Guus Jooss: Serious play

Guus Jooss is an artist and historian who feels a close link with antiquity. He encourages his students to consider creativity as play is to a child: a matter of life and death.

Show Notes

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Guus Jooss lives in Holland but comes to Pietrasanta in Italy for several months a year to work in marble.

Guus used to work as a museum teacher and researcher in the Netherlands when he wasn’t creating his own art. Before that, he went to an art academy in Utrecht for a year, but mostly learnt about sculpture through doing the work himself. He also did some teaching and found himself describing for his students skills that he didn’t realise he’d learnt.

When working in marble he considers himself rather old-fashioned as his heroes are artists of earlier generations: Henry Moore, Constantin Brâncuși, Alberto Viani, Isamu Noguchi and Hans Arp, all of whom had a classical, figurative, training but then moved on to pure form. He likes the honesty of one form made in one material.

With an affinity to antiquity, Guus makes collages that reference his love of history. Old civilizations that are lost are recreated by him in images which look a little like tapestries or Persian rugs. He’s fascinated by the regularity of geometric patterns that Islamic artists made in the sixth and seventh centuries. He talks us through his process and the way he expresses the layers of history.

Guus tells how Homo Ludens, a book by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, explains the importance of play in society. Like Huizinga, Guus believes that adult creativity should be approached with the same urgency that a child approaches play, that is to say, as a matter of life and death.

A keen swimmer, Guus found that open water swimming strengthened his lungs after what may, or may not have been, a dose of Covid. At the beginning of lockdown he enjoyed the chance to focus on work, but the need for a hug finally forced him to admit that isolation was actually a difficult experience.

Since this episode was recorded in September 2020, we’ve had another winter of lockdown. Like others who moved out of towns and cities during the pandemic, Guus relocated from Utrecht to the countryside where he has fresher air and more studio space.

guusjooss.nl

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Guus Jooss: 00:00

I'm actually going back to the old stuff. You feel this link with antiquity and the pureness of things. In my own work, I'm looking for pureness, honesty or clearness, and that you feel everything fits, everything falls in its place. I'm trying to find harmony and elegance, but it shouldn't be boring, know, so there has to be some tension. That's my play, that's what I'm looking for.

Guus Jooss: 00:50

For me, art or creativity, it's about serious playing. And I always said to my students: Feel if you remember how you could play as a child.

Sarah Monk: 01:12

Hi, this is Sarah with another episode of Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. Today, I'm talking to Dutch artist Huss Joys, who is a sculptor and art historian who divides his time between The Netherlands and Italy. I first met Joos at Studio Pescarella, where he showed me some of his current work: smooth curving sculptures in pure white and veined white marble. He creates fluid abstract forms which flow, sometimes endlessly, with soft graceful curves. We met a couple of days later for our interview in the center of Pietrasanta.

Sarah Monk: 01:54

We found a quiet spot to sit behind the Duomo by eagle Mitarai's half man, half horse statue, the Centaur. Pietrasanta is a place where you tend to arrange to meet someone in front of a sculpture, and there are many to choose from. We decided on an early morning coffee, as it was one of those hot days when you know by midday the sun will be much too much to work in and the beach will be the only option.

Guus Jooss: 02:19

My name is Guus, which is Dutch, so the Dutch G. Guus Jooss, which is a German name because my grandfather was German. I call myself Gustavo in Italy. Gustavo. Since 1996, I said, okay, I'm an artist from now on.

Guus Jooss: 02:35

I had much problems in saying about myself that I'm an artist, you know. People in Holland are always a bit skeptical. They say, oh, you're an artist? Yeah. You're in the pub all day.

Guus Jooss: 02:44

I suppose. You know, that's that's a bit so but I'm here in Pietrasanta since 1988. I was already graduated as an historian. I've been working in a museum over ten years, but still I always wanted to do art. I always wanted to study art.

Guus Jooss: 03:01

I had been doing one year of art academy art school in Holland, but at the end of the first year, I got in touch with working in stone through my teacher of three-dimensional, and he had little pieces of marble because he also worked here. I found out much later. And I love the marble, and I loved Italy already. I had come here since 1980, so that's now forty years ago, and had fallen in love with Italy. And I always was looking for an activity here, not to be the tourist that does, you know, three churches before the morning coffee and then again another museum.

