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22/1/2008

Jan De Cock

The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA, New York

Curated by Roxana Marcoci

For his first museum exhibition in the United States, Belgian artist Jan De Cock has conceived a floor-to-ceiling photographic and sculptural installation in response to The Museum of Modern Art's collection, Roy and Niuta Titus 1 Theater, library, conservation labs, and architecture. De Cock's installation is titled Denkmal, from the German word for "monument." However, in the artist's native Flemish the expression incorporates two meanings—denk, which signifies "'think," and mal, which translates as "mold." For De Cock, a denkmal is a mold for thinking.

The number in Denkmal 11 refers to the Museum's location at 11 West 53 Street. The exhibition is the starting point for De Cock's American Odyssey, an ambitious yearlong project initiated to document the country's landmark monuments. Informed by experimental European cinema, chiefly by Jean-Luc Godard's collage film Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), De Cock's installation offers a kaleidoscopic view into the lineages of modernism through his own interdisciplinary lens. The artist shot the pictures with two cameras (an analog Sinar and a digital Hasselblad) serially and from different angles, in a filmic manner. The results are straight photographs and photomontages.

De Cock juxtaposes the works of artists ranging from Constantin Brancusi to Barnett Newman and from Edward Hopper to Donald Judd with images culled from the history of photography, architecture, and film in his signature encyclopedic style. Central to the project is the artist's use of repetitive framing devices, extreme close-ups, and fragmentation, and the inclusion of the black strip of film dividing photographic frames, which allows him to present a picture from a dual perspective: both the right side of the left-hand frame and the left side of the right-hand frame are visible within the same image. De Cock's freely associative approaches to image-making and nonlinear display seem to ask, "What is the most important thing that remains: the images or a way of looking?" Constituted as a potentially endless atlas of pictures within pictures, Denkmal 11 underscores the idea that there is no closure or definitiveness in the interpretation of the history of modern art.

The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography.

The exhibition is supported by the Society of Friends of Belgium in America.

Image: Jan De Cock
Denkmal 25, Haus Konstruktiv, Selnaustrasse 25, Zürich, 2006. Fig. 0-028
Chromogenic color print, 22.4 x 15.7 inches (57 x 40 cm)
© Photo Atelier Jan De Cock
Courtesy Galerie Fons Welters and Luis Campaña Gallery

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The Age of Chevalier
January 24–March 8, 2008

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For more than a decade, from 1991 to 2003, Pierre Chevalier presided over the fiction department he established at ARTE, the premier French-German television company. In that time, Chevalier was responsible for more than 350 international productions or coproductions, a staggering number that is all the more remarkable for the extraordinary quality and diversity of what was made. The Age of Chevalier marked a renaissance in French cinema and television, heralding the arrival of a daring new wave of French filmmakers—including Laurent Cantet, Claire Denis, Pascale Ferran, Cédric Klapisch, and Sébastien Lifshitz—and demonstrating an unparalleled commitment to filmmakers from developing countries, particularly former French colonies, including Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Chad), Rithy Panh (Cambodia), Ghassan Salhab (Lebanon), and Abderrahmane Sissako (Mauritania). Moreover, French masters like Catherine Breillat, Patrice Chéreau, Philippe Garrel, Benoît Jacquot, and André Téchiné made some of their finest work for ARTE during this period, as did international directors like Hal Hartley (USA), Chantal Akerman (Belgium), João César Monteiro (Portugal), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan), Romuald Karmakar (Germany), Pedro Costa (Portugal), Robert Wilson (USA), and Lars von Trier (Denmark). This exhibition features approximately thirty fiction features and short films produced by ARTE under Pierre Chevalier's aegis, including eight New York premieres.

Abderrahmane Sissako introduces his film Waiting for Happiness on January 24, and, as part of Modern Mondays, Pascale Ferran discusses her adaptation of Lady Chatterley on January 28.

For press inquiries, please contact Kim Donica at 212/708-9752 or kim_donica@moma.org

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