied by the Peruvian architect Javier Bonifaz, Kloppenburg and Bien travel to Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Easter Island: Contacts with South-American artists, with Maria Reich (Nazca Lines research, Peru), field research, collecting of material for the production of artworks, drawings and photographic sequences (F.I.U.archive).

NOTE: Bien particularly remembers Kloppenburg's "last minute drawings" of Easter Island (Monday the 14 of February. 10:37h), made in a large Paraguayan ledger book.

1994, 21st of June - 18th of Aug: Gallery NOVA, Bratislava, Slovakia. Waldo Bien, Jacobus Kloppenburg, Michael Rutkowsky, Joseph Semah.

1995, 21st of May: Gallery PHOEBUS, Rotterdam "chest of drawers project" curator; Liesbeth van Abbe-Keyzer (object for a chest of drawers). Bien, Kloppenburg, Semah, Struyken, Buisman, Rogge, Van de Windt, and others .

1995, 8th of July - 3rd of Sept: Van Reekum Museum Apeldoorn; ZOMERLIED, 30 artists from the collection. K participates with a series of A4 drawings.

Beginning of the ongoing affair around the destruction
of the Artchive for the Future by the City of Amsterdam

1996, Jan: A research report from the Municipal Building Department points out the urgent need for a new foundation under the house at Lauriergracht 111 (K's residence), an expensive undertaking. The value of a house reduces considerably after such a report. Thereupon the Stichting tot Behoud van het Monument "De Pelikaan" (alias Ruska) 'purchases' the house at Lauriergracht III, as well as 109 (The Archive). Strangely enough there is no further talk of the need for a new foundation. (?) All at once artist and occupant's leases are terminated and they have to leave the premises within three months (as of the 31st of May 1996) in order to clear the road for the renovation to luxury apartments. However, against all legal regulations, renovations are immediately started. To break the resistance of the 12 tenants, as is evident from the juridical correspondence (F.I.U.archive), they are exposed to a true wave of terror: forced start of building, intentionally created leakages and noise pollution, cutting off of water, gas and electricity, blocking of sewage system, broken keys in locks, etc. Even physical threats are not absent. In short, the well known repertoire of terror of speculators. Despite the help of lawyers this process cannot be stopped. Against all rules and regulations a cunning use is made of the absence of the tenants during the holiday period; Construction workers replace the complete roof, remove roof-tiles in a period of weeks of heavy rain (KNMI). A few hundred pastel drawings and objects were therefore lost and the whole Archive covered in a thick layer of dust and debris. Construction workers gained access to The Archive through the floor underneath with the use of chainsaws and built an elevator shaft right through the floors. Cement needed is produced right on the spot with a mixer, which causes everything to be covered with cement stains. The debris and leftover pieces of heavy floor and ceiling beams is not taken away but is thrown on top of the artworks. Photographic and video documentation (F.I.U.archive) show the work was done with the most unimaginable contempt for the artist, for his rights and for his work. It is a complete and utter destruction with far-reaching consequences: The sculpture ARTCHIVE FOR THE FUTURE, prepared by Kloppenburg for a final, ultimate photographic registration is, by order of Ruska and under the supervision of municipal inspectors, destroyed, trampled on, pissed on (literally) and stolen (F.I.U.archive). MODERN ART - WHO CARES? Bien informs the police, but after a personal "explanation" from the inspectors of the Municipal Building Department, they refuse to make up any official report.

1996, 27th of Aug, 0900h: visit of the Judge to the ARTCHIVE FOR THE FUTURE in respect of the termination of the lease and Kloppenburg's request to the courthouse for protection against this. Present; For K: his lawyer Mr. J. Seegers, Waldo Bien (trustee for K), Gerard Gussenhoven (K' s secretary) an Virgil Gomperts, 9 years of age and the day off from school for this assignment, who comes running during the meeting (09.57h) with the TELEFAX just arrived from Moyland (text below). Others present: Lawyer of Foundation the Pelikaan, civil servants of the City of Amsterdam, Dienst Binnenstad, and damage experts from the insurance company Nationale Nederlanden which, as the insurance company of De Pelikaan, is liable for the damage done.

TELEFAX 27th of Aug 1996, 0955h, from: Hans van der Grinten, Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland to Waldo Bien, Amsterdam. "Dear Waldo Bien, hereby I confirm that our museum is very interested in taking over the complete Cloppenburg-archive [sic]. We would soon like to discuss this more closely with you. The archive part that you sent us has already been added to our collection with great pleasure. Kind Regards, (signed), Hans van der Grinten, Director."

