Everybody can be an artist in Marieken van Huijstee’s Neurotic Scribbles at Zeezout

Mar 9, 2012 | by Joris Zwetsloot | Art, Event

About the author

Joris likes to listen and play with music and has a broad interest in people and their creative outbursts.

Neurotic Scribbles is all about the creativity that comes boiling up during boredom. Everybody’s bored sometimes, and usually people don’t think they are productive then. Marieken van Huijstee challenges that with her interest for the things people scribble on paper while they don’t think about anything at all. These things are called doodles and I must say it’s rather nice to see how creative people are when they take a break from their daily business.

If Marcel Duchamp can place a toilet in a gallery and call it art, I can do the same with doodles

What’s more pure than creating just for the purpose of creating? People doodle every day on bits of newspaper, books and cartons. Not everyone is able to make art with a capital A. But because there’s nothing else behind it, doodling is a way of creating that’s purpose- and stress free. “Since there’s no intention or thought behind it, the scribbles are very intimate and therefore really interesting.” Marieken noticed that her own doodles changed throughout time. That raised questions about how it would be for other people, do they doodle as well? Does your age, career or social status affect your doodling? Could doodling be real art?

As a result of these questions Marieken decided to collect and assemble four weeks of scribblings of forty different people and display them at Club Home next week. “I tried to find people from the art world and also people that are having a career in science. Scribblings are really pure and personal and therefore they should have a place to be portrayed. Off course, one piece of scribble on its own wouldn’t have much effect, together they’re powerful.”

Neurotic Scribbles is a crossover between a research project and an art exhibition. The research part is the comparison between doodles made by ‘normal people’ and those with an artistic background. The art part is when you put all the doodles together as a visualisation of people’s expression. For me the doodle project blazes up an age-old discussion about what does it take for a creation to be qualified as art? Can a ballpoint drawing by a non-artist ever be real art? Marieken answers with a striking quote: “Form and place is everything in the art world. I thought, if Marcel Duchamp can place a toilet in a gallery and call it art, I can do the same with doodles since they’re the most pure form of creating.”