COUVIN, 4 OCTOBER 2017
LETTER: TO
Jan Hoet
(IV)
This book is almost exclusively composed of letters to artists that were written between 2005 and 2017. Included are also a few letters to colleagues, friends, collectors and even a gallerist. Most have been published previously, in books and catalogues. In recent years, I have often been asked whether my letters were also ever answered by the artists. This happened a few times, which can be an indication that it never was a goal to receive an answer. The epistolary form allows me to write down my thoughts in a form that is immediate and, by definition, subjective. Every letter originates in a personal experience and is intended to say something in a discreet way about the artist, the work and the world we move in. For the sake of clarity: the most important reason I work in the art world is the immense admiration and tremendous respect I have for artists. Unfortunately, I never had the talent or the exceptional courage required to become an artist. Without stating it explicitly, I wish to imply how much I experience the art world, of which I am myself a part, as being very problematic. But luckily – to borrow Johannes Cladders’ words – there is the museum as a ‘non-verbal mediating system’. During the preparation phases of this book, the question of who might write the introduction often came up. A fellow director? A curator? An academic? An artist? None of these options turned out to be meaningful, for a number of reasons. As was the case when I wrote three letters to you in the recent past, the only valuable option to me seemed to be to write an introduction in the form of a letter to you. The content of this letter is both a statement of intent and a plan, a sketch of a blueprint for the museum’s imminent future. In 1983 the mhk of Ghent (the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was to be rebaptized s.m.a.k. in 1999) organized an exhibition on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the museum’s friends’ association, known as ‘Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst’ (the Society for the Museum of Contemporary Art). The exhibition’s 5
title was Museum zoekt museum: projecten voor een autonoom museum van hedendaagse kunst, in confrontatie met opties en realisaties in binnenen buitenland. (Museum seeks museum: projects for an autonomous museum of contemporary art, in confrontation with options and realizations at home and abroad.) Perhaps this sounds surprising, but some 35 years on, the museum is still looking! In three decades’ time, the world and the art world surrounding the museum have of course changed, but the museum’s elementary needs remain the same. Now that the Friends of s.m.a.k. are celebrating their sixtieth birthday a similar exhibition would be a meaningful undertaking. But a museum naturally seeks to be more than a museum. A museum looks for meaning, and tries to take on a role within the complex and fragmented world in which it is embedded. What place can the museum possibly be, when most of what is offered in terms of culture is largely dictated by easily digestible entertainment? What can the museum mean tomorrow as a physical place, in a reality that is increasingly virtual and digital? How shall the museum relate to the growing diktats of numbers, which are themselves steered by the mediocrity of measurement? And how can the museum connect with a society like ours today, which is culturally multifaceted and socially diverse? For whom, in other words, is the museum conceived? A possible answer to these questions is perhaps best conveyed with a quote from my letter from 28 June 2017 to Gregor Jansen, director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf: ‘In an increasingly conservative world the institution, Kunsthalle or museum becomes a refuge for ideas, a machine against indifference. It is a pulsating organ that functions as a membrane between art and the world. The role of an institution changes with time, but the values remain: the institution has the recent history of art as a folding screen before which the vulnerable artistic experiment of the now takes place, detached from market-economic speculations. With regard to this value, the threat does not reside in the speculative momentum of the art market, but in how institutions are treated by a technocracy that penetrates art in city marketing, for example. Institutions have to make a profit and be efficient; they have to act decisively and integrate in a larger recruiting principle in the locality they are part of. Their impact is then measured 6
GHENT, 30 MAY 2012
LETTER: TO
Pawel Althamer
