Herman de Vries’s sense of a transcendent unity is both mystical and functional. Texts of Zen Buddhism and the Hindu verses of the Upanishads influenced his early artworks. In 1959 he made his first white painting. Trained as a scientist, de Vries worked as a researcher at the Institute of Applied Biology in Nature in Arnhem, Holland, until 1968. His artistic output in the 1960s was entirely separate from his scientific work, although the randomness and chance found in his art were encountered in the use of random number tables and the statistical design of biological experiments.
De Vries’s belief in the capacity of art to communicate, and his sense of objectivity, led him to abandon the use of capital letters in his writing for a period of over 45 years. Herman de Vries’s texts are never capitalized, as the hierarchy of words, language and structure is something he seeks to avoid. De Vries’s installations often have a scientific or objective aspect to them and involve collecting elements, objects and plants. More recently, de Vries has presented a design for the development of the Weeribben nature reserve in the northwest Dutch province of Overijssel – a project that integrates various scientific disciplines, concrete art and philosophy. Les très riches heures de Herman de Vries was recently published by Twelve Bells Press as was a major monograph authored by Mel Gooding.
J. G. : Moving from botany to art at the age of 40 is quite a transformation. What drove you to get into artmaking ?
H. d. V. : I did research work on the biology and geographic distribution of mice and rats and their extermination there and was not satisfied with my scientific work. I felt it was incomplete in its approach towards reality. My first artwork was spontaneous abstract painting. Under the influence of Suzuki’s books on Zen Buddhism, I reduced the colour and expressivity more and more –until I came to empty white paintings without any form. I also made collages. The beginnings of these were original : my fascination with the fragments that remained of advertisement walls in Paris. I was always playing with used, thrown away, weathered parts of reality found on roadsides, litter in the forest, and so on. There was a strong trend towards re-evaluating things that had lost all value – what is rubbish ?
J. G. : You created works that involve a musical component early on, didn’t you ?
H. d. V. : Yes. It began in 1962 and ’63 with bird voices, recorded with a large 100-centimetre parabolic microphone I borrowed from the Institute of Applied Biological Research in Nature. In the morning, at about 4:30 a.m., I would record them in a place with many gardens, bordering a large forest region. It was in fact a kind of “zero work” – no composition, no selection, just recordings. These recordings were reality-music : “natura artis magistra,” a title derived from the full 19th-century name of the Amsterdam Zoo, usually called artis. The next tape I made was “humanae vitae” in 1963 at a busy street corner (with traffic lights) during the morning rush hour, when people go to work, and trucks are entering and leaving the city. Later, in the early 1970s, I recorded six little waterfalls in a small brook. The waterfall phenomenon had fascinated me for a long time as it is always the same water in the same stream, but it manifests itself differently under different conditions. At the time, I could sit for hours in the proximity of little falls, contemplating their reality/actuality. It parallels other processes and lives. Later on I added other water sounds such as rain, coastal breakers, surf, the sound of dripping water in a small forest spring – produced in a record as “Water : The Music of Sound.” It was all an expression of our reality, and there was nothing to add, nothing to change – complete information and poetry, perfect.
J. G. : Your use of water as a component of your work, recording the sound of streams and movement of water, was truly breakthrough material in nature-art interaction. Again, with your “real works,” reality is reified : Nature is an active participant in the process.
H. d. V. : Water is in all and everything that is alive. The sound of a brook, the sound of six miniature waterfalls – each has a different sound and a different identity. Each is formulated by different circumstances, under different conditions, but still it is the same stream, the same water ! I will only exhibit what I have seen, found and collected. So the work is from nature, and the role I play in my works is modest. It is simply a presentation of these facts, of the result of processes, of the “process.”
J. G. : The artifacts series you produced from the 1990s approach the object as part of a process of rediscovery and reclamation. Books found under a hedge covered with moss, for instance. Your art remind us that rather than seeing matter as part of an ontological process, we often see it as an extension of production systems. The process is more complex and causes us to reflect on nature’s omnipresent role in the total environment of contemporary life, whether it be product, architecture, or naturect)...(extract)

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