ARTnews, November 2005

Panamarenko

Conquering the Fourth Dimension in a Flying Saucer

In 1996, in a shop on the Antwerp docks, the Belgian artist Panamarenko spotted a particularly splendid diesel engine and decided to build a submarine around it “as a shrine to the motor, a floating bunker,” he says. The resulting Pahama Nova Zemblaya, a steel-plated, 20-foot-long whale like vessel with a massive periscope and an interior painted green to match the motor, was eventually lowered into Belgium’s Schelde River. Panamarenko had planned to go all the way to the North Pole in it, but his crew through that the joke had gone on long enough and deserted him. “That taught me that you should never make something that you cannot use all by by yourself,” he says.

The submarine, which is now in the collection of the Cartier Foundation in Paris, is one of dozens of flamboyant machines that Panamarenko has created over the past five decades. (Others are in major museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Sweden’s Moderna Museet, and the Centre Pompidou.) His devices resemble dragonflies and bees, patched-up flying saucers, and worn-out zeppelins, and are composed of everything from balsa wood and fiberglass to aluminum, silk, rubber bands, and glue. He is usually referred to as a sculptor, although he prefers the term “artist/technologist.” Typically Belgian in his zany, obsessive seriousness, he has created a niche for himself somewhere between poetry and technology, art and science, merging the “ingenuity of the Renaissance artist with the uninhibited inquisitiveness of the modern artist,” according to Frederik Leen, curator of the first major Panamarenko retrospective, on view through January at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels.

Although designed to travel through air and water, over land and in outer space, these contraptions rarely work. But Panamarenko is not after functionality. Rather, he seeks intellectual creative adventure, from his first scribbled notes and calculations to the climatic, if usually unsuccessful, takeoff. “It’s not just mechanical, it’s also about fun and form,” he says.

Born Henri van Herreweghe, the artist 65, adopted the pseudonym Panamarenko in the 1960s, after a Russian general he heard mentioned on the radio. He thought it had a nice ring to it, with its suggestion of Pan American Airways and the Panama Canal. He lives and works in a modes red-brick farmhouse in a rolling landscape where cows graze, in Brakel, West Flanders. In addition to his two donkeys and a caged fighting rooster, he keeps a turquoise Cadillac that he no longer drives because the country roads are too narrow.

Slight of frame, and dressed in a fitted, sleeveless purple shirt and rust-colored trousers, Panamarenko reminds you of a 1950s gambler. His hands are tanned, his fingernails long, and he wears a plain gold wedding ring. He greets visitors with deadpan resignation and leads them up to his kitchen, which is decked out with green tile, orange floors, green walls, a pink refrigerator, colored glass ball lights, and scattered tin toys. A couple of empty soda cans lie on the kitchen counter, next to a large box of cookies. The room is juvenile and festive, like something out of Hansel and Gretel.

A confirmed eccentric and longtime bachelor, Panamarenko married for the first time two years ago. His perky 31-year-old wife, Eveline Hoorens, delivers packets of coffee around Antwerp for her father’s coffee-roasting business. Last summer, he and Eveline visited the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker to photograph one of his robots standing on the ice. A large color print of it now hands on one of their bright green walls. “Eveline took it,” he says proudly. The photo shows a forlorn tin shape facing a spectacular northern sun.

Panamarenko’s works range from mechanical chickens, which he is still teaching to walk around obstacles, to propeller-driven backpacks. “I’d give you a million francs to put one on your back and start it, it’s so scary,” he says. “It vibrates and makes a lot of noise, and if the motor shuts down you fall like a stone.” Among the weird and wonderful devices, his favorites are the submarine, the Aeromodeller (a sort of zeppelin), the human-powered six-bladed helicopter, and the cars. “The best car I made was the rubber Polistes (1974). You can bang against walls in it,” he says. “People said it was a silly idea, that it would bounce back with twice the energy, like a rubber ball. But it was pneumatic, so you hit a wall and the air squooshes out, like a foam mattress.”

Although one of Panamarenko’s primary concerns is energy conservation, the commotion and noise his machines produce can be deafening. Every test run is a spectacular occasion, often causing a fair amount of panic on the part of spectators. His 1967 Aeromodeller – a balloon measuring almost 9 feet high and 20 feet in diameter – was an adventure from start to finish. A mammoth airship of yellowing PVC with a wicker basket and four small lawnmower motors, it never fulfilled it goal of providing a flying home to the traveler. The project was characteristically laborious: First, Panamarenko wrote to glue factories around the world, asking for samples, which he diligently tested. He spent days gluing together squares of PVC and waiting for them to dry, and painted the wicker dozens of colors before finally settling on silver.