At the moment when I am writing this, your collective performance for TRACK will not yet have taken place. This event, based on Jan and Hubert Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1432), will take place on Sint-Pietersplein in Ghent on 8 September 2012. I can still remember very well the impression your visit to this altarpiece made on you. From that moment it was clear that this masterpiece would provide the guideline for an artistic event, in the same way that you had taken Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (1889) as the basis for the collective sculpture Bródno People a couple of years earlier. But it is difficult to discuss an experience that has yet to take place. I can quite imagine what the import of this performance will be, but I refuse to describe something that neither I nor anyone else has yet seen. A contemporary interpretation of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb has nothing to do with a historically realistic reconstruction but, as a transient experience, is an attempt to question forms of collectivity, participation and religiosity. Perhaps it is a good idea for me to write instead about a recent artistic event – perhaps even a milestone – in which I myself was able to participate. Although you too were there of course, I hope you will allow me to describe this ‘sunrise experience’ in my own way. The time of the event was the night of 17 May 2012. The location of this collective performance was Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Minsk feels like a very extensive city where Soviet architecture and old, historical accents provide the setting for what is now called the last dictatorship in Europe. In Belarus, freedom of expression, assembly and association is suppressed. So in this sort of political context it was no simple matter, and perhaps even dangerous, to hold a procession dressed in gold suits at sunrise. An air of tension, agitation, euphoria and optimism surrounded the preparations for this unique gathering. It all started with a number of concerts in a club on the evening of 17 May. After the reggae dub of the Polish band Paprika Korps and the Green Day rock 14
of the Belarusian power trio Amaroka, it was finally the turn of n.r.m. (New Republic of Dreams). n.r.m. is the most popular rock band in Belarus and a major voice in the opposition to the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko. The band has been on the blacklist for years, and even now most of their performances are given in secret or in difficult circumstances. When the n.r.m. concert was over, about 150 Belarusian youngsters continued endlessly chanting n.r.m. songs. At one point Pete Paulau, a member of the band, mounted the stage in a gold suit. By then it was four in the morning. Everyone who felt like it was given the opportunity to put on a gold suit and matching spectacles. A group of about 150 or 200 people moved slowly through the silent and empty streets of Minsk towards the sunrise. You were there too, Pawel, but not as an artist or as the director of this unique movement. Besides a large group of Belarusians, a couple of Germans and a Belgian, about 50 bio-energy therapists from Poland also took part in the procession. As night changed into day, the golden caravan moved onward through the streets of Minsk. This walk was halfway between a procession, a demonstration and a silent Golden Revolution. Like everything that starts off organized organically, at a certain moment – due to a police barricade – the whole group spontaneously broke up. The reverberations of this procession still continue. As an artist you gave the starting signal for a change in the experience of public space in terms of spontaneous interactions between people and solidarity. As a human being you probably initiated an artistic action in which form and process, ficition and reality, participation and engagement raise questions about the notion of the work of art and its author, radically and with alertness. Or how a cosmic attitude can colour the outlines of the commonplace.
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Matthias Beckmann Drawing of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, 2006 Graphite on paper 29.7 x 21 cm Collection of the artist
ESCH-SUR-ALZETTE, 17 FEBRUARY 2014
LETTER: TO
Berlinde De Bruyckere
(II)
