Jan De Cock

De Cock’s exhibition Denkmal 11 in 2008 in the MoMA in New York was announced by the museum as ‘a kaleidoscopic view into the lineages of modernism through his own interdisciplinary lens.’ In his typical ‘encyclopedic style’, De Cock combines famous modern art with image quotes from the history of photography, architecture and film. The announcement put the emphasis on what for the artist was his essential use of ‘repetitive framing devices, extreme close-ups, and fragmentation’. In an interview, De Cock claims Jean-Luc Godard's 260-minute Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998) – a soaring collage of film clips and stills, music fragments, sound effects, on-screen text, and voice-over – ‘to be more important in the formulation of twentieth-century culture than Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.’ Like this film 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?" The two-dimensional Modules CXX and CXXI contain all the stimuli that make his large installations so fascinating for the viewer. Here De Cock knows how to very well evoke the effect of the endlessly varying, the at once revealing and concealing vistas of his sculptures through fragments of architecture at different scale, an archeological maquette, a photograph in a photograph and an indication of time that falls beyond time.
– In a certain sense, De Cock’s view of the open character of art history is as optimistic as that of
Yves Saint Laurent when, in 1965, he uses a Mondriaan painting as motif for a dress.