When the work was finished and ready to be tested, the PVC melted while lying rolled on the grass under a hot summer sun. During the two months it took to repair it, the artist stayed in a tent on a field, where a cow settled on top of him one night. When the work was finally repaired and ready to go, the truck carrying hydrogen for the balloon got stuck in the mud and had to be hauled out by an American army surplus tank. Finally, as the hydrogen-filled balloon tugged and pulled, held down by a dozen helpers, Panamarenko decided it would never fly, so he slashed it open with a pair of giant scissors.

“It was meant as a camping car in the air,” he said, “but I realized you couldn’t live in it calmly. It was too dangerous. You felt the danger of the storms overhead, plus it would burn up like a bomb. I could have filled it with helium instead of hydrogen, but that would have cost a fortune and it would have flown away.”

The son of an electrical engineer and a shoe merchant, Panamarenko burst onto Antwerp’s giddy art scene in the 1960s, staging wild happenings with fellow artists. He was among the first to show at the Wide White Space, a gallery founded to provide a space for rambunctious street artists. In 1967, for one of his so-called Stunt Happenings, Panamarenko fired a double-barreled shotgun into a pot of hot chicken soup.

After high school, he enrolled in a design course at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, but he spent more time at the cinema and in the science library than on his schoolwork. He though that he would please his parents with a job in graphic design, but he soon realized that fine art was his calling. He drifted in and out of classes at the city’s Higher Institute for Fine Arts without enrolling, but by that time he was already receiving recognition as an artist, most notably for his Copper Plates With Bullet Holes (1963).

In 1968, Joseph Beuys, who had also exhibited at Wide White Space, invited Panamarenko to show his first airplane, Das Flugzeug (1967), at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. The slim, pedal-powered flying machine resembled an insect. He soon began concentrating exclusively on his inventions, discarding the happenings and neo-Pop sculptures. He subscribed to Scientific American, which is where he claims to have learned his punctilious English. Deciphering jargon until he could make sense of it, he wrote articles and books aiming to explain scientific theory in plain language. He has scant esteem for the art world or scientists, who are “always boasting with their ridiculous mathematics,” he explains. Many of his texts are on view, along with his drawings and sculptural contraptions, in the Brussels retrospective.

He is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, which showed his recent works last spring, such as Brazil (2004), a 750-pound bronze figure with a winged device inspired by the flying man in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. At his Belgian gallery, the Antwerpse Luchtschipbouw (The Panamarenko Gallery), his drawings and multiples – usually studies for his contraptions- range in price from €1,000 to €15,000 (around $1,200 to $18,350). Before working with Jos Jamar, director of Luchtscipbouw, Panamarenko was represented for 20 years by Antwerp dealer Ronny Van de Velde. They split abruptly this year. “We had different views of how to promote his work,” says Van de Velde. It was not an entirely amicable breakup. Van de Velde had purchased a former electrical plant in Antwerp for the artist to use as a studio and home, but Panamarenko found the place too swank and too open to visitors. Jamar then bought it to use as a gallery, and Panamarenko now assembles his larger pieces there.

The artist builds smaller works at home in a room where he keeps four stubby ferns. Across the narrow hallway are seven spectacular, rather noisy parrots. “I’m trying to do as little as possible,” he says with a giggle. “My idea is that the longer you think about something, the better it will be.”

Recently, the tracks of a new tank were lying on his carpet, and golden bolts and nails were arranged neatly on his desk. This is the second version of the tank, which he first tested in the Swiss Alps, where he has a studio in an outbuilding of a former hotel. The tank is a kind of two-seated bobsled, with which he likes “to astonish the tourists,” he says. “It does 150 kilometers per hour (93 miles per hour) and it’s great fun, although I should really wear something on my head. The problem is that it takes 20 seconds to get down, and half an hour to get back up. That’s why I invented the tank. With the tank, you slide down; it turns on itself and drives up the snow.” He claims champion skiers come to admire his invention. “They say it’s going to be a new sport,” he cackles joyfully.

It is Panamarenko’s great ambition to discover an energy source that can lift a spacecraft beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Twenty years ago, he promised Antwerp’s Middelheim open-air museum and park the first viewing of his flying saucer. “I want to make a flying saucer motor that would work with the fourth dimension – this invisible force that controls the speed of light. And anything that works with the fourth dimension is very doubtful,” he says. “But it’s not as silly as it sounds. It’s not hocus-pocus. That would be terrible. It’s an object that rotates and flies forward with two different speeds.” “Who is to say that Panamarenko won’t eventually find the answer, but as always, the inevitable question must be: “Will it work, and if so, should it?”