Guus Jooss: 03:34

And, I mean, I love art and I love historical things, but only consuming was not my thing. So I tried archaeology as well and I tried architecture. But sculpture was really something that hit me. So I started in Atzano in the mountains.

Sarah Monk: 03:50

When was this?

Guus Jooss: 03:51

That was 1988. And I loved it there. And I mean, the late eighties, everything was still very experimental and playful, half as serious as it is now. I learned a lot there and it was in a mountain village and it was in the green, it was in the nature and I made friends there and I kept coming back And I always organized myself free for a month or so to go to Atano. And of course being here, the Italians know everything and they are so generous in sharing their knowledge with you because they they feel it as a compliment that that foreigners coming from so far want to know what they are doing with stone.

Guus Jooss: 04:30

And I love the marble. It's it's beautiful. It's such a the working is so nice.

Sarah Monk: 04:36

So tell me about the marble. What marble do you work with mostly? What are your favorite?

Guus Jooss: 04:40

I cut out a marble from here. But I mean, no stone is the same as the other. Actually, the first years, I never knew exactly what I wanted to make, but working with the Subia, which is the point chisel, I loved it. And just working by hand. Actually, the first eight years that I worked in stone, only worked by hand.

Sarah Monk: 04:58

Can you tell me about the Subia? Because I don't know much about

Guus Jooss: 05:01

Subia is hardened iron, temperato they call it. So the point is hardened in fire and the rest of the iron is still weak. So the back of the chisel by hammering on it, it's also formed and it feathers because of that. You have to learn the coordination that the hammer hits the chisel and not your thumb or your fingers, you know. That's the first thing you have to train.

Guus Jooss: 05:23

But at the end, you are developing your sensitiveness. It becomes a prolongment of your body. In Holland, have skating on ice. That's a typical Holland thing. And I always, as a kid, I loved it.

Guus Jooss: 05:36

And it strikes me that there is a comparison because ice is frozen water. It's a crystal structure like marble is a crystal structure. And also the means that you touch the crystal structure is with a piece of iron. But in skating, the piece of iron is under your feet. But there I had the same sensation that it is as if your nerves you feel the ice through the skates.

Guus Jooss: 05:57

And with working in the Subia, you feel the marble through the point of your chisel. It's like how you use a pen, you know, and you explore it. You can see a stone and it can look nice, but only when you work it you start to know its characteristics. I had the luck to meet people who have had access to good satirio quality marble. But I have an old collection of stones in Utterton the last time.

Guus Jooss: 06:26

Somebody said, is it really marble? Because they're all so white, there's no veins. I said, yes. It's actually the best marble. But now lately, I thought, okay.

Guus Jooss: 06:36

I wanna do more marble with veins, venatura. And I found some out of viscata the last years through the neighbors who have a sawmill in the studio. I also love working there. And if you work with a stone that has a very wild design, you have to also adapt your form, I think. You don't want to do something figurative if it has dots everywhere.

Guus Jooss: 07:00

I mainly do abstract forms. You have to simplify your form so the design of the stone is not in concurrence with the form that you want to make out of it.

Sarah Monk: 07:25

The beginning. Where where were you born and what was your childhood like?

Guus Jooss: 07:29

I'm from Utrecht, Holland, and I studied history in Utrecht. And after graduating, I never got away from there. My parents also loved art. And I remember as young children, our parents took us to the famous park, Sandsberg. They had world renowned exhibitions on sculpture.

Guus Jooss: 07:47

After World War two, in modern art, there was this old wave of optimism. We're going to do it better. We want to get away from these horrible war years. And there was this this optimism that you could see reflected in the sculpture. I think that made an impression on me.

Guus Jooss: 08:02

It's not a clear memory, but looking back, I think, yeah, that's how I had the first taste. My parents loved art, though not really encouraging to make it your profession because it was, of course, you need to have a good profession. But studying history and then working in a museum was quite nice.

Sarah Monk: 08:20

So you worked in museums in New Tray?

Guus Jooss: 08:22

Now in Rotterdam, the City Museum, which was an historical museum. Later on in the Open Look Museum in Arnhem, which is a folklore museum, basically. So those were funny years because I started doing collection research and ended making exhibitions there. So it was quite nice and I could have gone on, but at the same time, I got frustrated that I wanted to do my own thing, which was art. And a friend with whom I went down to Italy said, Huss, what do you want with your life?

