Description of the artwork Besrat - Good News: This is an amalgamation of two works by Vermeer. The „maid with milk jar“ and the „young woman reading aletter“, called „maid“...
Description of the artwork Besrat - Good News: This is an amalgamation of two works by Vermeer. The „maid with milk jar“ and the „young woman reading aletter“, called „maid“ and „letter“ subsequently. Both paintings show young women in an interior space with a window on the left side, typical for Vermeer. The homage takes two stories, two perspectives so to say. The old subjects from an old master turns to a new meaning. Moreover, there is a media transfer from painting to photography is also ideally suited to Vermeer because it was in Vermeer‘s time that the artist was supposedly interested in camera obscure and optical devices were very much in development. The two subjects in the Vermeer paintings are very different. The settings is the same but different. Both Vermeer‘s interior are domestic but one is in the kitchen and the other is in the bedroom. The maid performs manual labor whereas the lady performs a rather intellectual deed, reading a letter or a note. The difference is action echoes the difference in occupation and in class, just like the decoration of the setting shows it. Both actions are performed due to an input from the outside. The lady reads the letter because another person wrote it to her. The maid does the milk thing because another person told her to do so. Each of the women is reacting to an exterior impulse. The girl went to get milk. She stops on the landing of the staircase, opposite a window, to read something on a smartphone. As in the Vermeer we do not know what she reads, how she will react or from whom the message is. We also do not know who (or if somebody) told her to get the milk. The story shows a young woman on her way (possibly her way up, definitely a child becoming an adult), a subject that in and of itself is as important in modern society as any other subject could be. It also crosses cultural boundaries. The moment is the fusion of themes and the associations that are possible thanks to this fusion. The maid is lower class and the young lady is upper class. Nowadays it is not as easily possible from race or from clothing to deduce the social class or social origin of a person. The girl is colored but her clothes are rather European, especially the down jacket. Her headdress interestingly could be just as well African as European from Vermeer’s own time or form today. The braids are typically African. This alludes to a question of class or social standing. The story leads us to the question about a social class, racial circumstances, colonialism, immigration, adaptation, feminism (milk, motherhood). The smartphone is a device in the girl‘s hands that allows us to stay connected but that also means dependent. Two people on opposite ends of a wire, receiving orders, causing action. The word „wired“ comes to mind. It implies someone who is a) connected and b) under some form of stress (note: only a tense wire will transmit the signal to the bell). „Wired“ is also the term for technological connectivity which is omnipresent in the 21st century and which has in some ways enslaved us socially but also in the work place. This is not unlike the fashion of writing letters in the 18th century that several Vermeer paintings refer to. Now we are writing WhatsApp and SMS messages or reading emails that gets us at any moment and interrupts what we are doing just like the girl on the picture interrupts her way back home to check a message. The title came spontaneously and fortunately. “Besrat” – this is a real name of the girl from the portrait. The fact that Besrat means Good News. It couldn’t be a better coincidence. Not only for the SMS message she reads but also because “good news” has a relation to Christianity for “Evangelium” means good news. It is the good news of Christ. Meaning that young African women are actually good news. This is an economical reality in third world aid. They say that investing in the health and education of young African women in Africa is the investment with the highest return and the best long-term effect on the world possible. Exactly the same value, in the future will be the investing in the integration and education of immigrant youth here in Europe.
Artwork references: The MilkmaidJohannes Vermeer, c. 1660https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer) Woman Reading a LetterJohannes Vermeer, c. 1663https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_Reading_a_Letter_(Vermeer)
