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I wrote the following words in the announcement of the exhibition entitled "The Destiny of Man": "If there's one thing that art should stop doing, it's holding up a mirror, mankind being duly certified and subscribed, held accountable and discounted, drained and encoded in this department. Whether this will do to stop serving as a source of inspiration, a mix-up or an ideal, however, is a question this exhibition will answer." I now feel an obligation to explain myself. There wasn't any room on the invitation to expound on the announcement, even though strictly speaking the paintings do speak for themselves, but I touched on something that they, the artists and their paintings, are not aiming for. As it is a highly complex topic, I'll try to keep it as simple as I can. A lot is going on in the world. All those goings-on are widely reported on. Opinions on the reports vary widely. This is giving people plenty of food for thought. This concludes the factual side of things. In so far as people did not already think they were doing just that, it is prompting them to think, thus sparking hope and anger, resistance and war, education and entertainment - to the point where it starts leading a life of its own. There is no aspect of life or you'll see it reflected in the characteristically human urge to express oneself, in one of its countless guises. It's just that we have a fancy word for it: culture. Culture is everything we do over and above mindlessly chewing the cud. This is why I'm convinced cows come pretty close to our culture, as no-one chews the cud better than they do, so that there must be room at some point for something more even though they haven't quite got there yet. But I digress. As soon as man becomes aware of the existence of culture, it's only a matter of time for the distinction between high and low, superior and inferior, to be made. I won't on this occasion go into the precise source of confusion, but it appears that an elite has spun off that justifies its position on the strength of its indispensability. This is a pleonasm, for we wouldn't understand the word if it weren't for culture, the only other option being that it is there. I'd prefer raison d'être as a notion, for we all have that. To which I would add while I'm at it that the unfathomable too can be captivating, and the demarcation between High and Non High is difficult to pinpoint, to the point where bringing it up for discussion implies a sort of mutual bias which can go so far as to border on an adversarial image, which is not where we want to go. And that is why it's so wonderful to have an alternative to hand. A kind of observational counterpoint echoes in the idiom of these painters that comes close to justifying all this human noise, and that boils down to abuse without violence of everything that goes wrong. They are able and willing to let rip with their talent. They are grateful to mankind for its imperfections: in much the same way that light could not be rendered detectable without shadow, their passion would lead nowhere if there were nothing to be tackled. And this is the essence of my message to you: whatever goes wrong in the world, there are artists who benefit, who in fact are able in turn to take the worst possible misery and extract something of breathtaking beauty. The last thing they'd want is for mankind - and I am now speaking in somewhat more general terms, just to be on the safe side - to stop feeding their sources of inspiration, as if that could be something for us to worry about. Mixed feelings or not, this would seem the right moment for me to declare this exhibition open. |