Ankie van Dijk: SHAPE
by Terri Witek
SHAPE
Ankie van Dijk
design: Harry van Doveren
The word incidental appears 3 times in Ankie van Dijk’s new book/object shape, brought to elegantly folded life by Harry van Doveren in a limited edition available from the artist. The word lives in titles: incidental poems, incidental squares, incidental curves. And while the first reading of incidental in English suggests something less than the main event, here incidental is more properly understood as ‘what’s liable to happen.’ What’s made/done with shape become small incidents: a series of unfoldings that ask us to think about the function of shape as architecture as well as mark. The result is a wonderful kind of serious play.
Because shape first opens to a triptych of oblong multi-folds, we are immediately asked to think about both sight + touch as ways of reading. Van Dijk’s work, featured both internationally in gallery shows and in the iconic 2021 Timglaset anthology Women Who Make Visual Poetry, often dimensionalizes marks + paper into sculptural combos. Here her signature build-outs have been remade as images and thereby flattened in reproduction, so we can’t actually “see” the layered materials that are notable in, say, her gallery shows and mail art. But the way the card paper works in shape achieves a witty substitution. We help / activate the 3-D reading /action both by moving our eyes over and across across the triple rows and by hand-lifting them in layers. The results pleasingly vary.Oblong shapes can become, for example, square little books if folded back to a title page and a multi-lingual word-scrambler square of typed letters. But these more traditional openings are so buried in shape it’s hardly an authoritative move, or even the first one. If anything, shape re-mystifies the act of opening a book (or in this case, 3 books!) because the first and most pleasurable action is to pull each rectangle up by the center into a cascading loop. We are unhooking/ unbooking in a way that feels oddly familiar despite the fact that we’ve never done it before: this intuitive shadow thought is known to anyone who appreciates van Dijk’s work; along with her meticulous making, it’s one of her gifts.
What’s surface on these released squares shows the artist’s usual elegance: each holds something resembling letters or numbers, but fluidly unjointed. Within those, however, mysteries recur. The unearthed titles instruct that 2 sections are grouped around marks which are recognizably “squares” and “curves,” but the “poem” section (the first if we read/touch left to right), offers both shapes included. So does “poem” here mean a fragment of eye-and-hand touchable marks? Is a piece of tape, flattened into graphic, a temptation to see western script, or should we resist? Does a linear group of 3 across = syntax, a memory of it, or just a desire or, equally, a resistance? And what of foldedness itself as “poem”? I note one delightful peculiarity here: left open, shape can re-arrange itself–or at least my copy did – as a mounted triptych of sculptural upsidedown T’s (or conjoined L s?). Sideways unfolding leads/leans other ways. But no need to translate, locking down forms.
If the work of shape as I’ve described it sounds vaguely whimsical, with its hints of find- a- word games and flipbooks, the effect is somehow simpler and more profound. shape offers a dry-eyed series of incidents that lead surprisingly comfortingly to no apotheosizing “where.” We understand that the project is part of the world in which Verónica Bicecci chooses to leave purely visual making for words and Rosaire Appel does the opposite, leaving words for asemic mark making. But van Dijk’s work calmly won’t choose among awkward (plus we know they’re not real) binaries. The most innocent opening of shape to poem and square and curve offers the unbalance of 3, and every action after remains oddly untortured: we don’t need to solve/resolve/dissolve, just re/re/re consider. There’s certainly no sense in shape, for instance, that spined books are required to choose away from their binding (though they may expand from it) nor that art on the wall (which may be open to pressing together) needs to unwall. What shape suggests, then, is neither broken language nor a mended reveal. Rather, in Ankie van Dijk’s assured, intellectually curious and collaborative making we see many actions we love held in minimal but lush equipoise. We are incidental to these as we are to the world, on a good day, when we register what’s beyond us as fold and surface and mark and somehow, when carefully and beautifully made as they are here, as poems.
