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RICHARD VENLET

16.04 – 20.06.2009

Dieter Roelstraete thinks about Richard Venlet

The work of Brussels-based artist Richard Venlet (°1964 in Hamilton, Australia) inhabits the interconnecting spaces and adjoing realms of sculpture, art-historical research, exhibition design and architecture; based not so much on collaboration or collaborative practice as such, his installations often incorporate the work of other artists, thus connecting his work with a definite “curatorial turn” in recent art (Carol Bove, Luis Jacob, Goshka Macuga), as well as with an older, more established tradition of interest in strategies of ‘framing’ and display (Mark Dion, Louise Lawler, Haim Steinbach, Fred Wilson) and “institutional critique” (Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser). The implied emphasis in his work on archival sensibilities and issues of contextualization and historicization obviously serves to further complicate the ongoing debate about the limits of authorship and the twin avant-gardist ‘myths’ of authenticity and originality on the one hand, and the sacrosanct autonomy of the work of art on the other.

Such tactics may invite all kinds of high-handed readings – I, for one, immediately start flipping through the pages of Jacques Derrida’s seminal The Truth in Painting from 1978 looking for a savvy quote from his chapter on the “parergon”, the technical term used to describe a “discourse on the limit between the inside and outside of the art object... a discourse on the frame.” [Bear with me, dear reader, in pursuing this personal weakness – but it does have some bearing on the work under consideration. Says Derrida: “the frame is the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning” – the question of the parergon, in other words, is the question of the artwork’s inside and outside, of what belongs to the work of art and what belongs to its context, to its staging. “Par-ergon” literally means: what is attached to the “ergon”, or work. Hence the crucial quandary: “Where does a parergon end. Would any garment be a parergon. G-strings and the like. What to do with absolutely transparent veils.” Mind you, Derrida is describing a painting by Cranach here.]

Yet there are also ample opportunities here for a more lighthearted, light-footed reading, and these are undoubtedly connected to a sense of community. Such a sense of what is common and shared, if only in space, certainly pervaded Venlet’s most ambitious exhibition project in Belgium to date, Paramount Basics (organized at MuHKA in 2002), during which the artist oversaw the transformation of the normally monographic space of the museum into both a play- and meeting ground for many of his peers, colleagues and traveling companions, many of whom are in fact friends. “Participatory art” and “relational aesthetics”, perhaps, but above all testament to the persistence, in art history proper, of a certain “politics of friendship” – the title, as it so happens, of an equally influential philosophical treatise by the same, aforementioned Jacques Derrida... [Both volumes stand side by side on my bookshelf, so I won’t resist the temptation of now also leafing through the latter. Somewhere early on, it is said that “the very work of the political, the properly political act or operation amounts to creating (to producing, to making, etc.) the most friendship possible” – a paraphrase from an early Platonic dialogue, Lysis.]

Let us now forget about Derrida, let us forget about the curatorial, about friendship and community, and turn to the present project instead – a rather more glum affair, given the emphatic centrality of one single artwork, made in the eightteenth century, by an artist who has, obviously, long been dead – and who, moreover, has long been known for his morbid, literally subterranean imagination: Giovanni Batista Piranesi. Covering the gallery floor with a jigsaw of some forty hexagonal wooden units that are in turn covered with brown carpet, Venlet here produces an appropriate architecural setting or frame – the term scenography would seem more apposite if his work wasn’t so radically undramatic, so staunchly anti-theatrical – for the viewer’s appreciation of the exhibition’s sole historical anchor point, the Piranesi drawing that is at the same time merely a footnote or pretext for the actual production of this elaborate environment. [The only other such feature in the exhibition is a publication which the visitor can leaf through; forgive me, dear reader, for experiencing difficulties in banishing any remaining memories of the Derridean parergon.] The exact content of the Piranesi drawing is unknown to me at this time of writing, but I am confidently assuming it will depict some labyrinthine underground cavity full of bridges, staircases, vaults – why, perhaps even smoke-belching machines. It won’t look exactly like the artist’s current rendition of Elisa Platteau’s cave, perhaps, but certain architectural echoes will surely resound nonetheless. One of these echoes may well pertain to one of modernism’s most dependable arch-tropes, the mention of which I have (surprisingly enough) not encountered yet in the scattered writing about Richard Venlet’s art: the grid.

“Structurally, logically, axiomatically, the grid can only be repeated,” said Rosalind Krauss in her groundbreaking work of early post-modern art criticism, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, and in the inevitability of this modular repetition – resembling the modular forms, precisely, of Venlet’s architectural (or curatorial) structuring device – we can locate at least one source of the melancholy that characterizes much of our contemporary culture’s morbid infatuation with a modernity that has long since become “our antiquity.” Piranesi our contemporary, then – and an early prophet of the grid we, the visitors, are led through in the gallery trying to find the work of Richard Venlet.

Dieter Roelstraete