In Conversation: Willem de Rooij (Part 2)

The Jewish Museum
The Jewish Museum
Published in
5 min readApr 8, 2015
Bella Meyer, preparatory sketch for Willem de Rooij’s Bouquet XI (detail), 2014, mixed media on paper © Bella Meyer/fleursBELLA

This is the second of two posts recounting excerpts from an interview with Willem de Rooij regarding his exhibition Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Willem de Rooij, which closes on April 19. Read part 1 of our interview here.

In 2002, Dutch-born Berlin-based artist Willem de Rooij began a series of projects in which he collaborates with florists to realize floral sculptures. Some of de Rooij’s Bouquets have been visually elaborate, incorporating numerous species of flowers and plants; others have been highly regimented, for instance juxtaposing bunches of black and white tulips — two varieties whose seasons only overlap for a short time in February.

His latest in the series, Bouquet XI (2014), is the current subject of the exhibition series Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings in the Museum’s Skirball Lobby. The installation resulted from a collaboration between de Rooij and Bella Meyer, founder and creative director of the New York-based floral studio FleursBELLA. Bouquet XI is made of flowers and plants that originate from Israel and its neighbors, and that have strong allergenic qualities.

The Jewish Museum: Being of Dutch descent, were flowers significant in your life from an early age?

Willem de Rooij: Oh yes, I grew up around flowers. They’re so readily available in The Netherlands, and they don’t cost much. Dutch people always have lots of flowers around the house. When I started making works out of flowers, it was a material that for me — because I was still living in Amsterdam at the time — was readily available, and cheap. It was not about exclusivity, rather the opposite. Of course in other cultures, in other countries, this material has a very different significance. It can be more rare, and more costly.

JM: So you don’t associate them with being a luxury good?

WdR: By now I sometimes do, but it was not the point of departure.

JM: Is it something that you came to just very naturally?

WdR: Well, I grew up looking at painted flowers — the Dutch still-life tradition. In these still lives flowers symbolize the shortness of life — and consequently a host of protestant morals and values. But for me flowers function in another way. My flower arrangements are kept fresh for the duration of an exhibition. A detailed description of such an arrangement is part of the work. After an exhibition, this description is the only aspect of the work that is left, but the bouquet can be reconstructed at any given time on the basis of this text. All this implies that the absence of the bouquet is of as much importance as its often short-lived presence. It’s much like movies: these are works that are mostly experienced as memories. That is what I love about flowers — their capacity to be absent.

JM: Tell me about the process behind the Bouquet series.

WdR: They’re a collaboration between me and a florist. I will come up with a very rough outline of an idea or a concept, if you wish. It can have to do with color or a shape, or with a particular flower or with some more abstract ideas that concern me. And I will translate those into parameters that I communicate with a florist, and then the florist will have to interpret these ideas or these parameters and build them into a piece.

JM: So, you provide them with instructions?

WdR: Yes. Sometimes there are only a few. For one Bouquet I said: every flower should be white. That was it. Sometimes it’s more elaborate. There are 11 of these works, and they all are based on very different premises, but it’s always a collaboration. The input of the florist is very important. The instructions that I provide leave a lot of room for interpretation, so there are always many surprises for me. I’m always very excited to see what the florist comes up with, because, for me, it’s like somebody else made the work. Actually, somebody else did make it, in the end.

JM: And that’s been the case from the very beginning — you created this project with the intent of leaving some kind of room for you to be surprised.

WdR: Yes, but also room for dialogue. I’ve been collaborating with different people, with artists, with florists, with technicians, with art historians, with all sorts of different people on many different works, in different ways. Sometimes these collaborations last long. I’ve collaborated with Jeroen de Rijke, under the name De Rijke / De Rooij, for 12 years. Sometimes collaborations are short, but the, let’s say, “presence” of other people in the work is something that I’m very comfortable with and that I really like and that I also invite.

JM: What was the collaboration like with Bella Meyer in this case? What instructions did you give her, and what was her contribution to the project now that you’ve seen it realized?

WdR: Everything. My instructions were so minimal… I said to Bella, “I want to work with flowers from the Israel.” In my studio I had a list made by the Israeli government of allergenic flowers — flowers that produce allergies. All flowers produce allergies, but some do so more than others, and some people are more susceptible than others. So there are many different physical connections possible between people and plants. So, I said to Bella, “I want plants that are high up on the allergy list and that come from the region.”

We were also talking about scale, and about the room. I said I would like it if there were areas in the work that look very different from other areas, so that there are different locations, or regions noticeable — that it should be an “uneven” or asymmetrical piece, with moments of harmony, and moments of difference.

JM: That has come through, where you catch these little vignettes. There is a pomegranate, there are what look like chili peppers.

WdR: Right, there is a lot of food in there! There are also olives, and different kind of peppers.

JM: Yeah. It rings true as to where everything came from.

WdR: Those are the elements that are quicker to be recognized as from that area. Like the so-called Bismarck fans, those big palms, maybe ring of the Middle East.

JM: Were there challenges around sourcing those things?

WdR: There might be in the future. If you want to display an arrangement for a longer duration of time that consists of so many ingredients — this one contains about 50 different kinds of plants and flowers — it’s always quite a challenge to have all those ingredients consistently available, because you’re dealing with organic material.

JM: How is Bella going to negotiate that over the run of the exhibition?

WdR: Certain ingredients will have to be replaced at certain moments during the show and then she’ll improvise, find something that maybe looks or feels similar. That’s okay. It’s a work in motion. The overall, let’s say architecture will remain the same and the overall atmosphere will remain the same, but inside there will be some evolutions going on.

JM: And you’re open to those subtle changes?

WdR: Absolutely! In this case and for this piece, it’s really an important aspect of my thoughts around the work. That it has that possibility to evolve and to grow and to change.

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Written by The Jewish Museum

An art museum in NYC committed to illuminating the complexity and vibrancy of Jewish culture for a global audience.

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