NOTE: On the request of Waldo Bien this fax is sent to the judge in order to demonstrate that the take-over of the Kloppenburg Oeuvre by Moyland is indeed taking place and that there is an issue of cultural esteem. If The Archive indeed has to be evicted, as the owner demands, it will irrevocably be lost. The communication between Waldo Bien (as authorised representative and Trustee of The Archive) and Hans van der Grinten that had been taking place so far had been viva voce and "off the record". Hans van de Grinten requested Bien to let the issue of Kloppenburg rest until the date that the Museum would open their gates to the public. Moyland is in the middle of a complex construction phase. Because of unforeseen constructional and logistic difficulties this will take some months longer than expected. On the morning of that same day, the 27th of August, at 08.31 hrs., Bien phoned Hans van der Grinten and explained the state of emergency. A lot depends on the legal judgement. >>> Verdict  handed down on the 8th of October 1996: The court extends the lease till the first of September 1997. The verdict also mentions the damage ascertained during the judicial visit. The owner finds himself thwarted in the further continuation of construction activities. After deliberation with Kloppenburg, Bien contacts the director of the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Eric Ebbinge, explains the emergency situation: Eric Ebbinge generously offers to bring some suitcases with sketchbooks in safety in the depot of the Teylers Museum. (F.I.U.archive, Recorded: G.J. Berkhof)

1996, 2nd of Sep: HET PAROOL; ARTCHIVE FOR THE FUTURE FINDS A PLACE IN GERMANY With Archive picture and portrait of K with tap. NOTE: article describes the taking over of K's oeuvre by Hans van der Grinten, Museum Schloss Moyland; ... "this will save the oeuvre of Kloppenburg from destruction, because the landlord has ended the lease with the intention of turning the atelier into apartments."

NOTE: At the request of TV broadcasting company VPRO, filmmaker Oeke Hogendijk starts shooting a documentary about Kloppenburg and the ARTCHIVE FOR THE FUTURE. Thereafter, all important events, lawsuits, exhibitions etc. are documented.

1996, 24th of Sep - 8th of Oct:  Gallery Witzenhausen and partners: Waldo Bien, Carl Giskes, Jacobus Kloppenburg: ARTCHITECTURA, "recent designs and analyses for an anthropologically oriented architecture". NOTE: with designs for OIBIBIO and drawings from the South America trip. For this occasion the gallery has been plastered with brown river clay by Carl Giskes.

Museum Schloss Moyland

May 24^th, 1997: opening of Museum Schloss Moyland; Franz Joseph van der Grinten with Bishop Jansen, and (below) Hans van der Grinten with family.

1996, October/November: On invitation of the French Ministère de la Culture de Bas Normandie (Eric Amouroux), Kloppenburg and Bien stay for 6 weeks in Prieurie St Michel, Crouttes. Meeting and collaboration with the French artists Laurent and Laurence Déjente, Alfons Alt and Jean Planès, who makes a portrait drawing of K (FIUWAC), and Sjoerd Buisman in St Jean Le Blanc... Furthermore; Study of Plastic Architecture and photographic sequences. A whole series of artworks are the result of this stay, among others Kloppenburg' s "The elimination of symmetry" (FIUWAC), made in the bedroom in Crouttes.

A visit to the ruin of the house of Piero Heliczer in Préaux du Perche, at the request of his Amsterdam widow Klazien Bader, is the founding stone of the FlU Summerschool. The house is condemned and the community is about to have it torn down. > Piero Heliczer, *Rome 1937, poet, actor and underground filmmaker. Shared productions and collaborations with Andy Warhol (among others the movie Dirt), Wallace Berman, Jack Smith, Ira Cohen, Gerard Malanga, Harry Hoogstraten, and others (F.l.U.archive). Portrait pictures of Heliczer are among others taken by Philip Mechanicus. Heliczer buys the house in Normandy in the early sixties, because his friend Friedensreich Hundertwasser lives in the neighbourhood, with money from the German Compensation Fund for victims of the Nazi's. "In the trash filled ruins Bien and Kloppenburg found Heliczer's plans for a Summerschool project, that was interrupted by his death in 1993". This "first encounter" with Heliczer's ruin (3rd of October 1996) is documented by Laurent Déjente, Marseille (video) and tape-recorded (Philips UC-II) by Bien. (F.l.U.archive - Trashburningtalks). An interview with Piero Heliczer can be found in Andy Warhol's magazine "INTERVIEW No.02". The restoration of the ruin, which Kloppenburg practically initiates by improvised technical adjustments to prevent further decay, is included in the FlU Amsterdam activities in January 1997 as a social-ecological educational construction program, as FlU SUMMERSCHOOL Normandy. A fixed group of children and adults collaborated on the project, which is in full progress, and a substitute for the plan made in 1996 in Dublin, during the FlU summer meeting, Bishop's Court, for the construction of an FlU domicile in Ireland, the 'FlU Boghouse project', which because of various reasons could not be realised. For this reason, Heliczer's widow, Klazien Bader, has made it available to FlU Amsterdam for 25 years.

