Justine Williams. Making Do Rhymes with Poo

Mid December, 2024 till January 26, 2025

performances; display of props: mixed materials

Justine Willams: website / instagram

Rotterdam, January 26, 2025

Dear Justine,

How are you? I hope that you’ve safely arrived back home to Brisbane, ‘down under’. Willem and me were happy that, during your trip to Europe, you’ve stayed at our home for three weeks, while we were away to Tierra del Fuego – a ‘down under’ as well. It felt good that our place wasn’t sitting empty and deserted.

I’m sorry that we didn’t meet face-to-face: you arrived 10 days after we’d left, and upon our return you had left, “to squeeze in a few days in Paris”. We just missed each other…

We only ‘met’ via Facetime: early morning in Brisbane, early evening in Rotterdam – or the other way around? Thses digital meets gave me an impression of your bristling personality: it almost exploded the tiny screen of my handy. “She must be a fun person”, I concluded, “to have as our guest behind DE RUIT.”

You immediately wanted to know all about it, so I explained its concept. I was happy that you wanted to create ‘something’ for it. At that moment neither you, nor I, had a clue of what it was going to be. You’ve turned your stay here into a short residency. That’s what DE RUIT is all about: an artist project space, an experimental playground!

Returning home

On our sidewalk, rather dazed and jetlagged after our topsy-turvy flight from Ushuaia via Buenos Aires to Rotterdam, we couldn’t avoid a first glimpse – and what a glimpse it was! – at what you’d been creating here.

Of course, you’d sent us some pictures and videos through WhatsApp – where would we be without it? But now seeing things ‘live’, and ‘in the real’: that was something completely different!

A shop window?

You turned DE RUIT’s all glass façade into a shopwindow – as the architects planned it some 30 years ago. “Is this now a fashion store?’ asked a passer-by. And indeed: the latest trend – ‘make do’.

A fragile Christmas tablecloth, sprinkled with golden stars, transformed into a sort of cape by roughly cutting into the delicate fleece fabric holes for arms and neck. It was a prop of one of your performances here: you wearing this makeshift garment, standing parallel to the window pane, rhythmically chanting mysterious sounds, hardly understandable: a priestess?

Next to it a dangling ‘costume’ out of lengths of silvery shining insulating foil from a roadside DIY shop, pieced into shape with black tape, seemingly haphazard but with a bulky torso, giant arms – or sleeves? – tall strong legs, and some sort of a neck – or was it a collar? But then: no head of this Zombie-like giant… This contraption – almost as tall as the ceiling, an oversized balloon – was now deflating, tumbling down, knees no longer able to carry the torso, the once mighty arms now devoid of muscles and flesh; a helpless, almost pitiable dino , no longer towering over your head, now an empty shell. In your video I see it full of you. Standing upright, falling head-down, sitting on hands and knees – wildly gesturing. I guess these movements weren’t meticulously choreographed, but impromptu, improvised, ‘making do’.

Boccioni / McCarthy / Rodin / Zadkine – and you

In the book you left on our table on previous projects I found an image of Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture Striding Man (1913). Solid bronze, yet very dynamic: he hardly has any coherent shape. Predecessor of your more-than-lifesize ‘zombie’? On Insta you posted a foto of you and your daughter standing at the feet of Paul McCarthy’s gigantesque and slightly absurdist SantaClaus (Rotterdammers dubbed it ‘Kabouter Buttplug’…), since 2008 at a Rotterdam street corner. I can imagine that you were intrigued by it. I hope that, just around the corner,you discovered Auguste Rodin’s L’Homme qui marche (c. 1900): an assemblage of a male torso, and legs Rodin had created previously for a Saint John-the-Baptist. No arms, no head; walking, striding vigorously, as Boccioni’s dynamic futurist, yet frozen on a tall granite pedestal, towering over one’s head. Did you also admire the most famous of Rotterdam’s sculptures in public space: ‘Jan Gat’, by Ossip Zadkine (1953). Again, a male figure in bronze: his bulky legs twisted and torqued, his head and firm Cubist arms reaching into the skies – and his torso cut wide open: a hole where the heart should be… ‘The Zadkine’ (it’s second dub-name) is the memorial of the 1940 bombardment of Rotterdam, which razed the city centre.

All bronzes – yours of flimsy insulating foil. And yet: all of them symbols, instantaneously recognizable, of their times.

Making Do Rhymes with Poo

An intriguing title! Five words, common words, bit naughty (the ‘poo’-bit). Since I first read them in your WhatsApp’s I’ve been wondering how to interpret them. The pivotal word is ‘rhymes’: is it a noun, the plural of ‘a rhyme’, or rather a verb: ‘to rhyme’, i.e. making words rhyme, as when writing poems or songs? The answer to this question has consequences for the syntax of the sentence: how to divide it into its constituent parts; and this again influences its meaning.

‘Making Do Rhymes – with Poo’, or rather ‘Making Do – Rhymes with Poo’?

In the first syntactic division the title is about ‘making do rhymes’: composing rhymes that have ‘making do’ as their content, writing these rhymes not in ink, but with ‘shit’?

The second as ‘making do’, i.e. the ability to improvise or to ‘make do’, is rhyming with the word ‘poo’?

Astrid Moors, who created the next presentation at DE RUIT, even suggested that your Poo sounds like Pooh: did he lend a hand, or did you write with Winnie being around?

Is all this just linguistic hassling? To decide on an ‘either’ / ‘or’, to pick the only right possibility, the ‘proper’ interpretation? I’m fully aware that such hair-splitting might be superfluous; that you deliberately made your title ambiguous – a play with language, an escape away from predefined ‘clarity’?

It would be perfectly congruent with your artistic personality, the essence of all your projects – as far I’ve interpreted them.

‘To make do’ or not ’to make do’

Justine Williams. The Glittering Principle. Sydney, October 2024

As mentioned, I didn’t know you nor your previous projects. Your book – an exuberantly coloured cover, and an abundance of colour on the inside pages. It’s immediately clear that, as an artist, you are not a Minimalist or a Conceptualist, nor basing your projects on contemporary social issues – even though they seem to refer to them, be it maybe ‘from a distance’. It’s also visible in more recent projects that I found through Instagram. ‘Making Do…’ is a good example.

We live in an era of seemingly limitless neo-liberal consumerism: readymade products, most of them precooked, uniform and non-individualistic, ill-assembled, trendy & fashionable, but with a very limited lifespan and relevance, and then thrown away (or maybe ‘re-used’, or marketed as ‘vintage’), to be replaced by ever ‘new’ items: the start of a new cycle – the commercial show must go on! All this a terrible waste of resources, draining money out of people’s hands into the claws of a few… Even worse, in my opinion, than these ecological and economic aspects is the disastrous effect this has on consumers’ ability to develop their own creativity and imagination, their fantasies, the capacity to ‘make do’.

Nowadays, kids want LEGO ships, airplanes or racing cars, to be assembled from highly specialized parts, the ‘proper version’ on a ‘how to’ sheet. So different from the unspecified bricks that we once used to invent houses, castles and ‘cars’…

Making Do with Poo

Thank God there’s artists to show how to improvise, to make do, to re-invent: to sit on a piece of rock while camping, to use a plank-with-a-hole as loo, decrepid pallets as toilet walls, or assembled into makeshift tables, desks, chairs and couches, chaise longues or beds, or BBQ-countertops. Re-invent, giving new use, new meaning to given materials, leftovers: textiles, paper, and building materials, words and rhymes, myths and ancient theatre texts, tunes and voices, movements. To improvise, to shift, to impromptu, to make do – with poo. It rhymes: Thank yoo!

January 26, 2025