As I write this letter I have surrounded myself with a number of books: Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Krieg dem Kriege by Ernst Friedrich, Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes and Museum der Obsessionen by and about Harald Szeemann. In the book by the anarcho-pacifist Friedrich I found a photograph with the following caption: ‘To the last breath of man and horse.’ The black-and-white image shows the bodies of a horse and its rider in an advanced state of decomposition. Two dogs stand guard, seemingly in mourning, over this unspeakable cruelty. The photograph and its caption would not let me go, just as your work has burrowed its way inside me. Writing to you did not get any easier after reading Rilke’s letters. On 17 February 1903 he wrote these words to Franz Xaver Kappus: ‘Things are not all so easy to grasp and to express as most people would have us believe; most events are inexpressible, and take place in a sphere that no word has ever entered. Most inexpressible of all are works of art, existences full of secrets whose life continues alongside ours, whilst ours is transitory.’ Each physical encounter with your work strikes me dumb; words and sentences degenerate into meaningless noises compared with your charged imagery. It too is made up of existences full of secrets which stop us in our tracks, leaving us abandoned and awkward. The viewer becomes visibly complicit in the sculpture; there is no escape. There is no ‘maybe’ in your work – just ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Compromise exists only in the viewer who refuses to grasp the work’s iconographic stratification and existential complexity. Beauty, loss, death, consolation, hope, life and pain are some of the universals inscribed on your sculptures’ skin. As an artist, you seek a contemporary form for the universal, indescribable paradox of human existence. Your sculptures are bodies that function like prostheses, compensating for an existential human shortcoming. They are intimate, vulnerable protagonists, which set out from a sensual cruelty to give tangible form to what makes a human being 67
human. Every piece has a mental and physical space of its own and testifies to an intensive quest for the right sculptural solution. Form is set by the human scale. And it is the folds and cavities of bodies in flux, the bringing together of different materials and textures, that generate the tension within the sculpture. Each work is a disfigured body that presents itself, stricken and damaged, and invites viewers to lose themselves in it. As an artist, you move in a spectrum of beauty and horror, intimacy and hardness, to make sculptures that are conceived out of artistic urgency, out of a need to create works that can extricate themselves from the inflationary spiral of images and pictures in which we find ourselves. Franz Kafka once said that his stories were a way of closing his eyes. Your sculptures are a way of enabling us to look more clearly.
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OSTEND, 12 JULY 2008
LETTER: TO
Jan Fabre
(II)
(Heart of Darkness) In 2002 Jan Fabre created the ecstatic work Heaven of Delight in the Royal Palace in Brussels. On commission to Paola, Queen of the Belgians, the artist completed the interior of the Hall of Mirrors in the Royal Palace with a permanent site-specific work on the ceiling. This was a task that had remained uncompleted one hundred years previously, in 1909, on the deaths of King Leopold II and his architect Henri Maquet. The ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors is now no longer painted white, but has been transformed into a mobile, unreachable blue-green heaven. Fabre has added a pictorial layer to the ceiling using more than 1.4 million wing-cases of the jewel beetle (Sternocera acquisignata). The beauty of their almost immaterial monochrome is literally supported by the somewhat pom pous ceremonial design of the Hall of Mirrors. The changing light gives Heaven of Delight a symbolic liveliness and transcendent variability. To look upward as a viewer is to lose oneself in eternity. At the same time it is a recollection of the tradition of ceiling painting, and of the age-old association between royal (and religious) patrons and artists. One thinks, logically, of Michelangelo, Tiepolo and Tintoretto. But the work of art that most enigmatically visualizes the relationship between the royal patron and the artist is Velázquez’ Las Meninas. This masterpiece, now in the Prado in Madrid, is not only a painter’s complex articulation of the relationship between the painted space, the viewer’s space and the ‘historical space’, but also makes a point of the omnipotence of the artist’s creation, the authority of the artistic eye, and art as an environment that implies an assumption of freedom. The public unveiling of Heaven of Delight was accompanied by the publication of a book. As befits a good book, the work is excellently illustrated and there is a formal introduction and art-historical interpretation. However, the intellectual versatility of the ideas and the fact that one is drawn in by the beauty and sublimity of this masterpiece mean that most viewers miss 111
