GALLERY GALLERY

Chronicle of a relentless Crisis
On ten years of GALLERY GALLERY by Rens Cools

I. A False Start

The story of GALLERY GALLERY knows many false starts. The first one takes place during Rens Cools’ education in Fine Arts at Sint Lucas Antwerp. Intrigued by the spaces wherein the work of art becomes art – thus, by everything that happens around the work itself – Rens hits a Degree Zero of some sorts in his practice when he eliminates as much of these external factors as possible. The next logical step in this process turns out to be a caring interference with the works of others. At first, Rens builds his own space within the school’s structure where he can exhibit the works of his fellow students, but soon afterwards he breaks out of this structure by mutating it into an online project. A performance taking place in the confines of the school is livestreamed, making it accessible for an external audience. Along the same vein footage is broadcast of a webcam in front of which students can position and hence exhibit their own works. Early, tentative experiments with a playful tinkering with other people’s works.

A little trip abroad is undertaken when Rens plays the character of caricatural gallerist of a performance duo at Kultuurfaktorij Monty in Antwerp and De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam. Another show, consisting entirely of GIFs, is curated but then the curtain falls over this first (false) start of what would become GALLERY GALLERY. We have to wait until 2018 for the project to take a new (equally false) start.

II. Intermezzo

After having completed his education at Sint Lucas Antwerp, Rens goes to Brussels to study Drama – Acting at the RITCS. Displeased by the conservative interpretation of the courses, he leaves again for Antwerp and, with great furore, opens a pop-up exhibition to celebrate his homecoming. He also successfully completes a new Advanced Master’s degree during which he, unbeknownst for now, would meet the first artist he would later exhibit. During his year back in Antwerp, Rens would start his practice of embodied identities which would become the other branch of his artistic output. Wrecked by the intense processes of these identities and somewhat disillusioned by the artworld (and despondent of his own place therein), Rens, after completing his degree, returns to his hometown called Loenhout, where he combines working at his parents’ tree nursery with a job in a factory during the weekends. Numbed by this life in the hinterland but in possession of some financial means as a result of all the hard work, he decides once again to return to Antwerp and spends his evenings scrolling through
the internet in search of a location suitable as both a studio and exhibition space.

The ground floor space he eventually buys, is in a dilapidated state, and for the first couple of years Rens, out of necessity, has to alternate exhibitions with renovations. Nevertheless, and in spite of all this, GALLERY GALLERY had finally found a foothold. After years of wandering, in 2018 the project would come home at Schoenstraat 58 in the Antwerp district of Borgerhout.

III. A False Start II

Owning a space does not mean you know how to fill it. For the first couple of exhibitions in the new building, Rens had to address the only network available to him at the time: his friends and acquaintances. Calling these first shows another false start is in a certain sense an attempt at attesting how these works are not yet fully attuned to the core values that GALLERY GALLERY would later articulate for itself but that were already dormantly present in the early experiments. These core values, whose formulation Rens was still working out for himself, had to go against the grain of everything more traditional galleries stood for. Although one could say “making do with what is at hand” is as much a part of the DNA of GALLERY GALLERY and this is unmistakably evidenced in this restart of sorts.

The first artist invited to take over the new space in 2018 was William Ludwig Lutgens with whom Rens had done the Master of Research in Art and Design. Please Play by the Rules consisted of an assembly of playful protest signs spelling out the title word for word, lined up in such a way that their ominous message was clearly visible for the hanged teddy bear that apparently had ignored this pleading warning. In retrospect, the title seems especially meaningful in the context of GALLERY GALLERY’s trajectory that was still to come.

Even though the second show also exhibited work from former fellow students, conceptually one can already find more connection with what GALLERY GALLERY would become. With Twin Flames – a title alluding to the astrological equivalent of the soulmate or twin soul – Mathias MU and Yasmin Van der Rauwelaert brought their DIY tattoo parlour to Schoenstraat 58. Tattoos, furniture, costumes and the hairdos of both artists and curator; everything in this total installation was of own making and design. In the span of the three days the parlour was open for business, some twenty hand-poked tattoos were set.

The last show of this restart was by an artist who was already a bit more renowned at the time. Philippe Van Wolputte, well- known for his urban in-situ installations and street interventions, was looking for a space for his next exploit and found Rens through a mutual acquaintance. The two artists bonded easily over their shared scepsis towards the art world, particularly its more bourgeois pretentions, and as a result the two of them went looking for the bric-à-brac materials Van Wolputte typically uses for his installations; from the neighbourhood DIY stores to stuff that lay discarded on the side of the road. Everything they found in combination with the rubble of the first round of renovations of the building would be turned into an installation consisting of a long tunnel. The m’as-tu-vu-factor of most gallery openings would be thematised by forcing the attending public to crawl through this tunnel if they wanted to feast upon the free liquor that is mandatory on most openings. Having reached the consumptions, the artist would take a picture from a hidden position. This picture could later be used as the personalised cover image of the publication that coincided with this one-night-only exhibition.

