23.10.25 to 06.04.26
THE CUCKOO’S CHICK: a silly child, the poor girl
A tentative interpretation of an image that says little on its own
I. Restrictions as a Disclaimer
When an artwork is presented to the public, a legitimate question often arises: 'What does the artist mean by this work?' And inevitably, the next question follows: 'What does the title mean?' Understandable questions, which in my view are difficult or even impossible to answer.
First of all, and this is obvious, the meaning of any language that is not spoken or written lies within itself, in the language used. If the maker had nothing to express visually, they would have written a text, a manifesto, or recited or sung something. But a visual artwork offers an image, not a text. While just as visible to the human eye as a written or printed text, it does not intend to be a text. Occasionally, a visual image does contain text - text that sneaks in like a Trojan horse - as if the image does not speak well enough for itself. If the creator of the visual image writes or speaks, only then there are textual clues.
The Cuckoo’s Chick prefers to remain silent, knowing only its own baptismal name consisting of two words - a definite article and a noun - not contained within the image itself, but written below it in nearly illegible handwriting. But fine, let’s proceed.
The frame of reference for The Cuckoo’s Chick is, first and foremost, any other visual image made by a human, not textual images written by humans. This child exists primarily in the context of other, more or less equal and thus comparable objects. An object without other nearby objects does not exist - or barely exists. A frame of reference is presumed and also given. The frame of reference for this child is the artist’s other work and works by others created in the same era and it exists within its own time and, among its generational peers, is a child of its time.
The viewer who wants to understand a visual image immediately translates it into language. This usually happens completely automatically and almost instantly. The poor viewer resembles the blind child chasing a giant grasshopper in the pitch dark, never able to catch it.
Visual images follow their own internal logic, which by definition cannot be translated into words, no matter how much one might wish to, and no matter how hard the well-meaning viewer tries. It makes sense, then, that the artist hesitates to say anything that might steer the viewer’s thoughts. Why would anyone want a travel guide - and where is this guide supposed to lead the traveler or pilgrim?
Even the artist runs behind the facts, trying to put into words what was created visually. They too, almost by reflex, translate the visual image into language - and something always gets lost in the process, or a great deal. Because the idea is embedded in the flesh of the image from the moment of its incarnation - not outside of it, for instance in language. And yet the human brain translates all visual information into words immediately: 'This is the child that came into the world.' 'This is the die that was cast.' 'Who is it?' Wordless observation is difficult, but when it succeeds, it touches on bare existence - beyond words - toward the things that are animated.
It is understandable that the viewer wants to know - or better yet, read or hear -something about the background of the work. If the artist remains silent, they are quickly accused of needlessly mystifying things. Meanwhile, the viewer must accept that an image is not always an illustration or a propaganda poster, with a clear, unambiguous message - a single narrative from A to B to C, a story with a crystal-clear beginning and a deeply satisfying or deeply disturbing end, an image that, once decoded, has no more secrets. I find nothing in either extreme.
Without doing violence to the internal logic of the image, without interpreting it too rigidly, but also without indulging in endless mystification, artist and viewer balance- like a tightrope walker - on a thin thread that is usually red and always called Ariadne.
The fate of the artist who tries to write about their own visual work is sealed before even a single letter or title is committed to paper. But the urge to write and to search for the meaning of the image in words is too strong to resist entirely. Still, guilt lingers, because the image wanted to offer nothing to the world but its wordless self. Forgiveness is asked in advance: through my fault, through my great fault. Mea maxima culpa.
II. The Cuckoo Child, Finally in Words
The artwork titled The Cuckoo's Chick was created around 2015 - possibly a bit later, and maybe even started earlier. It was drawn using various materials, including charcoal, pastel, and colored pencil, on thick white paper, measuring approximately 150 by 90 cm. We see a human child, quite young, presumably a girl - if one is still allowed to say such things. The child appears to have a rather light complexion. She seems to be in a room: to her right (on the viewer's left) stands a large chair, the floor appears to be made of wooden planks or parquet - it's not entirely clear. In the background, we see a dark door or window on the right, and above the child's head, a lamp or a moon.
The girl is wearing a white-grey skirt of tulle-like fabric with many frills, and a cardigan that is strikingly asymmetrical in color. Color, in general, is barely present in the image; nearly everything is drab grey. On her feet are oversized shoes, heavy boots, and underneath, the child wears thick woolen socks - though whether it’s real wool, we do not know. The child’s head is somewhat problematic; whether one may see or say such a thing is unclear. But it's evident that the child deviates from the norm, the prototype of a young human. The skull is clearly too large, and the eyes are far too close together. Most striking of all, the child is cross-eyed or squinting. Due to her physiognomy deviating too much from the average, she was likely bullied at school - unless all children looked like her.
The final element that demands our attention is the hand puppet the child is holding in her left hand. We cannot see the hand itself, but it seems very much as though it has fully taken possession of the puppet’s innards. The hand climbs up through the opening and wriggles its way through intestines and stomach, up the esophagus and windpipe. The puppet does not need to breathe, nor eat or drink; what was never alive is being animated by the living. Every child is a shaman and believes that everything is ensouled - especially a doll that resembles a human: everything longs for breath, everything seeks contact. The most beautiful aspect is perhaps the annunciation of this viable impregnation: a strictly private proclamation of the stirring of the inanimate by the breath of life, like a seraph breathing into the lifeless: 'A Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind.'