an underlying meaning which in this case may even have been Fabre’s motivation for this work. If one opens the book precisely in the middle, it is almost as though one were experiencing a fifteenth-century polyptych. In this case, the outer panels do not depict an annunciation, but are two sheets of paper which, when unfolded, offer a panoramic view of the whole Heaven of Delight ceiling. The way the work is shown in the book makes it possible to ‘read’ the work clearly in a way that is not possible in the room itself. Just as the picture is composed of several parts, the actual experience of the work is fragmented and literally detached. However, the right-hand page of the ‘printed polyptych’ shows us a photographic detail of Heaven of Delight. This detail is of a highly dynamic shiny strip of inlaid beetles above a classical pediment. The confrontation between the twinkling green ‘painted layer’ and the goldleaf-covered pediment can in itself only be called an aesthetic encounter, if there were not at the centre of the pediment a globe with the outline of Africa and a dark raised area that denotes the former Belgian Congo. Before the Congo became a colonial possession of the Belgian State, it could best be described as a rich and undeveloped private garden of the Belgian monarch Leopold II. At the end of the nineteenth century, this same Leopold decided to establish the Museum of Central Africa just outside Brussels. This Belgian ‘Petit Palais’ was a depository for the King’s colonial finds rather than a museum. In the good nineteenth-century pseudoscientific tradition, not only were specimens of all African flora and fauna, utility objects, sculptures of ancestors and masks from ethnic groups brought to Belgium, but also complete population groups, who were first exhibited before almost all of them died. Nowadays the museum is a silent, fixated witness to a dark period in Belgian history. Sculptures by the Luba stand there, dazed and perforated by a surfeit of colonial history. Even now, in 2008, many of the archives from the colonial period are still deliberately inaccessible so that the common suspicion of abuse and slavery, maltreatment and exploitation remains only a suspicion. The black, golden heart of Africa is a dark page in Belgian national and colonial history. The geological and cultural wealth of that country was for decades the locus delicti of dehumanized and patriarchal acts whose consequences are still visible in 112
BÁCSBORSÓD, 9 SEPTEMBER 2015
LETTER: TO
Ann Veronica Janssens
Time and time again, I am surprised by the fact that, in an art world influenced by the market, large quantities of art are still being made – art, moreover, that, as the decorum of an interested elite, is transported from one side of the world to the other. Apparently there is a correlation between the socially and politically conservative climate in which we live and the need for ‘tangible’ works of art. Matter matters. The work of art has to be visible and (its content) manageable; it has to be able to operate social sensations and sensors. Does the viewer perhaps have more of a handhold if something is clearly materialized by another (the artist)? Or does the viewer simply lack the courage to experience or to complete the artwork or what is proposed by the artist? Just as the artist has a responsibility towards her own work, something can also be expected – even demanded – of the viewer. What happens between a viewer and an artist is on the order of an informal contract; it is a readiness to take the artwork into consideration. In your work the material mode of an artwork is unravelled, delicately pulverized until the moment when experience gets the upper hand. It is an economy of the intangible in which the visibly absent is clearly present. Light, smoke, sound, refractions and reflections are a few elements in an artistic vocabulary that lends itself more to whispering than to speaking. And what is whispered has to do with the essence of the artwork itself. All elements in your work are well known and easily identified by everyone, but you give them the manifest function of an artwork. When a certain kind of material is taken out of a technical laboratory context, for example, it changes its capacities and capabilities. It withdraws from the logic of technical efficiency to function as a prototype of an artistic enigma. The steel beam from the work ipe 535 almost functions as an observational tool that changes the characteristics of the space in which the work is shown. Usually one would define this work as sculpture, sculpture that moreover relates to the 168
Ann Veronica Janssens Untitled (Blue Glitter), 2015 Installation with blue glitter Variable dimensions Collection S.M.A.K.
