How To

A project for The One Minutes by Hans Aarsman

31 May - 24 August 2014

The One Minutes is an international platform for very short video works. Since 1999 more than 10,000 one-minute films have been produced by makers from 120 countries. The contributions mainly come from (former) students of the Sandberg Instituut, the Master program of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. A significant part of the platform's activities involves the production of a monthly video offering, The One Minutes Series, to which museums and other cultural institutions can subscribe. In the Netherlands there are twenty subscribers, among them De Pont. Partly in connection with the fifteenth anniversary of The One Minutes, writer and 'photo-detective' Hans Aarsman (1951) has been asked to organize a special project, which has been given the theme and title How To. Aarsman has a column in the newspaper de Volkskrant, in which he provides a meticulous analysis of news photographs and frequently does something similar to this for the television program De Wereld Draait Door. At the moment he is touring the country with his theatrical program De Aarsman Projectie, een college in het kijken (The Aarsman Projection, a lecture on looking). How To, the exhibition conceived by Hans Aarsman, deals with convenient tips. It is a compilation of short films that teach us something within one minute. What do you do, for instance, if you have to tie your shoes and have only one hand free? Another film shows a variety of ways to separate an egg yolk from the white: not all of them are very practical. One of the films was made by Aarsman himself. He had an uncle Loek, one of those characters found in every family, who told unforgettable stories. Aarsman's uncle taught him how to wash his hands in a jiffy when they're covered in black grease: first rub them with olive oil, then with soap and only after that, rinse them under the faucet. By way of The One Minutes, Aarsman had a message sent to artists, asking them whether they would be interested in making short films with such convenient tips as the subject matter. Nearly sixty were submitted to him, from all parts of the world. Half of these are now on view in De Pont's project space.  See Hans Aarsman's one minute here.