ERIK KESSELS: "COMING UP WITH AN IDEA IS HARD WORK"
- donderdag 20 mei 2021
- 09:03
- Door: Natasha Hendriks
Irene van de Laar sets her sights on Erik Kessels. Erik Kessels is a visual artist, designer, co-founder and creative director of communications agency KesselsKramer. He collects photography, has published several photo books and curated exhibitions. In his projects he likes to merge existing things in a new way.Text: Irene van de Laar | Online editing: Natasha Hendriks
Image: Karoly Effenberger
"For creativity, the year did have a crunch, especially culturally. A lot has come to a standstill in that area, of course. It's going to take a long time for people to come out of that. To be creative, you have to feel comfortable. And that feeling is obviously a little bit gone. During periods when the economy is doing very well, creativity often flourishes. Because that's precisely when people think: we'll go over it again and again. Almost a kind of decadence, exaggeration. That does often lead to innovative things. Sometimes it is said: 'In a time of crisis, good ideas come.' But those are more patch-up ideas. You see that in this period as well: all those frantic attempts to do something with corona or the lockdown. Surely that is a bit of patchwork instead of the real thing."
In 1996, together with Johan Kramer, you founded KesselsKramer. What was your mission?
"Before that, the two of us had worked at various agencies in London. But after two years we wanted to return to the Netherlands. Clients often employed marketing people in their companies, but the creativity was bought in. More and more of the creative side was demanded. Furthermore, we wanted to keep busy with our hobbies - for Johan that was film, for me photography. We wanted to weave that into our projects. That's actually how it came about. In the beginning, we also wanted to determine exactly what we were and were not working for, so we very often said no."
"I come from a village in Limburg and there, window dresser was one of the most creative professions. I wanted to become that, that was my dream since I was five years old. Eleven years later, I went to a school in Boxtel where you could become a window dresser. I didn't last long - it was really terrible. I then decided to try my luck at art school: painting and graphics. After graduating, I started making commercial drawings. But I found that too lonely work. I was alone in a little room and had hardly any contact with anyone. That's why I started working at an agency. I liked that because all kinds of disciplines came together there. Eventually I grew more and more as an art director and editor. I knew something about photography, film, drawing and illustration and brought all those disciplines together. The fact that I made something that could be seen a day later in the newspaper or as an advertisement on TV was fascinating to me. Although what came out of my hands in the beginning was not all good. For example, I made the most terrible Piet Klerkx home furnishing ads for advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. I had a wake-up call when someone said to me that it is not at all special for something to appear in the newspaper. 'That's just what you do. It's better to focus on something that sticks and is meaningful.' At twenty-seven I felt for the first time that I had made something that was really about something."
"I like to make things very humane, that an advertisement serves as a mirror. You saw that in the Ben ads, for example, where we showed everyone on the street. We thought: if you say as a mobile provider that you want to be there for everyone, that you are the cheapest and everyone can buy your phone, then you should also show everyone. That was very innovative and shocking. Another style of advertising that I prefer is the ironic way, a little more pointed so than humor alone."
"I think it always has to be different. You have to stand out in whatever way you can. We worked for a health insurance company once. They had one policy that they said, 'We want you to make a video about that that shows: it covers everything.' We were given a huge list of what was in that coverage. Last on the list was stutter therapy. We then made a one-minute film with a boy who stutters. The film was a kind of talking head. The next day that boy was on talk shows and the clip was shown everywhere. You have to look for the discernment. That can also be a strategic distinction, as we did with the campaign for the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. It's a hostel on Kerkstraat with five hundred beds, pretty big. Just backpackers, students, in and out, late to bed, chaos. A mess in every sense of the word. The manager of the hotel received lots of complaints, it drove him crazy. He called us, if we could help him. We went to have a look and thought: what hell, how can you make anything out of this? Then we came up with the idea that honesty is the only luxury the hotel has to offer. We made a kind of anti-advertising, to piss off the hotel completely: 'Even more dog shit in the main entrance', 'Now a door in every room' - things like that. That worked very well. For years they had around 60,000 overnight stays a year. The first year after the campaign it was already 75,000 and now they have over 160,000. The hotel got so much free publicity as a result of our anti-advertising - I have hundreds of press clippings, articles and press folders full. People wanted to go to the worst hotel in the world. While of course everyone knew that was meant to be ironic."