Guus Jooss: 08:49

What are you going to do? And I said, I have no idea, but it has to be something with art and it has to be something with groups. And next day, a friend of me who was a teacher there, he said, I have a full group. And I need an assistant. I have somebody, but I prefer it if it would be you.

Guus Jooss: 09:04

So that was like everything fell in its place. Through that, I became an art teacher. I never studied for it, but I love the history of arts. I always could tell a lot about art history. People like that.

Guus Jooss: 09:17

And it's through giving courses that I more and more became an artist. I mean, I had only one year of art training at Art Academy in Utrecht, being here, doing shows with people, seeing a lot, that's So I'm autodidekt, you call it in Dutch?

Sarah Monk: 09:35

Mhmm. I think it's the same in English.

Guus Jooss: 09:36

Okay, okay.

Sarah Monk: 09:37

Autodidekt.

Guus Jooss: 09:37

And Yeah. So it's basically through the practice and seeing a lot, doing a lot. I lived off selling my work for a couple of years, but then I thought I need more income. And so now I'm working in the City Museum of Utrecht as a tour guide. The funny thing is that they were looking for somebody who is fluently German.

Guus Jooss: 09:54

And by doing courses here in Italy to German students, I learned fluently German.

Sarah Monk: 09:59

How many languages do you speak?

Guus Jooss: 10:01

English, Italian, French, and German, and Dutch, of course. Some Greek. I worked also in Greek three summers.

Sarah Monk: 10:10

Oh, tell me about Greece.

Guus Jooss: 10:12

Oh, Greece is is beautiful because it's a bit more rough wildlife than Italy. Italy is more civilized, maybe. And if you are at the Cyclades where there are marble finds, the light is incomparable. I've never seen a light like that.

Sarah Monk: 10:25

Where is this?

Guus Jooss: 10:26

The Ciclades, Tinos, Delos, Mykonos, Cyros. I've been on Tinos and Andros.

Sarah Monk: 10:32

What are the qualities of the light that are special? Is it all day or?

Guus Jooss: 10:36

I think it has to do with the reflection on the seawater. The Aegean Sea is the darkest blue that you've ever seen. And there's something about the silvery quality of the light. It goes through everything. I've never seen it somewhere else. It's beautiful.

Sarah Monk: 10:48

And how did that affect your art?

Guus Jooss: 10:50

Well, you feel this link with antiquity, you know, and the pureness of things. I'm not working figuratively because I think people have done that through the ages so good and so well that who am I that I think I can still contribute something there? But in my own work, I'm looking for also pureness or honesty or clearness, you know, and that you feel everything fits, everything falls in its place. I'm always looking for clarity and it's about movement. I have this conviction that I let form be a product of movement.

Guus Jooss: 11:25

I learned a lot by giving courses. I hear myself saying things to my students that I actually didn't know that I knew them. That gives me an insight and they say, Oh yeah, wow, I didn't know that I know that. So like for instance, I say to my students, if you make this form, if you want to get more tension in the surface, think of how a river flows to a landscape and this meandering, we call it, you know, this curve, these surroundings of the river. If you work your surface like a river, you eat away every time a little bit so that you get to the perfect bowing surface.

Guus Jooss: 12:00

That's what I try with my forms as well. So you scrape, scrape, scratch, scratch layer after layer until you really get it to an essence. As Italians say, okay, the form is there, but now you need to 'spoliare', you need to undress it to come really to the core. So that's what I basically try. It's about movement.

Guus Jooss: 12:22

It's very nice that people who are professionally engaged in dancing or music, that they recognize something in my work. They sometimes really react very enthusiastically because they see this movement.

Sarah Monk: 12:33

So it's about movement and

Guus Jooss: 12:35

And form. Form as a result of movement. Form has a beginning and an end, and that you come to the essence in the way that everything which is superfluous on its way to the beginning and the end, that you just put it away, so that you remain with some essence. That's actually quite simply formulated what I try to do.

Sarah Monk: 12:53

For me, it's sort of going back to the ice skating. It's sort of It feels like that's quite it was quite a defining thing.