The child’s index finger is in the puppet’s head, thumb and middle finger in the left and right arms. The puppet is strikingly black - nowadays you can buy those, but in the past, it was quite a thing. And even when black dolls were available, they usually wore little straw skirts. This puppet wears a beautifully decorated robe and raises its arms like a priest - perhaps to speak, to conjure, or to warn the viewer. The puppet is no longer a child, appears older, perhaps weathered, possibly even a grown man. But can one still say all that? The black puppet wears only one large earring - not two.
Perhaps the living child clutches the chair out of fear, out of anxiety. Perhaps she realizes the puppet is angry, says something unexpected, something she didn’t want to hear. If the puppet is a priest or shaman, then messages sometimes come through - from the other side, from the subconscious, prophecies the viewer may prefer not to hear. What was once stone-dead but turned out to be viable may now have its own will, wants something other than the creating child with her contagiously boundless imagination and cognitive limitations.
III. The Other as Fear
With a bit of luck, the child does not merely project her own unfathomable mind onto the brain of the puppet - our dark shaman - but a dialogue may emerge between creator and creation, between the giant girl and the little man. But such a dialogue can only arise if the child refuses to be satisfied with herself, doubts herself, or is fed up with her inner monologues. This dialogue between subject and world is what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called the perpetuum mobile of existential doubt. Opening oneself to the other, no matter how lifeless it initially appeared, may be the only source of light or salvation from this endless doubt about existence. The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once called this the "questioning face of the other" - the other whom one encounters, to whom the “I” is elected. Every human being is destined to read the questioning other in the face and to respond as best as possible, especially when that face asks for help.
One of my father’s brothers, Uncle Jakob, moved with his young wife shortly after WWII from South Limburg in the Netherlands - a region bordering both Germany and Belgium - to Belgian Congo in Central Africa, where he worked in the diamond industry. There they had their only child, a daughter. The child was as white as her parents and behaved accordingly, as an only child with privileged white skin. Occasionally, the family visited the Netherlands. Whether I had been born yet, I don't know - I don't remember. Regardless, I never forgot the anecdote my late mother often told.
The young girl, my niece, naturally in a princess dress, once dropped a handkerchief in our home. She didn’t pick it up herself but said, 'Aunt Ger, would you pick that up for me?' My mother refused. She said, 'You can do that yourself. Bending over is healthy.' Uncle Jakob, who had lived in Belgian Congo for years, moved when unrest began around 1959 with wife and child to California. Whether the handkerchief anecdote happened in their Congo period or later in the US, I no longer know - but it hardly matters. The child was destined to rule, to command. She knew no different and fulfilled her role with flair.
Perhaps this is also the right moment to say something about the title, The Cuckoo's Chick, which is not so easy to interpret. Naturally, everyone pictures the birds cuckoo's chick - too fat and far too large - refusing to make room for the original hatchlings. All the food goes into the wide-open mouth of the cuckoo's chick; the others wither and are eventually shoved out of the nest by the fat bully. The greed of the simpleton is so great that it would rather be an only child than be raised in a family with siblings. Obsessed with the compulsive thought of coming up short, the chick suppresses every notion of sharing the bread and wine, resulting in boundless loneliness and budding fears.
But those who are yet to be born rarely determine their own fate. It wasn’t the cuckoo egg that laid itself; it was the impulse of the mother cuckoo that managed to deposit the guilty egg in another nest - among much smaller eggs - too lazy to build a home herself, too sluggish to feed it herself, and too loveless to teach the child how to fly. Now, we shouldn’t blame the cuckoo for all of this; it thoughtlessly repeats what parents and grandparents and long lines of ancestors have always done. The cuckoo has no grand conscience - if it even has anything like: 'I knew what I was doing' or 'I didn’t know.' [1]
If we want to change this ingrained, parasitic displacement syndrome, then that will - understated as it may be - be quite the task. It’s unlikely that it will ever work with the bird who spawned a cuckoo chick, but human children must keep hope alive that what is crooked can indeed be straightened. Once aware of the utterly unconscious exploitation of the other, a person should be capable of adjusting their behavior - for the good of the community, and to the education and amusement of the insatiable ego.
So ask yourself this: 'Which of us is the enlightened cuckoo's chick who, though never having laid itself in the wrong nest, refuses ever again to let its own egg push out any others?'
IV. Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit
My mother had a big heart for the weak, especially for Ria, her little sister, a mentally disabled child who, after suffering meningitis, became severely physically and mentally handicapped and spent her life in a wheelchair. I was afraid of Aunt Ria because when you had to shake her hand, she would squeeze it hard and laugh.
