Nick Lodgers: I WOULD PREFER NOT TO
image: (c) M HKA
This exhibition brings together various instances of refusal by artists to play by the implicit rules of the art world game. Sometimes it is a weariness, and other times it is a more blatant antipathy, and yet other times the conditions by which the disavowal takes place is much more than a simple disinterest. Absence as practice appears throughout recent art history, defining key moments in the work of Bas Jan Ader, Maurizio Cattelan, Thierry De Cordier, Marcel Duchamp, David Hammons, Jef Geys, Cady Noland, Panamerenko, Laurie Parsons, and Charlotte Posenenske, whose works appear together for the first time in this exhibition about denouncement from the context, culture, and place of art.
If participation marks a mode of production, this grouping of artists is explicit in saying no, resisting that capitalist tendency toward production, and even participation more broadly. In the early 1920s, French-American artist Marcel Duchamp—one of the great disrupters of 20th century art—declared that he would move away from art in order to focus his full attention on chess. While Duchamp might have been tired of his position within the avant-garde, this declaration was nevertheless untrue, as he continued to make artwork, albeit in secret, until the end of his life. Duchamp’s aversion to the social and commercial side of art, and his resistance to engage, marks a key early moment in the practice of anti-art, explored in this exhibition.
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader was a performance and conceptual artist whose final piece, a 1975 journey around the Atlantic Ocean in a small sailboat, left the artist lost at sea. His disappearance, and presumed death, not only conflate the space of art and life, but that of art and death. Jan Ader’s final performance was both presumably inadvertent and tragic.
In contrast, Maurizio Cattelan, contemporary Italian provocateur, plays with death and letting go in a comical way. In 2011, the artist announced his retirement from artmaking. At the same time, he remains a significant living sculptor, and retains commercial gallery representation. His retirement forces his audiences to consider the role of the artist as a job much like any other, and not as a calling or inherent, lofty need to create and produce. With this gesture, Cattelan asks why audiences so often see artmaking and the role of the artist as different from any other profession.
Other artists in this exhibition use retreat as a conceptual gesture, and in these instances the very act of refusing to appear or refusing to produce is a performative act unto itself. So often that leaves us, the audience and the viewer, desiring more. Fixity and ambiguity become the key components in these works. If we expect artists to make statements, to hold mirrors up to society, sometimes saying nothing at all speaks louder than a more traditional or tangible artwork.
Each of these artists toy with subversive gestures, asking their audiences to take a step back and see artmaking within a wider, often more politicized context. By taking that step backwards—retiring, vanishing, or reacting to the commercial constraints of production—these artists ask us to question what role we need and want art to play. There is no one easy or simple answer.
With works from Bas Jan Ader, Maurizio Cattelan, Thierry De Cordier, Marcel Duchamp, David Hammons, Jef Geys, Cady Noland, Panamarenko, Laurie Parsons and Charlotte Posenenske.
Exhibition coordinated by Lode Geens for Nick Lodgers.