Guus Jooss: 13:01

Yes.

Sarah Monk: 13:17

I wanted to talk to you about lockdown, the pandemic. So we're talking in early September twenty twenty. You're you've got another day at the beach. I've got another day at the beach.

Guus Jooss: 13:28

Yes. Exactly.

Sarah Monk: 13:29

Yes. And then we had to

Guus Jooss: 13:30

And then it's over. Yeah.

Sarah Monk: 13:31

It's over. You know, we're all looking at the figures every day to see what's going on. Yep. So what happened to you in February and March of this year? Where were you?

Guus Jooss: 13:39

Well, I was here. There was a funny thing. And I had influenza, and I slept all week, basically. And then I had this cough that didn't go away. Then, okay, a friend called and said, Hus, they're going to lock down Italy.

Guus Jooss: 13:52

So if you wanna leave, you have to hurry. And two days later, I was gone. I was one of the last to get out of Italy, so to speak.

Sarah Monk: 13:58

Do you think that was COVID?

Guus Jooss: 14:00

I don't know. Because when I got to Holland, I called my doctor and I wanted to be tested. And he said, no, don't do that. If you have signs, you stay at home. Stay away from people.

Guus Jooss: 14:09

So I had a cough for more than three months, and I've never had that in my life. Felt as a bronchitis that I had as a kid, burning feeling in my lungs, and I had no taste. So sounds like very much. And then, somewhere half May and the weather was good and the open water was good for swimming, so I went to swim and I really made it an exercise to do every day a little bit more, a bit further with deep breathing, and then it got away finally. But I was in isolation and I had two courses which were on the list that I should give, so that income I missed.

Guus Jooss: 14:45

But I used the time to work for myself, so I produced collages and for two months it wasn't bothering me. I had fun for myself, but then I started to really miss people around me and contacts and friends and just exchange and really desperately wanted to touch somebody or so, you know. And it was after the results negative, I immediately called my family and we made an appointment to have dinner together, emotional and then we got into a fight. Yes, really quite stupid. I think it was all because you had everything stored, so long, you had just postponed.

Guus Jooss: 15:15

So you do something to yourself as well. You were in a survival mode. You don't allow yourself to realise what it's really doing to you. And that's only after that. Looking back, I could reconstruct, oh shit, yeah, it was really a heavy thing.

Sarah Monk: 15:30

And do you think it's changed your outlook on life or impacted your work?

Guus Jooss: 15:34

I'm 63 years old, so you know you're aging, but during this lockdown I had for one moment to face this reality, yeah, you might die simply like that. And of course I will die, you know, but usually you live in the illusion of immortality. So, yeah, that was sort of dramatic. Yeah. I was always in my life looking what I want to do, and I didn't know what and where and what sort of career.

Guus Jooss: 16:01

But I love what I'm doing, and this is it. Make the best out of it.

Sarah Monk: 16:16

So tell me your routine of working. You live in Utrecht and then come here for

Guus Jooss: 16:22

Two or three months. Yeah, the funny thing is, I just explained the other day, I have an atelier in Utrecht, but it's more a depositor because it's a basement and I don't like to work there so much. I only work when I can work outside when the weather permits. So under the streets, under the houses, there are basements. I have five vaults in my basement and it's all medieval.

Guus Jooss: 16:42

It's a bit dusty and it's a bit stinky. So I have mostly that as a deposit. I'm there eighteen years now, twenty years. I'm looking for another atelier, in Holland, I mean, in Holland, it's almost impossible to find something. But I have to carry everything down, so I make small forms.

Guus Jooss: 16:59

But I like also to make bigger sized forms. So the thing that I have to do is to hollow them out, to make it as airy as possible so that I can carry You have to do it? Yes. So it was only recently that I heard myself also saying that to somebody. That's actually the logic of it.

Guus Jooss: 17:15

I'm an Aquarius as a birth sign and that's an air sign. So I make airy things. I like to make them airy. There are a few works that are titled, so adioso, you know, so it's airy.

Sarah Monk: 17:28

Oh, that's really interesting.

Guus Jooss: 17:31

Here I do stone in Italy, and in Holland I make collages. They are maybe more in reference to my background as an historian. I still love history, so I work my associations with old civilizations that are lost, you know, the Byzantine Empire or something like that. And these associations, I put them in images. I always think in images, and those are my collages.