It Takes One To Know One by Phillipe Van Wolputte marks the exhaustion of the original network of friends and acquaintances and thus, for the next era in its existence, GALLERY GALLERY would have to expand.

IV. A Proper Start (that once more would turn out to be false)

With Structural Film n°58 [...] by Evelin Brosi & Elvis Bonier, anagrammatic pseudonyms of one and the same artist, GALLERY GALLERY seems to finally embark on its proper trajectory. The lion’s share of the core values that would be written down in the near future are already manifested here. Even the search for the artist behind the pseudonyms can be thought of as exemplary for what was yet to come. Intrigued by the constellation of interconnected aliases, Rens, in hopes of meeting the man himself, ends up at a lecture at M HKA only to encounter an actor hired by the artist. At wit’s end, he starts a correspondence with one of the pseudonyms on Instagram which at last would result in their collaboration. After having signed a contract, also exhibited in the show, Rens spends the whole of the Antwerp Art Weekend in his darkened space, clicking 6000 times per hour
on a computer mouse, hence dragging projections of four-letter words that are banned on YouTube across the wall in front of him. Every missed click equals a minute of closure during the next Antwerp Art Weekend. The institutional critique that lies at the basis of Evelin Brosi & Elvis Bonier’s work, would leave lasting traces in the next projects that would be developed and would more and more clearly carry Rens’ own signature.

Ironically, the rapids in which GALLERY GALLERY would get caught soon are the result of a complete standstill.
But before this, Rens first still invited The Shape Shifts, the graduation show of the Master of Research in Art & Design at his alma mater, to take place in the building in 2019. Even though the works themselves didn’t fit in with the project, the way they were presented, sort of did. One by one, the works were taken out of a constructed depot space, to be activated in the main room only to be brought back to make space for the next piece.

A few months later, the world shut down completely because of the corona crisis. While everybody, including the undersigned, used the first lockdown to drink themselves into oblivion, Rens put the time that had been freed up to good use by finishing the renovations of the building that had been in his possession for two years now. He needed to make the building ready for the ever more ambitious projects that were to follow during what turned out to be the heyday of GALLERY GALLERY.

V. 2020-2021: Annus Mirabilis

Where up until now GALLERY GALLERY had restricted the timespan of their events to
a weekend or a single evening in hopes of concentrating the audience’s attention,
the next project after the forced closure lasted for the whole season. A Man Sternly Clearing His Throat by Oscar Hugal consisted of an audio installation that played a recording of the act described in the title with intervals of one minute. Except for the evening of its opening, billed as a pre-reopening, the installation could only be experienced during the other exhibitions of the season. The results of this were twofold: on the one hand, the audience got surprised by a sporadic sound whose source they could not immediately recognise, on the other hand, the artists participating in future events were forced to take into account this sound that would slightly unbalance their own works. For the first time, an overarching vision on GALLERY GALLERY’s trajectory, one in which all projects are lined up in an incessant stream of crises, presents itself. Every project presented in the year 2021 resumed themes from its predecessors in an attempt to deepen them by undermining them. The criticism GALLERY GALLERY wanted to present in its approach gained its weight through its embodiment of the project itself, but nevertheless remained playful as a constant ad hoc reaction to what had been shown only a minute ago.

Since the official reopening had to be postponed due to the second lockdown, the year of 2021 started with the launch of the first edition of TIM magazine. The love themed issue was not coincidentally presented on Valentine’s Day. The programme of this presentation was put together by the editorial team in a week’s notice, after the covid measures had been partially lifted. For GALLERY GALLERY this presentation was an ideal occasion to warm up audiences old and new for the projects that were to follow.

The long-awaited and more than once postponed reopening finally took place in March with A Beggars Banquet. As the first show officially curated by Rens in the finished space, Banquet was assembled by going through the unsolicited portfolios Rens had received in preceding years. Impressed with the chutzpah necessary

to send out one’s own work in hopes of finding a place to show it and recognising his own hunger in theirs, Rens contacted those artists whose work met the core values he had by then finally known how to formulate.