1996, Dec: article in KUNSTBEELD, by Anne Berk; "ARTCHlVE FOR THE FUTURE SECURED", 2 pages with 6 photos: "The complete oeuvre of Jacobus Kloppenburg (66) in Amsterdam, consisting of thousands of drawings plus a few rolling stock wagons with the complete content of his atelier, has been taken over by Hans van der Grinten. Kloppenburg's oeuvre will be housed in Castle Moyland which is currently being decorated as a Museum for their important Beuys collection by the brothers v.d. Grinten... So the Dutch museums have missed the boat… That it has now managed to secure this beautiful work for prosperity is thanks to Waldo Bien. "We are like two mountaineers on a rope", Picasso once said about his colleague Braque. Kloppenburg and Waldo Bien share a similar relation. For K not only makes drawings, but also assemblages. He is a passionate collector of second hand objects that he hoists with rope and block and which are given a place in the Archive of the Future. Key-racks with 600 hooks and numbers found at the police station. Spanish knives made out of privet wood. Branches from the Frisian mud flats with salt crystals and sometimes cockles still on it. A pair of scissors that was stabbed into the ceiling. A small glass box with the skeleton of a shrew, found 1947 in Loon op Zand. In the atelier the objects mingle into mountains, become alleyways and caves; the sediment of civilisation has been arranged to become a sizeable sculpture... Openness is for him a requisite and that also expresses itself in his work, which becomes more and more minimal. His drawings are fluent; signs become numbers, forms and life appear and disappear, the representation itself seems to be in movement. Everything subject to change, everything floats. Hares, deer, dogs, mice and birds and hybrid specimens have large eyes, ears and legs. Just like their creator they use their senses like antennae. They are open, ready to receive any signal."

1996, 12th of Dec: The Irish writer/philosopher Patrick Healy (FlU Dublin) is invited by the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, Dir. Tijmen v. Grootheest, for a year long stay in Amsterdam as first guest in a new Artist in Residence Program. His declared aim; To write the first full monograph on the Amsterdam artist Jacobus Kloppenburg (* 1930) and his sculpture ARTCHIVE FOR THE FUTURE, on the way to Museum Schloss Moyland, BRD.

F.I.U. Summermeeting Dublin

1997, 7th of Jan: Founding of the FlU Art Collection, a Social Sculpture Study Collection.

NOTE: This was the result of a discussion among FlU Amsterdam members, about the need for a world wide and multicultural art collection which should be owned by the entire world population, and which should overcome the barriers we have created through specialisation, and open up an understanding of what is common to our humanity as brotherhood, sisterhood, our human kindness and capacity to create. All agreed on the need for such a collection, but as is so often the case, there was no finance to help realise the conception. Someone then suggested that the way to get this going was to ask artists for credit for this idea and to request donations. Something unexpected happened. Two of Bien's children were playing on the ground, not far from where the discussion was taking place. It didn't occur to them that they were listening to the conversation, when suddenly they called out "can we give something?" All where surprised and charmed at the same time. Such an offer would dissolve the problem of the founding stone in the collection, in the sense of significance and symbolic value. We were being offered the future generation, not a name from the famous past, and to our astonishment, the children began to make a sculpture from things lying around the studio, which consisted of tree elements. This was followed by donations from our other members, and in a matter of minutes, you might say, the collection had been formed. The artworks were signed in and put aside for later further development of the collection. Other things needed urgent attention.

1997, 21st of Jan: Patrick Healy, "A report from the Archive for the Future, for Hans van der Grinten, Museum Moyland": "I am writing from the Archive for the Future. The phrase has once again entered the literature. On the Amsterdam born artist K, Jacobus Kloppenburg  in a recent article in the Kunstbeeld, 12'96/ 01 '97: Het 'Archief voor de Toekomst'. 

