Jan De Cock: Denkmal 87

Jan De Cock’s first extended installation in the United States opened May 26th at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton. The installation quickly became a more elaborate project than De Cock had originally planned. He first set foot in the space, approximately 60 hours before the show was scheduled to open, intending only to re-configure his installation from last November’s NY Art Book Fair for a new location. That installation consisted of 25 ‘denkmal’ (these are minimalist wooden forms that intentionally evoke the sculpture of Donald Judd) along with potted kentia palms and copies of his artist’s book. But when De Cock looked at the space, and then at the books on the shelves, the art on display and the many other items in storage, he quickly decided to make a more elaborate site-specific installation, something more akin to the ‘occupying the museum’ projects that he has previously made at London’s Tate Modern and other European venues. (His next such piece, which he is currently planning along with curators Peter Galassi and Roxana Marcoci, is scheduled to open at MoMA in January).

De Cock selected books, photos, and objects from the shelves of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and, by arranging them next to each other, stacking them up, placing them on the denkmal, in display windows and in vitrines, and, by taking pictures of these temporary arrangements made collages that incorporate not only book covers and objects, but, through shadows and reflections, the real space in which they were made. He took the photos on Thursday, printed, matted and framed them on Friday, and on Saturday the show was installed and opened to the public. The process was similar to that of past installations, but more fast-paced, spontaneous and improvisatory.

As Jan determined how he was going to create the installation he set his assistant to recording every book on the shop’s shelves. This document, which ran to 30 pages when complete, is for De Cock what a color palette is to a more traditional artist--raw materials from which art is made. The books and other items he selected to use in the photos and installation all represent aspects of De Cock’s own aesthetic and working methods. Some of the choices relate straightforwardly: Judd books (De Cock’s minimalist approach to the sculptural elements), a Herbert Matter photo of a Brancusi sculpture (stacking of objects as method of making art), an Eisenstein book, a Warhol Cinema catalogue from Centre Pompidou (montage and artistic appropriation of filmic idiom), Friedlander photos (incorporation of shadows, reflections and other traces of the photographer’s presence into the photo), Rodchenko, El Lissitsky, Malevich books (Jan telescopes photographic space in his images to create spare, geometric compositions very much in the mode of these artists). Other connections are more conceptual. De Cock placed two interior design books prominently: Eliot Elisofon’s ‘Hollywood Style’, a book showing the interior spaces of the movie stars, and another volume, even more lavish, showing rooms in the palaces of Versailles. However garish these spaces may seem to contemporary eyes, they nonetheless show how a sensibility expresses itself through the ‘installation’ of art and objects in a given space.

The 30 photos De Cock made as part of the installation are available individually, each is an edition of one. For more information about the exhibition please contact us.