Harmen Brethouwer - How to Be Plural

How to Be Plural

“Be plural like the universe.”

Fernando Pessoa

By the early 1980s—just as Harmen Brethouwer was beginning his artistic practice—culture had undergone a profound philosophical shift. In the wake of what Arthur C. Danto famously described as the “end of art,” the very boundaries of what could count as an artwork had dissolved. The art world had become radically pluralistic, governed no longer by stylistic rules or formal hierarchies, but by an open-ended tolerance for all modes, materials, and meanings. This new landscape offered unprecedented freedom, but also a kind of disorientation: without shared limits, how does one find direction?

Brethouwer’s answer was to fix his compass to archetype. In a time when “anything goes,” he chose to go deep. He embraced the pluralism of contemporary art as an essential condition for his own art—but through a paradoxical strategy of deliberately restricting himself to two archetypal forms: the square wall panel and the conical object. This set the stage for a broad, eclectic inquiry into cultural diversity.

The panel and the cone can perform this unlikely trick because they function as what Robert Morris once called “blank forms”—shapes emptied of expressive urgency, without inherent symbolism or historical baggage, and therefore capable of receiving any content. They are open structures, ideal for hosting the full heterogeneity of cultural forms. Like containers whose meaning is shaped entirely by what fills them, these archetypes become a tool to navigate the world of art. In Brethouwer’s hands, they are not symbols of reduction, but frameworks for inclusion—forms that hold steady even as the references, techniques, and materials within them shift radically from one work to the next.

This capacity for openness is what makes the panel and the cone such powerful vehicles for collaboration. Given the scope of Brethouwer’s inquiry, collaboration is not optional but essential. His work is grounded in the recognition that the overwhelming majority of artistic intelligence—its techniques, materials, traditions, and symbolic systems—resides in forms of knowledge embedded in other people, cultures, and practices. To access that richness, the artist must collaborate. For Brethouwer, therefore, the work of art as a solitary act of expression is useless, it can only function as a site of dialogue—between himself and his collaborators, and between contemporary art and the vast continuum of cultural making. His panels and cones become meeting grounds where “the stuff of art” is not merely quoted, but actively engaged. Whether partnering with faux marble painters, silversmiths, or potters rooted in centuries-old traditions, Brethouwer creates shared conditions of authorship, treating the studio and the workshop as mutual sites of learning.

Don't be surprised, then, to see Chinese dragons or the frippery of silver filigree making an appearance on his panels and cones. Far from being decorative flourishes, each motif is a precise response to a specific historical, cultural, or material reference. The panel and the cone canvass for these interventions readily, allowing each narrative to unfold on its own terms. In this way, Brethouwer’s work becomes a kind of pluralist activism—one shaped by collaboration, curiosity, and the sustained labor of translation across traditions.

On Miscellany

"We need all culture as we need all nature."

Norbert Lynton

The term miscellaneous, derived from the Latin miscere (to mix), has long functioned as a residual category in hierarchical classification systems—those which strive to impose order on collections of objects, images, and knowledge. Within art institutions, this impulse toward taxonomy emerged prominently during the Enlightenment and was formalized through the rise of the modern museum in the 18th and 19th centuries. Artworks were grouped by genre, geography, period, medium, or "school"—a classificatory logic drawn from natural science, aiming at clarity, progression, and pedagogical utility.

But what did not fit these dominant categories—vernacular crafts, ritual objects, works by untrained artists, hybrid forms, or artifacts lacking clear provenance—was often relegated to the catch-all drawer: miscellaneous. This label did not simply denote variety; it indexed uncertainty, irregularity, and a failure to conform. It became, in effect, a conceptual dumping ground for what could not be otherwise named within the institution’s schema.

The consequence of this was double-edged. On one hand, miscellaneous allowed institutions to house and retain anomalous works without excluding them entirely. On the other, it imposed a subtle structural marginalization. To be called "miscellaneous" was to be suspended in a liminal state—present but unrecognized, included but unvalued. This marginality was compounded by the Western canon’s preference for linear historical narratives and stylistic purity, in which the miscellaneous had no clear place.

In recent decades, however, the term has begun to shift. The critique of institutional hierarchies by artists, scholars, and curators—particularly through postcolonial and feminist frameworks—has destabilized the primacy of traditional categories. The miscellaneous has been reclaimed as a site of hybridity, resistance, and pluralism. Marginal arts—outsider art, Indigenous practices, and diasporic visual languages—are increasingly seen not as footnotes to dominant histories, but as challenges to the very structures that once relegated them.