How the phrase came into existence and what it means, is something I propose to discuss in the following report. It may well be that the paper trail has to stop at the point where the oral and the 'with-writing' intersect. It is a provocative title and masks a complex series of moves and ideas which need to be unravelled if the Archive for the Future is to be preserved and given the kind of support it needs for survival.

Initially I was engaged in a traditional form of research. I expressed an interest in the work of Kloppenburg and was directed, when in Amsterdam one year ago, to the artist, and his mend, Waldo Bien. I had hoped to publish some of the drawings, with a collection of stories, in Ireland and to make a further study of K on my return to Amsterdam.

On my return (12.12.1996) I once again met the artist and was made aware of developments which had taken place over the previous year. My idea of an orderly and rational reconstruction in the form of a traditional monograph, and the proposal to select individual works for publication was circumvented by the dramatic situation which had unfolded since September 1996. The clearest record of that was the appearance in Kunstbeeld of an article which brought wide attention to the fate of the Archive for the Future. It was under direct physical threat, and the issue of its continued perdurance had now engaged public debate and controversy, it was also the subject of judicial argument.

The physical location of the Archive for the Future is a floor of a house on Lauriergracht in Amsterdam. The house owner is requesting vacant possession, and by a process akin to interlocutory injunction the tenant K has a stay of execution on the order until September of 1997, terminus post quem. During the course of the conversion of the house into apartments, part of the atelier has been vandalised and works destroyed. This is the subject of a current suit and litigation and has opened up for discussion the question of whether or not the atelier and its contents is artistic content or the collection of a demented Lumpensammler.

Apart from the article there is a 17 hour video documentary on the artist currently being edited, and a programme for VPRO TV due for broadcast in the near future (possibly early February) with further plans to make a more extensive documentary film and the shooting concluded in November 1996. Waldo Bien has made an inventory of almost 1000 photographs of the Archive as a work based on his relation with K, and K has also made photographic works (referred to as materia prima) on the Archive... I have interviewed Waldo Bien to request a fuller understanding of what he meant in 1987 and how this construction may be understood at present. In an ordinary sense archive refers to an ordered collection of public records. This traditional conception has almost no value for the current situation. However Bien insists that the term was used by K as early as 1980 and he had added that the activity he was engaged in, K, was not that of making assemblages and or a random gathering of objects, but the creation of a sculpture away from traditional ideas of representation, space, interplay between optical and plastic value. The Archive for K was understood as a process in which things, objects even representations were not accumulated as a site of sedimenting meanings.

When one takes for example the kind of critical appraisal of the works of sculpture by Zorio or Calzolari or Orzco, there is a tendency to view the works as organisms of transformation, where synechdochic acts sustain meaning in a kind of hermeneutic cultural corpus. As in the case of Zorio the work is seen as a place of accumulated intentions and interpretative processes.

The Archive for the Future does not yield to this abstract and mystifying linguistic nimbus. K never intends any linguistic reference, thus the problem of part/whole, individual/collective must be viewed as an overdetermined concept pairing, if not just simple category error.

The closest one gets is through a concept like evolutionary metamorphosis. The Archive of, does not exist, it is the Archive for, that is to say the metamorphosis is the real event, not processes in a space time continuum. The problem of order and non order is for K an ornamental fiction, and the idea of the sculptural as proceeding from a classical conception of material as resistance, and form as the shaping from the given materiality is abandoned. Rather the process is proleptic, it intends itself, and has only an existence in its metamorphosis. The element of light for K is its real register, because this is a foyer of endless expansion. K refuses to have this conception lured into a discussion on primitivist projection, or even into simple indexial ascription. Unlike Arte Povera there is no searching for an expressivist Kunstwollen, nor are the materials treated as a drama of objects under stress and tension in terms of surrounding atmosphere, or space.

The Archive for the Future is also a kind of hesitation in time as well as making, what Simone Weil called the properly human interval. As with K endless writing, designing, architecture, botany, sketching, all forms of dimension, scale and measure relate to the Archive for the future. There is a need to say what is not for this becoming to have its appropriate freedom, this is a kind of post modernist negative theology, where the non description frees and removes the old binary and dualistic compulsions to name according to domination.

The relation of the Archive for the Future to all the other work of Kloppenburg remains an open question.

As I write from here, one overwhelming sensation emerges from the light-oracle in the western sky, on the short wall at the top of the building, the fragility of this extraordinary work, and the need for urgent help to save it from the ravages of misunderstanding, and the erosion of incomprehension."

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FIUWAC Founding Stone

Patrick Healy

Museum Schloss Moyland

K touring Lothar Baumgarten, Amsterdam