"Sometimes, when I'm invited by a client, I already have the idea while the conversation is still going on. Otherwise I really have to work on it. Sometimes I close myself off, sometimes I just go among the people, sometimes I retreat to the toilet... And I just have to see: where can I find it? Then you also go through the most horrible clichés in your head. You have to go through a kind of forest of stereotypes and eventually you come to a kind of wasteland, where nothing has ever been done. A kind of virgin territory where the idea must be. There are also emotional things from the past or ideas you have parked there. You are not born with a talent for coming up with a very good campaign idea. It's not like that, it's work."
"The theme for this festival was 'the best of times, the worst of times.' It was about social issues of the moment. The starting point for my work was the fascination with people's urge to apply plastic surgery. This whole selfie culture fascinates me enormously. Why can't people accept themselves as they are? I have no value judgment about it, but I can relate to that. I compiled sixty portraits from eight hundred portraits I had found on the Internet, all of which had undergone some form of plastic surgery or fillers. The sixty portraits were the result of an algorithm and do not represent existing people. Destroy My Face was displayed on the floor of Skatepark Pier 15, creating an interaction with the skaters who had the opportunity to intervene in the images. As easily as the faces were once made beautiful, they were destroyed again."
"There is no limit. An artist is someone who reflects on something. Who brings something to light: an opinion or a statement or a work that symbolizes something. In that, an artist is free to do what he or she wants. So in that respect, an artist is not an activist or politician either."
"On trips, I often buy things I see in markets. I have more than 15,000 family albums. Those are in storage. I don't collect as a kind of possessive collector. I'm not a collector. In fact, hate collectors because they are too single minded and greedy. For me, it's work material. I do buy things from other artists as well. If I have seen a work and can't sleep from it, I buy it. At my house, a lot of things hang from people I know, with whom I have a personal connection."
"For me, the story behind a photograph is more important than the photograph itself. I'm looking for the most meaningless images. I then try to show them in such a way that they suddenly become special. That has to do with the story behind them. We are in a renaissance in terms of images. We're almost at the peak, almost over it. I don't think all the stories have been told yet, but almost all the pictures have been made. We consume images in a huge quantity. We don't chew it anymore; it's swallow and get out. I try to make the everyday of some images special or monumental again, by taking it out of its existing context and bringing it into a new one."
"Letting go. In your head, losing control, letting go of your self-assurance. That feels very naked then and then it comes in, I think. Then you can repackage it, and bring it out."
"Pretty meaningless places in the Eastern Bloc, they fascinate me. In 2019, I was in Georgia, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. It's kind of nice to see that that's still completely unexplored, in our eyes at least. It's also special to travel just a little counter-cyclical. I have also been on vacation in Romania. Not to hang out in a hotel somewhere there or whatever, but to discover things. I always want to go to those gipsy markets. Pretty dangerous at times. For me, that's a form of relaxation. Also, I often go to Sofia with a friend, there's a big gypsy market where you can buy guns for robbery, haha. That's a super rough place. I love it. Then we get there at six in the morning. It's a bit of a rancid area, you have to watch out there. It's almost like a huge garbage dump where people live on and you can find stuff. Right now I have an ideal project, together with an artist friend, Europe Archive. We call this "searching European fleemarkets and recreating collective memory. We will drive a gold truck through Europe and compile an archive in its tailgate, in one of those shipping containers. What we do is collect objects, things that have been forgotten. So with stories attached. For example, a kitchen pan that was built up like a house and can no longer be used as a pan. Or a cigar box with seven bullets that still work. And what I found in Belgium: gas masks for fetish purposes, sex photos or dildos for commercial use. This is a perfect project for us. We are building it up now. The idea is that at exhibitions in cities like Tokyo, Paris and Berlin, that truck will be placed and those things will be displayed. As a kind of archive of Europe, a memory of Europe in stuff and in pictures. That's a dream, though."
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