Taking place during Antwerp Art Weekend 2021, GALLERY GALLERY organised a group show curated by Rens Cools. Visitors explored the ideas of proprietary, appropriation and authenticity. The show consisted of a thoughtful selection of works by non-artists giving their unerring point of view on the arts.
A Curator’s Crush: interview with Rens Cools
On the occasion of Visitors, a group show at GALLERY GALLERY During Antwerp Art Weekend, 13 – 16th of May 2021
Why did you name the exhibition - and thus its participants - Visitors?
Because I invited them. In contrast to the previous show at GALLERY GALLERY - A Beggars Banquet - wherein the participants had all asked me if they could do something inside (or making use of) my space, this time I invited every single one of the participants. Not only into GALLERY GALLERY, but, since none of them are, or consider themselves to be, artists, also into the art world at large. I wanted to be their host.
How does this show figure into the overall praxis of GALLERY GALLERY?
Since I am an artist with his own practice myself, I look at art from two different perspectives. As an artist and a curator. My artistic practice has its specific themes and methods that, of course, inform my curatorial practice. Everything that has been brought together in this show are works that caught me as an artist first and foremost. Not only because I liked what was (being) done but even more so because I wish I could have done it myself. As such the things I wish I had done as an artist are the exact things I present as a curator in this exhibition.
You’ve been collecting this kind of non-artist artworks for quite some time now. Why mount this show at this particular moment?
The show would have been presented a year ago already were it not for the by now all too well- known reasons. I wanted to present this specific pet project of mine during Antwerp Art Weekend because the theme of this show, which is of course shared by the works it consists of, has a lot to do with art itself in a self-reflective way. To present it then during an event in which art is pre- sented as a tour and people have a lot of expectations and presuppositions seemed like the right timing for this kind of meaningful friction.
Can you delve deeper into the theme (or themes) that binds this show together?
Every work deals with the notion of art itself but in a very humorous way. A lot of self-reflective art is even more pretentious than the art it reflects on but these works manage to do it in a no-non- sense style while at the same time addressing, maybe even undermining, that pretentiousness. ART THOUGHTZ (2010-2012) by Hennessy Youngman (US), for example, the work I have known the longest but added last to the selection of this show, deals with the idea of becoming an artist in a very matter-of-factly style by incorporating street slang and a pop cultural frame of reference in the dissection of artistic concepts that, at the time, when I was at art school, sort of baffled me. Here were these videos I found on YouTube that dealt with the concepts I was supposed to be studying and incorporating but explaining them in a way that actually “said something to me about my life”.
That no-nonsense, bottoms-up sensibility towards art is also explicit in your own practice. Was that something you missed during your education as an artist?
Yes. Let me give another example. When I studied acting at RITCS in Brussels, I encountered Sil Verdickt (BE) who gave me his Theatre Bingo (2014) card whereupon he had written down all the clichés of student theatre in a very off-the-cuff manner. Here was a guy, aspiring to become a technician - something that is not usually looked upon as the creative part of theatre performance - who had an insight into the art form that most of the people who were about to go on stage seemed to lack. And he made a bingo card out of it! This kind of humor is art. I kept that card in my pocket for the last seven years.
Were all the people you approached for this show easily persuaded to take part?
They were, although some of them were not so easily tracked down. Bob Jacobs (NL), whose All Hail Jan De Cock (2015) I also had stumbled upon on YouTube, seemed to have vanished from the internet. In his video this young-looking boy, who was, as it turned out, sixteen at the time, gives a long and seemingly ironical but enthusiastic monologue about Belgian artist Jan De Cock and how great it was to have him as an unexpected teacher. It is very clever, especially for someone that age. During my research I found out there had been a Brussels art school that because of renovations had been relocated in the ateliers of Jan De Cock at the time of the filming of this laudatory rant. When I watched the video again I noticed the boy mentions the name of a teacher and by combining this name with the name of the school I had finally, after all those years, found a lead. Youngman and Jacobs are the only artists I have not met but the whole show was arranged solely through online communication. Which, I’m sure, also says something.
The last two artists you met around the same time. But their works seem quite antithetical to each other?
In a way yes, but more in method than in result. Diego Giovannettone (IT) I met when we were living in the same student house where he was always video calling in the kitchen because his room had no Wi-Fi. One day he showed me his Tumblr page where he had painstakingly paired images out of the grand pictorial tradition of Western civilization with stills and screenshots from gay pornography. The obsessive nature behind this collection intrigued me as did the conflicting and mutually infecting desires it seemed to showcase. From the 450 pairings he sent me for this exhibition, I made a selection of around 40 and asked him for a title which became Iconography of Scopophilia (2021). The title already in a way alluding to the game that is being played.
Denis Maksimov’s (RU) text On the condition of an exhibition (2021) is the only work that was commissioned by you especially for Visitors. Why add this new work to the older ones?
I met Denis not long after I had left the house I had shared with Diego. We had both enrolled in a post-graduate degree in Artistic Research and what was interesting about Denis was how he did not make visual art himself but, as the only one there, participated in the course as an academic. His texts were always heavily discussed and had big pro- and opponents. To me, they seemed to be an ironic and even satiric takedown of the common curatorial and exhibition bullshit text but the way he presented them made it unclear if they were, indeed, ironical or if they were genuine (not unlike Bob Jacobs’ video). This quite often goes for all writing on art. Especially in International Art English. That is why I asked him to write a new text based on the premises of this show. As an ourobouros biting itself in the tail.
Interview conducted by Michaël Van Remoortere.