The white disabled child plays with the black hand puppet as if it were alive. Why did her parents give her that puppet, of all things? Why not a white one? Why a little man? Why not a girl who looked like her? Does the child know what she is doing? Is the puppet allowed to exist? Is the little man allowed to speak? Is he an “other” or merely the girl’s mouthpiece? Can a mentally impaired person truly engage in a dialogue with the other? And: what human is not impaired? How much free will and rights does a lesser human have? What is a human? What is lesser? Who is accountable - and who is not? Who do we still blame for the mistakes of history?
My mother occasionally spoke about the war, which she had lived through as a young girl. I believe she found it important that we grew up with those stories. She told us about the deaf miller across the road, who was shot on liberation day. Confused German Wehrmacht soldiers shouted at him to halt - but he was deaf. They shot him in the back and he died. She also told us about her father, my grandfather, who nearly got taken away in a raid van with a young Jewish girl they had hidden in their home. He admitted they had hidden her - he couldn't lie. Why he wasn’t taken, nobody knows. She also talked about Dutch girls who had dated German soldiers - “Moffenmeiden.” [2] After the liberation, these girls were immediately rounded up, had their heads shaved, and were publicly humiliated. My mother - and her parents -disliked revenge.
The ideology of the Nazis, fundamentally based on racism, was adamant that humanity was not one undifferentiated mass - that there were higher and lower types, Übermenschen and Ungeziefer. This cold, clinical cynicism divided humanity through a semi-scientific system adorned with vivid illustrations. Some etnicities were not even deemed worthy of the term Untermensch [3]: Jews, Roma, and Sinti were rated so low they were denied the term human - instead labeled as rats or vermin. Mentally handicapped people, even if of Aryan race, were preferably removed from society as discreetly as possible. German citizens, initially unfamiliar with Nazi racial theories, had to learn to accept that not everyone who looked human actually was.
V. Other sources
As the primary visual source for The Cuckoo's Chick, I used some hundred-year-old photographs from archives, mainly from the USA. I’m deeply interested in photography, especially from the first century of its existence - starting around 1835. I recall combining three photographs: one of a white girl in an interior, one of a black girl in a white dress, and a third for the child’s head. I forget where I got the head of the little man - the shaman - but it came from somewhere else. What fascinated me most was a rare photo from the late 19th century of an African American girl wearing exactly the same dress as the white girl. That child - or rather her parents - had achieved something, were emancipated; some could afford the same lifestyle as white Americans. They adapted, to show they belonged to a certain class, to the model of the white middle class. Today, we might say they aligned too much with an identity not their own. Now, roots and identity ask us to express both visibly - through clothing and hairstyle.
Besides the deliberately sought photographic sources, the photo-collage concept is also imbued with stylistic drawing influences - inescapable ones. Every drawing -The Cuckoo's Chick is technically best defined as a drawing - contains, consciously or unconsciously, traces of the medium’s history. At the 1985 exhibition Traum und Wirklichkeit, Wien 1870–1930 [4], which we visited with the entire academy, I first saw original works by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and many others. Even before I was struck by Klimt or Schiele’s paintings, I was undeniably moved by their drawings. I loved Schiele most, who drew more rawly and directly than Klimt and portrayed humans as vulnerable mammals: girls and young women, often drawn from life; in all their fatal beauty, also mortal flesh. More than Klimt, Schiele embraced the fatal inadequacy of human spirit and body. The shabby little dresses, pitiful sheaths for the feminine form, have rarely been captured more vividly.
Spiritual and philosophical sources for The Cuckoo's Chick include first and foremost the core of the four canonical gospels, namely the parables, and Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas. [5] To prevent man and cosmos from collapsing into deterministic Darwinism, I try to keep the mind alive, let's say spiritual - like a noble heir of Baron von Münchhausen, beneath this fatal firmament - by drawing from an old source:
'There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one […].' [6]
Levinas saw neither the self nor fellow man as mere animals with cognition, but as slightly more: a mamal with a conscience: 'I did know.' The radicality of his stance lies in how the self reaches full maturity only in relation to the other, who makes a demand. Rather than viewing the other - and thus also the self - as a finite closed system (finality), as unfreedom, as hell, he saw humans as chosen for the other in infinite openness (infinity).
Should sentimentality well up, I believe I owe the culture I descend from mostly gratitude for its distrust of ideologies, its refusal to judge, its ethos of doing good quietly, and its lived-out beliefs. For their entire lives our mutual ancestors drew from the same sources as my wife and I do - father and mother of two daughters and a son.
Rinke Nijburg, Arnhem, June 2025
Notes:
[1] Needles to say this sentence refers to the infamous line quoted by a lot of Germans shortly after WOII: 'Ich habe es nicht gewusst.'
[2] Free translation: Jerry Chicky.
[3] The ideology of the Nazi's had little to do with the ideas of W.F. Nietzsche. For Nietzsche 'der Übermensch' had nothing to do wih race but all with Der Wille zur Macht which is nothing else than the individual striving for the utmost selfrealisation.
[4] Wiener Künstlerhaus, Traum und Wirklichkeit, Wien 1870–1930 ("Dream and Reality, Vienna 1870–1930"), March 28 to October 6, 1985.
[5] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, The Hague, 1961.
[6] Galatians 3:28. One could very easily and in accordance with this old teaching add: '[...] white nor black [...].'
