Jacqueline Hassink visits Wits
by Robyn Sassen
The genre of the portrait has historically reflected an understanding of the self. During April, internationally acclaimed award-winning photographer Jacqueline Hassink lectured at the Wits School of the Arts for a week, during which time ArtThrob was privileged to be amongst the invited audience at one of her lectures.
Sponsored by the Dutch Embassy, Hassink's stay in South Africa offered students and professionals exposure to her working practices and philosophies which embody a refreshingly lateral interpretation of the portrait - one that's caught on in academic and corporate circles worldwide. Hassink is a recipient of the Prix No Limit d'Arles, a French award established to acknowledge a photographer who dramatically pushes the boundaries of the medium.
Born in Amsterdam, Hassink is what one might call a global professor, teaching concurrently in Switzerland, the Netherlands and the States, marketing herself as lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies. She began her artistic training in sculpture, but as she matured, developed a fascination for the power of furniture as a social and economic signifier.
A consideration of corporate tables was her first project which began an initiative that maps economic globalisation with precision, and from an unusual perspective. Table of Power (1993-5) was a passport-format book which documented the empty boardrooms of the 40 largest listed Fortune 500 companies in Europe.
The work comprises not only an impeccable photograph of the said table, but details about the company, such as its listed turnover, the industry in which it functions and so on. Thus the work became not only an art gesture, but one which elucidated the dynamics which inform a taxonomy of economics, identity and even hospitality.
The table proved too sensitive a part of some organisations for Hassink's purposes, and these organisations refused her access. In these cases, she represented the organisations in question with a black page, which serves like a hole in the work, interrupting its surface.
In 1997, the idea took wings in terms of its corporate and marketing possibilities, and she was commissioned by the magazine Fortune 500 to realise a similar project for top American companies. Since forging these inroads into the traditional and historical gap between the machinations of artmaking and those of the global economy, Hassink has been involved in significant collaborations with CEOs of major corporations.
Table of Power prompted Queen Bees, a project which looks at more than just the corporate table, but stays within the realm of powerful decision-making. Here Hassink's research is framed by gender. She contacted women who chair large corporate boards and proceeded to photograph their boardroom tables at work, as well as their dining tables at home, juxtaposing these two sites of power.
This level of portraiture, while revealing in terms of taste-based decisions and reflected cultural values, was upheld with enthusiasm by the powerful women in question, who would most likely have viewed a traditional portrait with some distaste, if not distrust. Producing large - 3x1.3m - format prints, Hassink developed this project globally.
This project in turn led to another entitled Mindscapes in which Hassink interrogated the divisions between public and private space, using relatively small but extremely telling examples of personal identity in the corporate world. Personal coffee mugs, computer desktop designs and even one woman's collection of shoes became viable issues to work around in this manner.
Hassink has further extended her repertoire to include the globally and socially critical and revealing elements of quarry walls around the world. These explore graffiti or spontaneous drawing, evocative in the type of scale with which Hassink works. She considers 'car girls' in another project - the women provocatively used by the car industry to motivate the appeal of cars to a presumably male buyership.
Enormously visually seductive, Hassink's body of work confronts issues of control and play of public/private values that infuse identity across the board. Hassink is acknowledged by Harvard University as having contributed meaningfully to 'the shift from the traditional notion of art work to the idea of art project. The art project could be understood as a concept structured in a constellation of different but independent elements, in which the author is able to master not only the implicit creative aspects, but also a certain social dimension.'
