Jan De Cock
"Jan De Cock" by Joseph R. Wolin, Summer 2008, pp. 85-6
A dense and complex floor-to-ceiling installation of photographs, wall labels and fibreboard constructions that resemble Donald Judd boxes, the Belgian artist Jan De Cock’s American debut exhibition spilled out from a large gallery at MOMA into the adjacent entryway and corridor. Many of the images document the museum: not only its iconic collection, but also backstage—the conservation labs, theatre, even a page from the official website. Nearly always fragmentary, De Cock’s images imply an oblique and transitory view. A large diptych of MOMA’s installation of Brancusi sculptures, for instance, features a doubled image of Mlle Pogany at its centre—cropped by the right edge in the left-hand photo, hugging the left side of the right-hand one—as if it represented two frames from a panning shot in a movie.
The images of the museum hung alongside scenes of urban Buffalo and suburban Long Island, rephotographed plates from art-history books and views of previous exhibitions by the artist in European institutions. A set of off-kilter photos of a 2006 show at the Haus Konstructiv in Zurich, with framed works skirting empty expanses of wall, echo the MOMA installation itself. Perhaps these were found in MOMA’s library or curatorial files, but, in any event, their presence on the walls makes them part of the museum’s institutional history, and, in turn, that institutional history part of the artist’s own. This expanded (and expanding) field of endlessly multiplying cross-references seemed even to subsume the 19th-century works hanging in grids on the walls of the museum’s photography galleries, seen through open doorways from within De Cock’s show.
The hanging of the minimalist constructions played off the gallery’s architecture as well as the arrangement of the framed photos, sometimes even obscuring them. One sculpture underscored the metal letters inscribing museum donors’ names high up on the wall, while the largest one, which suggested both interlocking office furniture and a complicated child’s playhouse, rested on the floor, obstructing visitors’ circulation around a partition wall. The labels bore diagrams and extensive lists that itemized each element of the installation with names, dates, times, locations and two or three overlapping numbering systems, yet attempting to analyze the logic of the exhibition by way of this hermetic and almost parodically convoluted data seemed not to provide much usable information beyond identifying the things pictured.
Denkmal, the general title of this and all of De Cock’s installations, means “monument” in German, but in the artist’s native Flemish can be construed as something like “a mould for thinking.” We might imagine the MOMA show as a walk-in model of the artist’s mind, at work on this very commission. The project at hand, in the form of photographs of the museum, predominates, flitting across the walls in clustered fragments like thoughts, and occasionally haunted by memories of previous experiences and more random images farther afield. Solid and familiar structures articulate the arrangement of all of these, while sometimes also impeding our apprehension of them, while an overly elaborate regime of classification fails to adequately make sense of it all. This is your brain on art.
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