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Jan de Cock: Denkmal
Belgian wunderkind Jan De Cock's latest publication is a slowly unfolding, thought-provoking masterwork that reads much like his renowned sculptural installations--which the artist sees as monuments to Modernism, hence the title Denkmal. Winner of the Plantin-Moretus prize, it uses structural challenges to the book format to offer an entirely new reading experience. Its large format, variety of papers, special cover treatment and 632 pages conspire to reveal a dense web of images and ideas that cross-reference not only De Cock's own increasingly admired oeuvre but also the entire structure of history into which it is read. Capitalizing on the sequential nature of the book, which the artist likens to film, De Cock guides the reader through this volume much in the way a viewer would experience his sculpture. He presents to the world his Trojan Horse: a book that will certainly be picked up for its cover, but will also draw you into its world of mysteries.
632 pages, Hardcover
First published October 15, 2006
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January 16, 2023
Designed by Belgian artist Jan de Cock to accompany his 2005 “Denkmal” installation at Tate Modern in London, this thick, heavy book is a bibliophile’s dream that brings together his work of the previous two years, focussing particularly on the Tate show. It includes many photographs of visitors walking around the Tate, looking at his installations. These installations are highly architectural, being composed on the basis of complex grids within a strictly limited palette of materials and forms: chipboard panels assembled into De Stijl-like functionless buildings; banal office furniture arranged to make arid, rigidly orthogonal, vaguely oppressive interiors; a colour palette of deliberately characterless mauves and greens.
The book is a compendium that includes lists of numbers, carefully paginated layouts of tiny random illustrations, full-page spreads showing photographs of all kinds (de Cock’s own installations, remote forests, the island of Capri, Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House in Utrecht, etc.). This configuration challenges any attempt to read it in a conventional way. If James Joyce were alive now, perhaps “Finnegans Wake” might have been like this: lots of pictures interspersed with fragmented texts using different fonts in different colours and sizes that run into one another in a clash of styles and modes. Some pages are even left uncut, requiring the use of a knife.
This complex structuring of the book as a piece of art in its own right prevents us (intentionally) from any attempt to read, logically, the essays by Tim Martin, Kirstie Skinner, John Welchman, Jon Wood and Wouter Davidts. Instead, as we browse them we fleetingly glimpse fragments of writing and notice trigger-words like “Camus” “containment”, and “San Sebastian” or technical information detailing the manufacture of plywood. At times we think we've found a structure; we try to follow it, only to lose ourselves in an alternative structure that suddenly offers itself.
Just as the book’s graphical aspects make use of overlaid, intersecting grids to orchestrate this wandering-through-space process, other intellectual grids and frames of reference (used by de Cock’s critical commentators to situate his work in various cultural contexts) are also shifted and superimposed by the artist himself, who cuts them up and mixes them with the graphics in seemingly random ways. The result is a book that's impossible to “read”; only fragments of ideas or images can be perceived, and even then they are always contaminated by other thought processes and perceptions appearing from somewhere else.
Philosophically, the message is that all forms of systematisation and order, whether grids or thought-patterns, are artifices that fail. The bearer of this message is a rather special book that is identifiable only by its code: ISBN 9080842427. The art market, and fashion brands like Comme des Garçons, have been investing significantly in this artist; hopefully his increasing celebrity will not blunt his edge as thinker, artisan, innovator. Bursting with inspirational visual and critical ideas that interact and renew themselves, such a book is bound to intrigue and stimulate anyone who has a visual perception of the world.
The book is a compendium that includes lists of numbers, carefully paginated layouts of tiny random illustrations, full-page spreads showing photographs of all kinds (de Cock’s own installations, remote forests, the island of Capri, Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House in Utrecht, etc.). This configuration challenges any attempt to read it in a conventional way. If James Joyce were alive now, perhaps “Finnegans Wake” might have been like this: lots of pictures interspersed with fragmented texts using different fonts in different colours and sizes that run into one another in a clash of styles and modes. Some pages are even left uncut, requiring the use of a knife.
This complex structuring of the book as a piece of art in its own right prevents us (intentionally) from any attempt to read, logically, the essays by Tim Martin, Kirstie Skinner, John Welchman, Jon Wood and Wouter Davidts. Instead, as we browse them we fleetingly glimpse fragments of writing and notice trigger-words like “Camus” “containment”, and “San Sebastian” or technical information detailing the manufacture of plywood. At times we think we've found a structure; we try to follow it, only to lose ourselves in an alternative structure that suddenly offers itself.
Just as the book’s graphical aspects make use of overlaid, intersecting grids to orchestrate this wandering-through-space process, other intellectual grids and frames of reference (used by de Cock’s critical commentators to situate his work in various cultural contexts) are also shifted and superimposed by the artist himself, who cuts them up and mixes them with the graphics in seemingly random ways. The result is a book that's impossible to “read”; only fragments of ideas or images can be perceived, and even then they are always contaminated by other thought processes and perceptions appearing from somewhere else.
Philosophically, the message is that all forms of systematisation and order, whether grids or thought-patterns, are artifices that fail. The bearer of this message is a rather special book that is identifiable only by its code: ISBN 9080842427. The art market, and fashion brands like Comme des Garçons, have been investing significantly in this artist; hopefully his increasing celebrity will not blunt his edge as thinker, artisan, innovator. Bursting with inspirational visual and critical ideas that interact and renew themselves, such a book is bound to intrigue and stimulate anyone who has a visual perception of the world.
Displaying 1 of 1 review