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VALéRIE MANNAERTS

15 APR - 21 MAY 2011
OPENING THURSDAY 14 APR, 6-9pm


Many things vie for our attention in Valérie Mannaerts’ first solo show in a Brussels private gallery since 2004, and most of these are things indeed. And what vies for our attention in these things in turn is, precisely, their thingness, their serene awareness of being things, rather than mere objects, as such: fascinating expressions of the artist’s evolving mastery of sculptural form and material intelligence. Some of the works in the show will be familiar to those viewers who have been fortunate enough to see Mannaerts’ magnificent exhibitions at Extra City in Antwerp last year (Blood Flow) and at de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam earlier this year (Diamond Dancer), on the occasion of which a comprehensive catalogue was published by Sternberg Press – the first major publishing project since A Prior magazine built one of its Documenta 12 special issues around Mannaerts’ practice. In the 2007-2009 period, the artist also exhibited at Etablissement d’en face in Brussels and took part in high-profile group exhibitions at Wiels in Brussels and in Mechelen, in an appropriately titled exhibition (organized by the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKA) called The Thing – all of which set out the contours and defined the premises of her current interrogation of the prodigiously heterogeneous traditions of sculpture. One question that has been central to this process of expansion and redefinition may appear slightly abstract, even technical at first (or profoundly philosophical, if you consider that none other than Jacques Derrida has written a whole book – The Truth in Painting – about it), and concerns the craft’s limits and liminal possibilities: do draperies, frames, pedestals, plinths, screens and similarly contextualizing devices and dramatizing effects ‘belong’ to sculpture, or do they instead mark the boundaries that set the work of art apart from the proverbial rest of the world? Can an artwork be fully autonomous, i.e. truly a Ding an sich, or is it always chained to the world of human experience and ‘in’ it with us – a Ding für uns? Mannaerts has used the spectral language of genies, ghosts and phantoms to describe her work before (in particular in relation to the key work that is Rare Organ (ghost)), and I suspect that what haunts this highly specific terminology is precisely the suggestion of the ghost’s autonomy, its discrete physical reality as a revenant, as some-thing that always comes back to haunt both us and the spaces of art. In this regard, I believe it helps to imagine her exhibitions enveloped in silence and darkness, at dusk or at night, in a deserted museum or gallery: a gathering of things – ‘thing’ itself is old Norse for gathering – that start talking to each other and come to muted life the very minute the lights are switched off and the last human being has left the building.
Any mention of ‘hauntology’, to dust off another fortuitous Derridean term, will inevitably lead us back to the (admittedly slightly tired) discussion of das Unheimliche or the uncanny – that which, in Freud’s celebrated formulation (actually borrowed from Ernst Jensch), consists of the programmatic confusion between animate beings and inanimate objects, of the “doubt whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.” To be sure, there are plenty of examples of such uncanniness to be found within Mannaert’s work, but I would like to focus on one instance in particular, one involving a living (though not necessarily ‘animate’) being – a cactus. I am drawn to this work in part because a couple of months ago, I had the good fortune of seeing an exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York titled Chaos and Classicism 1918-1936, focusing on the disorder and subsequent return to order that characterized French, German and Italian art in the interbellum, a small subchapter of which was built around the cactus craze which allegedly held some parts of the European bohème in thrall for a number of years (see, for instance, Felice Casorati’s Prinkly Pear Cactus from 1928). A very odd thing indeed – but who could be surprised? Isn’t the cactus the closest that plant life has ever come to approximating the irreducible thingness of art? It certainly is the one “apparently animate being” that is able of raising doubts as to whether it is really alive or not – the one thing that truly deserves the services of a sculpture posing as a piece of furniture, as is the case in Diamond Dancer (pink recipient with cactus).
This willful confusion or masquerade (a word I’m not sure Valérie Mannaerts will like, but with a title like Diamond Dancer I’m just placing a bet), in conclusion, tempts us to turn to what is perhaps the most puzzling piece in the exhibition: image or object? Painting or sculpture? Folding screen or picture of a folding screen? Trompe-l’oeil or trompe-l’intellect? This work too has a New York story behind it…


Dieter Roelstraete