Werner Mannaers Anyth_=, 2008 Oil on canvas 60 x 50 cm Private collection
MUNICH, 6 NOVEMBER 2008
LETTER: TO
Werner Mannaers
It was in fact your drawings that introduced me to your pictorial universe. During a visit to your studio I leafed through your hundreds of drawings with fascination, but my restless gaze was actually distracted by several paintings hanging at various levels and placed on the floor in the studio. I saw works I found it difficult to describe or name, but which for some unknown reason have remained in my memory. Soon after I visited you again to test my memory and to acquaint myself better with your work – and its idiom. The same paintings were still generally hanging in the same spot. I was further nourished by your paintings, small drawings and bits of paper, a pile of cassette recorders painted in bright, monochrome colours, the portrait of your mother, jazz, a reminder of a small painting from earlier times, three chairs, Andy Warhol, and a multilayered and much-used universe in which painting is both the participant and the onlooker. Anything. It seemed like everything and nothing. Small gestures, obsessive actions or the repetition of the same and other ideas (pensées). Paintings were turned around and tipped to one side, tentatively exuding a desire. A small vertical painting in particular caught my eye. It was this painting that finally resulted in the exhibition in s.m.a.k. Allow me to describe this work as I remember it. Of course the description is imperfect, like everything else – except for painting, of course. The title suggests that it is an English word which stops after five letters, followed by an underscore and an equal sign: Anyth_=. All or nothing. It is boldly written in a small blank space on the canvas, ready to be painted over. The word becomes a sign of which the meaning evokes a fundamental question – at least for me – about the relationship between painting and reality, about the relevance and meaning of painting today. Somewhere on another ‘flat’ canvas you have written ‘By entering this space I try to understand this world better’. Yet another statement that translates the intention of how the system of painting is related to the anarchy of 213
GHENT, 16 AUGUST 2015
LETTER: TO
Paul Van Gysegem
Not long ago we were sauntering among a number of sculptures in your garden. As you knocked on one of your sculptures, the name Mal Waldron came up. You recalled the memory of that magnificent, elegantly hammering pianist who had been a good friend of yours and with whom you had also frequently shared a stage. Suddenly two things seemed to coincide: the reserved echo of sculpture wove its way through the pioneering work you performed in what I can succinctly describe as the free jazz idiom. Your sculptures in the garden suddenly became intervals, and the garden and the sculptures became an arcade that embraced the artistic universe of Paul Van Gysegem. I read the sculptures of yours that I know as archetypical guises whose weathered and rhythmic surfaces resemble the skin of an unstable body. Diagonal, against the grain, driving forces, that is how I can best describe the sculptures. Not only are they assemblages of found parts; they are also snippets of cultural history, literature, music ‌ The sculptures are unstable grounds that do not obey the conditions of gravity. They are present witnesses that celebrate the imagination, that connect the faculties of sight and hearing. I asked you about the latter of the two when we spoke about scores. In Ghent, for the first time, on an almost square piece of hard paper, I saw a collection of lines, colours, hatchings, nervous pencil traits. Intuitively organized as a landscape or a panorama, with a clear echo of the sculptures I am familiar with. The drawings are indications, open, drawn proposals, directions that can be occupied by sound. I thought of a swarm of bees, or of ants that walk the earth in organized lanes. I thought of Mal Waldron, and I wondered how he would sculpt the drawing in sound, on the keyboard. I wondered about the difference there is, for you, between making an assemblage or a sculpture, and allowing your fingers to saunter over the strings of a double bass. Or is there no difference at all? Just like the drawings (scores), the sculptures are constructed bodies that de314
Paul Van Gysegem Improvisatie voor contrabas en piano, 2016 Drawing, musical score 28.2 x 33.5 cm Private collection
COLOPHON Author: Philippe Van Cauteren Copy-editing: Patrick Lennon Translation: Kate Mayne (Dutch-English), Dirk Verbiest (German-English) Project Coordination: Anna Drijbooms and Jenke Van den Akkerveken Photo Credits: Dirk Pauwels (all images collection S.M.A.K. and exhibition views S.M.A.K., p. 13, p. 21, p. 40, p. 55, p. 106, p. 177, p. 212, p. 305, p. 315, p. 320); Titus Simoens (p. 35); Mirjam Devriendt (p. 65); Henk Delabie (p. 318); Philip Braem (p. 85); Achim K ukulies (p. 166); Huig Bartels (p. 197); Peter Cox (p. 210); Frauke Dendooven (p. 221); A. Schultz (p. 241). Graphic Design: Johan Jacobs Cover: Tim Bisschop Printing and binding: die Keure, Bruges With the support of:
ISBN: 978 94 9267 731 0 D/2017/11922/48 NUR 640 © Hannibal Publishing, 2017 Hannibal Publishing is part of Cannibal Publishing www.hannibalpublishing.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders for all texts, photographs and reproductions. If, however, you feel that you have inadvertently been overlooked, please contact S.M.A.K., Ghent.
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