They are: (post)conceptual, performative, time-based, ephemeral, intangible, in-situ, distributive, multidisciplinary and participatory. He invited each one of them to take part in a group show with the above-mentioned title already chosen, thematising as such the dependency between gallerists and artists, which oftentimes turns the latter into beggars. With one exception from Loenhout, all the selected artists had studied at Sint Lucas Antwerp, which emphasised the as yet still local character of the space. This local disposition would be definitively shaken off with the next show.

The second group show of the year, Visitors, extended the pool of participants far beyond national boundaries: the creators of the works came from five different countries. Where Rens as a curator had reached out to artists through their mendicant letters, for this show he no longer needed them to make up his mind about what is and is not art. To prove this, he selected ‘works’ from non-artists and did not hesitate to mold them into something that was more coherent with his own requirements, therefore blemishing their authenticity. The tombola ticket he remembered being passed around by a technician during his time at the RITCS was, for example, redesigned and the press release he had commissioned by a crazed academic was pushed far beyond the borders of the intelligible. At GALLERY GALLERY artist and curator had finally merged into one.

And yet, the next two shows were once again on invitation. Swan Song by Alexey Shlyk & Ben Van den Berghe can be considered the antipode of Twin Flames. Both are total installations by artist duos invited to take over the space. Cabinet of Hearts by Che Go Eun, a window sticker visible throughout the summer, was a variation on the installation by Oscar Hugal. Visible from the street, the window was a bridge between two seasons and, especially when illuminated at night, also referred to the curator’s absence during those months. The lights are on, but there is no one home.

VI. Expansion, explosion, implosion

GALLERY GALLERY’s last exploit during 2021 was its first painters’ exhibition, however, without showing any paintings whatsoever. For Why are we still painting? Rens moderated a panel discussion between four painters who were asked to formulate an answer to the question of the title. Starting from an honest interest in why someone would still choose to work with paint and turpentine nowadays when so many other mediums are at hand, the moderator annexed the respondents into his own work of art. The lack of a definite answer (to him at least), made the discussion surrounding this subject almost into an autonomous work of art. The audiovisual recording of this conversation was GALLERY GALLERY’s first online work of art since its nomadic existence. The big difference being the unmistakable signature of Rens himself. After a year like no other, GALLERY GALLERY went into 2022 with the same impetus. In Toogpraat, Loek Grootjans was invited to rehash the stories he had told during a guest lecture at Sint Lucas Antwerp, in a setting that would reinforce the fantastical nature of most of these stories. Even though at the time Rens had been impressed by his rhetorical skills, Grootjans had mostly remained in his memory because of the undeniable suspicion that most of these stories were at least partially made-up. This practice of freely mixing the performative with the fantastical and using language as the means for making art still intrigued Rens ten years later, even when he had established a similar practice of his own. In a meticulously reconstructed bar interior, with the curator himself as a bartender, the fiction of these stories was brought to the surface. The effect was enhanced in the video recording, which was once again put online and in which images upholding the illusion of realism were interchanged with a shot showing the fabricated construction of this performance.

A third big group show was set up in collaboration with another curatorial project: Multiplied by Susan Kuijpers. An open call was sent out in search for artists willing to explore the multiple along the lines of the by now known core values of GALLERY GALLERY. Through this open call, the curation took place even before any selection was made. 67 submissions were received and the final selection of 9 participants was once more outspokenly international. The selection aimed to consider the idea of the multiple as broadly as possible and was deliberately conceptual in nature. With editions running from 5 up until a million and even a multiple that could be reproduced infinitely, another common trope of the art world lent itself all too easily to subversion, without losing sight of a democratic intent and easy accessibility. Once again, the liquor that no opening can avoid was conceptually rethought and new doorbells were put in place symbolising the new artists that had found a home here. Another Degree Zero was rubbed up against when even pumpkins and T-shirts were elevated to the status of art object through the autograph of one of the participants.

The final GALLERY GALLERY group show will moonlight as a retrospective of the past ten years. Of course, it will be a retrospective with a twist, on the occasion of which this publication will appear. GALLERY GALLERY invites all 50 artists it had the pleasure to work with up until now to nominate a new name for the ultimate group show. With EXPONENTIAL GROWTH, its network of artists and their audiences will burst at the seams, fatally undermining GALLERY GALLERY’s original conception as a Trojan horse of the art world by making it succumb to its own success. The ironic posture that started this whole project, will turn out to be unsustainable. New roads will have to be discovered.

The final event of GALLERY GALLERY as we have known it, will place on June 17th, 2022. Not with a bang but a whimper. will be the climactic apotheosis of a ten-year trajectory and of course it will end once more tongue very much in cheek. What the future will bring, has yet to be determined, but what we do know is this: the future will only be possible by once again undermining everything that has been before.

written down by Michaël Van Remoortere
26/05/22