Inkijk # 25: A Short Walk

Praneet Soi (Calcutta/Amsterdam) created an artistic intervention for the gatehouse of the former sewage works, a building that currently houses SKOR’s office. The work marked the beginning of a brief collaboration between SKOR and W139, the latter of whom would ‘occupy’ the Inkijk three times.

The installation that Soi conceived for the Inkijk formed an integral part of his research on the ‘rhetorics of the image’. This specific intervention was inspired by the magical, maritime ‘Panorama’ that painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag first presented to the public in 1881 and that can still be viewed in the custom-made building on the Zeestraat in Scheveningen. With his circular beach scene the Hague painter joined the ‘panorama craze’ that had been raging in Western Europe and the US since 1792 when Irish artist, Robert Barker, introduced the genre. This panorama is sometimes referred to as the ‘first mass medium’. Initially the Panorama Mesdag - alongside Luzerne’s ‘Bourbaki Panorama’ and the ‘Battle of Waterloo’ (one of six panoramas that is to this day being exhibited in its original location, in this case its eponymous city) - functioned as a popular form of entertainment. Nineteenth Century audiences were impressed by the ‘faithful and detailed representation’ of the gigantic beach scene and were, momentarily, under the (optical) illusion of actually being on the top of one of Scheveningen’s dunes as opposed to being in the center of a cylindrical painting. Furthermore it is interesting to note that the Panorama Mesdag ‘traveled around’ for a while and was, among others, exhibited in a building on Amsterdam’s Plantage Middenlaan for a period of two years (1889-1891).

The ‘beach’ that can be seen in the Panorama Mesdag is a painted representation of a beach that is located in the vicinity of the Panorama building. Soi used this idea as a basic principle in the miniscule semi-panorama that he presented in the Inkijk. The work is an ‘urban scene’ of the Inkijk’s direct surroundings. To realize this ‘visual account of the artist’s day in and around the Inkijk, Soi built a drawing machine. The latter was inspired by the cylindrical glass perspective frame that Mesdag used to paint his beach scene and by the instrument that Albrecht Dürer used to study the phenomena of ‘perspective reduction’.

In the Inkijk, Soi’s painting was presented so that it could be seen from different angles and isolated parts of the canvas could be studied through a telescopic lens. In this way the observer found himself in the midst of the represented events while simultaneously remaining ignorant to the scale of the semi-panorama. Another window allowed the observer to get an overview of the entire installation including the painting’s format, its suspension system and the drawing machine that Soi built and on which the mini-canvas was presented.

At 8:00 pm on 28 May 2004 curator Marijke de Jong (Panorama Mesdag) discussed the genesis of the cylindrical painting and described the development of the panoramic genre. The lecture took place in the Rijksmuseum’s ‘underpass’ which, although normally closed off to the public due to renovations, was opened for this occasion.