SMAKATTAK

While we were boring ourselves to tears in the hallowed halls of the former museum of Jan Hoet, across the road from his new haunt, we had the oppor¬tunity to make use of a convergence of circumstances and visit the smak for free. Escaping from the steady murmur of bookish people, we stood in line for our free ticket to the snazzy spectacular complete with boat-rides and roller¬coasters from one chinese adept which i forget...the only thing i can come up with is Li Ping or something.

But also tucked away between the fan¬fare were some viddies by Koen Theys which subverted my pleasure even more .. the academic one I had already seen, an amorphic etude which relegat¬ed all the classics to the same bookcase in a digital sort of way, fascinating but just short of mesmerizing ... while two opposite panels of Picasso handling his brush came closer to the abstract.. his movement slowed down to the mechanical, it gave the viewer time to consider the fact itself rather than the greatness of the identification of it... it seemed a bird, or a hunchbacked tree or a fish in trouble sometimes .. and yet remained recognizable as the master at work ... right on the edge of temporal recognition... The projection with the faces leering out at one a bit too slow perhaps for the circumstance in which it was presented ... I Myself was sure to recognize movement where there was none, and thought this the crowning of illusion, but it seems there was actually some movement, and then it becomes an extrapolation of the same, exercise... but even so, a good attempt to subvert entirely the way we look at things (or images) …

There was also a room 'With a view to the ongoing travelogue of Christoph Fink, which makes for pleasant reading for anyone who has stepped out of his own street for more than a week... the amassment and configuration of minu¬tiae well compressed into schematics and reduced to blips with personal comments and conjectures ... in a dark¬room the images of lost moments on the way to italy compressed into a movie or sorts which was in itself a new timeline and dealt with it's own measure & rhythm.
But what endeared me most were the guards, which, used to the muffled shuffle of paying guests, were over¬whelmed by the masses of day-trippers with their free tickets running riot among the artworks... sticking their sticky fingers in places they shouldn't and pressing their snouts against the windowpanes to have a look at the Scotch Gambit which stood idle in the hangar like just another Boeing bought but not paid for de fa societe aeronautique beige nationale, and wondering if 'bel¬gian art' was just a flash in the pan gleaned from the past or had some weight in the scheme of things to come.

C. Straetlinck - L'IMAGAZINE
summer 2003

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