Thus, the history of the miscellaneous in art is not merely about classification; it is about power. It shows how the systems that organize knowledge can obscure as much as they reveal. Yet the peripheral, once dismissed, may now redefine the center. Where the canon operates on exclusion—privileging the rare, the linear, the “significant”—it is replaced by inclusion-as-method: an ecology of culture where everything belongs and nothing is outside the system. The miscellaneous, no longer a drawer of leftovers, becomes the structure of everything. It becomes a synonym for biodiversity—a state in which multiplicity is not noise, but a precondition for the survival of culture.

This is where Harmen Brethouwer aligns himself with a crucial development in contemporary artistic thinking: a shift in perspective that sees the vast cultural legacy not as a linear inheritance of established styles and movements—some relevant, some outdated—but as disjointed cultural information, as culture’s raw materials, every bit of which is potentially relevant. What matters is to unleash the abundance of culture, by bringing these elements to form new constellations. Then, miscellaneous—true to its Latin root “to mix”— also becomes the operative principle for this system.

In Vitro: A Sanctuary of Convergence

“Merz means to create connections, preferably between everything in the world.”

Kurt Schwitters

Harmen Brethouwer’s In Vitro series presents a vision of culture at its most idealist. A sequence of square glass panels, suspended on stainless-steel pegs, occupies the wallspace almost without assertion. Their presence is subtle, verging on immaterial. But embedded within each transparent glass is a unique arrangement of fine, silver-grey lines: visual inscriptions that, while barely perceptible, represent a whole world. These patterns are not decorative—they are data. Each panel encodes an artist's biography or an artifact’s description, transcribed first into sound graphics and then inscribed directly into the interior of the glass by laser. The process removes the legibility and audibility of language, leaving behind only its trace: a silent rhythm, preserved like an insect in amber—untouched by time itself.

In Vitro forms a growing archive—one that is grounded in Cornel Bierens’ Manifesto on Preciousness, inscribed into the largest of the glass panels. In this manifesto, written especially for this project, Bierens separates the idea of the “costly” from the “precious.” The costly belongs to the realm of economy and is measured comparatively; the precious exists within art and holds its value absolutely. In Vitro gives this principle a material expression.

As an archive, In Vitro is not a practical repository, nor does it follow the theoretical imperative of completeness that underlies archival systems. In Vitro evades this ambition. It unfolds gradually, one panel at a time, shaped by accidental accumulation rather than plan. Its structure is open, episodic, and inherently incomplete. But as a visionary model, In Vitro is at once a duplication—a second body of culture. It offers a purified parallel, as if culture had passed through a conceptual prism and returned in distilled form.

Brethouwer’s project stands within a deep tradition of idealism in the arts—a lineage that spans sacred architecture, musical theory, visual abstraction, and theological cosmology. These traditions share a metaphysical orientation. They are grounded in the belief that the world possesses an underlying, divinely ordered structure, and that form, when rightly composed, can enter into alignment with it. Art becomes a way of ordering reality toward the ideal.

In the visions of Hildegard von Bingen, received in the 12th century, divine order appears as diagrammatic crystallizations, in which symmetry and structure reveal a correspondence between heaven and earth. Centuries later, Agnes Martin would return to this same impulse with different tools. Her grid paintings vibrate with the tenderness of faith. They do not represent perfection but seek its atmosphere.

In Vitro does not generate new visionary content in the manner of Hildegard, nor aspires to the emotive delicacy of Martin’s aesthetics. Instead, it frames culture as an ordered field. It may, therefore, be understood as a meta-version of these traditions. In Vitro gathers voices across time without separating them by category or status. Each line within the glass becomes a passage between different registers of thought. It brings together the ecstatic and the restrained, the medieval and the contemporary, the personal and the anonymous. The archive becomes a sanctuary of convergence—where artists, thinkers, and makers are preserved in the same medium, offered the same level of presence.

In Vitro stands among those rare works that brings into the world a model of how things might belong together, where voices are not erased, not elevated above others, but carried equally. Through the simplest and most modest of forms, In Vitro offers a radiant proposition: that clarity can carry complexity, and that sameness of treatment can protect the dignity of difference.

How to be plural

three meditations on the work of Harmen Brethouwer

Eloise Veronese-Froome

2025