Guus Jooss: 17:53

They look like a tapestry or like Persian rugs. I'm fascinated by geometry, with the regularity of these geometric patterns that the Islam artists made from the sixth, seventh century onwards, or earlier even. That was always an inspiration for me.

Sarah Monk: 18:08

So what are the collages comprised of?

Guus Jooss: 18:10

It's a very funny procedure that I sort of spontaneously invented at art school. I was cutting and gluing, working with very simple watercolors and I put them on photocopies. And then I have these colored photocopies with a pattern And then if I drench it in oil, the paper is getting thicker and it gets this certain parchment quality and it also becomes transparent. And it's the transparency that I use for putting different layers on each other because it gives this time dimension. The German word for layer is Schist.

Guus Jooss: 18:47

And history you call Geschichte. Is there a connection? So it's about the layerness of the history. That's my inspiration. People sometimes think there's a big contrast between my sculpture and my collages, as I call them.

Guus Jooss: 19:01

But for me, I think they fit well together. I always try to convince galleries that one compensates the other, but no discussion, you know.

Sarah Monk: 19:09

Can you describe the work that you do in marble?

Guus Jooss: 19:13

It's a difficult one. Well, I can say what my inspirations are if I look at art. I'm very old fashioned, actually. My big heroes are all artists that have passed away now. Like it's Henry Moore or Brancusi or there's less well known guy Alberto Viani.

Guus Jooss: 19:34

He he was a teacher at the Art Academy in Carrara and he did the Biennale Venezia in '56, you know, so way back. And Hans Arp or Antoine Ponce, that's a French guy in the seventies, eighties, nineties, they all had work made here. In our studio, there's Sauro Lorenzoni, a very old artisan, so artigiano, and he has worked for some of them.

Sarah Monk: 19:59

Really?

Guus Jooss: 20:00

Yes. And he has known them. And and Marino Marini, in you, and Noguchi, also one of my favorites. It's actually those guys that really are my inspiration because they also go for pure form. They all had a classical schooling still, figurative, and then they fought themselves free for that.

Guus Jooss: 20:18

So they made huge steps. And actually, for me in art history, I'm sorry, but most of what is coming after that, I'm not so interested. I'm not fond of pop art. I'm not fond of postmodernism or or what's it called conceptualism. I very rarely see conceptual artists that that I really like.

Guus Jooss: 20:38

I'm actually going back to the old stuff. I I love that. I like the honesty of it and that it's one dimensional. I don't like assemblage art, you know. It has to be one form, one piece of stone, not adding plastic or or iron or glass or whatever.

Guus Jooss: 20:56

So this yeah. This unity. And I'm I'm trying to to go for to find harmony and elegance, but it shouldn't be boring, you know. So there has to be some tension. So that's what I'm that's my play.

Guus Jooss: 21:10

That's what I'm looking for. And, yeah, there's some noise here.

Sarah Monk: 21:14

Very cute little Fiat, but a noisy one.

Guus Jooss: 21:26

It's basically also playing because for me one of the basic things in art, one of my favorite Dutch historians, very famous, Huisinghe, he died already in the 1940s. He was a cultural historian and he wrote a book called Homo Ludens, so it's the playing human being. He defined playing as an essential aspect of a living culture. And I always felt that. You set yourself certain limits.

Guus Jooss: 21:51

Within you do your play or like the English that they do games. You find a bunch of crazy rules and you call it cricket. And within those rules everything is possible. That's playing. And for me art or creativity, it's about serious playing.

Guus Jooss: 22:07

And I always said to my students, feel like if you remember how you could play as a child. Children are playing in a very serious way. It's about life and death. Because they live in this fairytale world and everything is essential and everything is important. And that's pure creativity.

Sarah Monk: 22:34

Thanks to Ruus Jooss. You can see his work on his website, ruusjooss.nl. And thanks to you for listening. As with all episodes, you can find photographs of the work discussed on our website, materiallyspeaking.com, or on Instagram. If you're enjoying materially speaking, please subscribe to our newsletter on our web site so we can send you news and let you know when the next episode goes live.

Sarah Monk: 23:01

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