André Volten

By Joke de Wolf

This is an artwork without a title; a sculpture made in 1964 which was originally placed next to the St. Paulus school in Rotterdam. André Volten (Andijk, 1925 – Amsterdam, 2002) often left his sculptures untitled. Some artists refrain from giving their artwork a title because it has an indefinable objective, sending it into the world like poste restante. This certainly did not apply to Volten. ‘I don’t want to bother anyone with my own emotions and sentiments,’ he once modestly explained. This, however, did not mean he took the emotions and sentiments of the environment in which his works would be placed for granted. On the contrary.

In many cases it feels as if André Volten’s sculptures have always just been there. While leafing through the publications on his work, I came to the realization that I have been, or believe to have been, familiar with many of his sculptures for years, without knowing he made them. For instance, the six arches that were standing on the Jaarbeursplein square in Utrecht since 1982. Due to renovations of this square they were later relocated to the Surinameplein square in Amsterdam where, incidentally, they also fit in wonderfully well. In Utrecht these arches were part of an even larger work, which also included two circles made from basaltic lava stone , a 28-metre-high stainless steel column, and a 51-metre-long canopy. I doubt passers-by were aware of the fact that all those different shapes had been conceived by a single artist. But what I do know for sure is that their, and my own, experience of the space would have been different if these works had not been there.

In 1986, Volten also created a ring with a seventeen-metre diameter for the Stopera in Amsterdam, a building that houses both the city hall and a music venue . The sculpture barely reaches above the pavement. One part is embedded in the ground while another part rises up just half a metre above it, thus making it suitable to sit on. It can function as an extension of the stage inside the building: Volten also described it as an arena. An arena right in front of the city hall, where passers-by and citizens are given the opportunity to share their stories. A silent but generous contribution to the public space.

Despite measuring eleven-and-a-half metres long, Volten’s recently relocated 1964 Rotterdam sculpture remained equally inconspicuous for a long time. It used to stand beside the schoolyard of the St. Paulus school on Hazelaarsweg, a Roman-Catholic technical school that was demolished in 2018. The sculpture appears in a school photograph from the early 1970s. The trees surrounding the school are still small, the students and teachers are cheerfully looking into the camera. I can see boys and men, and only one woman.

Curiously enough, despite being eleven-and-a-half metres long the sculpture hardly takes up any space in this black-and-white photograph. An art critic once compared the elongated shapes Volten was creating at that time with tuning forks, but that description definitely does not apply to this sculpture. This composition consists of long, vertically installed plates of iron. Although planted in the ground on two poles, the base of the work is narrow, only widening at a height of about two metres. Some parts apparently need little support and seem light and flexible, despite their solidity. The sculpture’s inconspicuousness is partly the result of the open spaces Volten has left between the iron plates. They allow room for air, light, and interaction.

Volten was born as the son of a fisherman in the village of Andijk in 1925. Although he started his career as a painter, the art historian Antje von Graevenitz wrote in 1975 that he was not only interested in communicating his images with people, but wanted ‘the things’ to be able to enter into a dialogue with his work as well. According to Volten, he was probably destined to start working with metal. Between 1954 and 1958 he had worked for the Nederlandsche Dok en Scheepsbouw Maatschappij (the Netherlands dock and shipbuilding company) in North Amsterdam. It was there, in that same shipyard, that he produced his first sculptures. In the early 1950s, it was still very unusual to work with iron. In 1955 Volten found kindred spirits when he joined the Liga Nieuw Beelden, a collective of architects and artist who pursued the unity of art and life.

Volten also found his studio in North Amsterdam, in the place where once Asterdorp had stood, a community for ‘anti-social elements’. It was still a working class neighbourhood. Volten enjoyed working with his hands, saying: ‘I love the sensual interaction with the material.’ I am reminded of Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), the English sculptor who described the direct interaction with marble, the carving and polishing, as a ‘biological necessity’. And similar to Volten, she added transparency to her sculptures as well, creating the first of her pierced sculptures in 1931. Thanks to an encounter with Piet Mondrian in London in 1936, Hepworth’s stone sculptures were first exhibited in the Netherlands as early as 1938. Volten, however, preferred to work mostly with iron. Despite its cold reputation, he described the material as ‘democratic’ and ‘human’. He was not interested in creating new spaces, but rather in creating new spatial experiences. ‘I want people to live in my constructions, I want children to climb onto them.’ The latter would actually happen, for instance to the work Volten made for the Amsterdam Vondel Park, on the occasion of its centenary in 1965.

In 1970, Volten submitted his entry for the city-wide Rotterdam event C70, organized to mark the 25th anniversary of liberation day. No less than 28 artists, including Jan Dibbets, Panamarenko, and local artists Wim Gijzen and Toni Burgering, had been asked to ‘critically examine the relationship between art and society’. Most entries were rejected for ‘lacking a sense of realism’. Volten’s ‘Communicatiezuil’ (communication column) was the only design to be realized. Placed on the square in front of Central Station, it was a cylindrical shape of around ten metres high, executed in red lead. Although it had been Volten’s intention to allow everyone to put up posters on the column and thereby turn it into a ‘dynamic socio-cultural element in the city’, the municipality mainly used it for its city marketing. Later on, organizers of concerts and festivals also started using it. In 1975 the column could finally fulfil its socio-cultural purpose when a group of Chilean artists and activist were given permission to decorate the Communicatiezuil with slogans and drawings.

Today André Volten’s untitled artwork serves as a new anchoring point on the median strip of the busy Dordtselaan street. The proximity of the port and the historical working-class neighbourhoods of South Rotterdam, as well as the city’s industrial heritage, and modern-day urban development, all come together in the sculpture. And just like all works by Volten, in its new location it is open to new interpretations. At night the sculpture seems to have been absorbed by the darkness, while during the day it is visible in all its glory, with two posts firmly rooted in the ground. Here the sculpture is able to deal with all the emotions and sentiments of anyone willing to share.