Luc Tuymans curates: A Vision of Central Europe

It has been suggested that, for a city with such a rich heritage, Bruges has few dedicated art institutions. But what the city lacks in permanent galleries - primarily those concerned with contemporary art - it has more than made up for with its recent series of highly successful cultural festivals.

Following in the wake of these comes the latest, Brugge Centraal, a city-wide art and culture event. Headlining the festival is Belgian-born figurative painter Luc Tuymans, who, with his assistant Tommy Simoens, has guest-curated a special exhibition, A Vision of Central Europe, which takes as its starting point the difference in fortunes between modern Bruges and Warsaw - one surviving unscathed, the other decimated in World War II. Featuring works by Central European artists who have made, or are making their mark, on the artistic landscape and who, like Tuymans, place such themes as history, identity, war and trauma at the heart of their working and thinking, the exhibition gives a unique overview of the arts of this extraordinary region as their influence once again begins to be felt all over the world. 

As the Festival launched last weekend they explained some of the influences behind the exhibition:

Q: How did the idea for the theme for A Vision come about?

When first asked by Manfred Sellink, Director of the museums of Bruges, to assume the curatorship of an exhibition with a focus on Central European art in the context of the Brugge Centraal festival, we happened to be working on a retrospective exhibition at the Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw. The world of difference that exists between Bruges and Warsaw was the first thought - fraught with contrast - that immediately came to mind. Both cities enjoy UNESCO World Heritage status, but they have obtained their place on the list for very different reasons. Bruges as a city is commended for the way in which it has been so carefully preserved, and for its link to the culture of its 15th century heyday. However the city subsequently survived both World Wars intact, as well as the very different dangers posed by property developers. Warsaw deserves its place on the UNESCO World Heritage list for the way in which, after 85% of the city was destroyed during WWII, it was painstakingly rebuilt, stone by stone, in a bid to preserve this important part of the collective memory and of Polish culture. So both cities of Bruges and Warsaw, whilst being so different, in their city policies display a pronounced attitude towards (the preservation of) memory, a theme that inevitably attached itself to this endeavour.

Q: You have suggested Georges Rodenbach's 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte has been an important inspiration. What role has the novel played in the conception process of the show?

After the silting up of the river giving access to the harbour, Bruges had fallen into a centuries-long process of decline, a process that was only halted and in some ways reversed in the late 19th century. The Belgian Symbolist poet and author, Georges Rodenbach's novel coincided with a flurry of conservation and restoration projects that came over the city, which it in some ways perpetuated. The novel’s popularity made Bruges a key destination for tourism, a new activity created by the industrial revolution, which provided the economic impetus for the city’s ongoing preservation. Bruges-la-Morte is a specific example of an artwork having a far-reaching impact on the real world.

The image propagated in Bruges-la-Morte, of a city in stasis, preserved as if under a glass bell, or inside a snow-globe, where time has stood still, provides one of several backdrops for the exhibition. With the citywide setting of this visual presentation, the city in effect becomes one of the exhibition’s protagonists, as it plays a role in the experience of those coming to see it. It is not uninteresting to consider how Bruges as a city has attracted and affected artists and the general public in the past, and vice versa, how these visitors may have affected the city in return.

Q: Poland forms a natural starting point for the exhibition. Which of the Polish artists who you have included in the show have you found particularly inspiring?

The first personage we encountered was the incontrovertible Tadeusz Kantor. Born in 1915, Kantor was a creative polymath, active as a stage director, creator of happenings, painter, scenery designer, writer, art theoretician, actor in his own productions, and a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Even in Nazi-occupied Krakow, he had managed somehow to make underground theatre. It was his adage that artists should be able to continue to create, whatever the circumstances. Kantor’s legendary personality is held to account for the fact that under the subsequent Communist regime, culture continued to thrive in Poland. His prolific career, spanning half a century, took him all over the world, from New York (for a gallery exhibition in 1947) to the Edinburgh Festival and all over Europe. Thus he stayed abreast of art developments in the rest of the world, integrating many of these into his own practice, whilst communicating about their existence within Poland, a vital input into a community that was, in essence, cut off.

Q: The majority of artists featured are from Central Europe, with space given also to those who hailed from this area but who then left (or fled) their native lands. Have you included any others from outside this remit?

We included work by Japanese artist Takishi Murakami because it offers perspective through which to read the exhibition as a whole. In our opinion, Murakami is an extremely misunderstood artist, who has been mainly labelled as a marketeer, instead of any further effort being made to discover the cynical reality behind his work. Murakami conceived many of his ideas on art and culture, including, for example his Superflat theory, from Manga culture. When one considers this cultural phenomenon to be a direct result of nuclear annihilation, with Japan being a nation both traumatized by such utter destruction, and subsequently infantilized by an occupying imperialist power, Takashi Murakami’s work takes on an altogether graver meaning. Murakami’s work stands as a possible answer to the kind of art that can be produced after a nuclear disaster. It is no surprise then, that the artist makes a point of referring to his own practice and that of artists whose work he considers to be part of the same Superflat aesthetic, as Post-War Japanese art.

Murakami’s work is an essential inclusion in this exhibition since it perhaps most effectively summons up the real nature of the backdrop with which the artists in this exhibition are dealing. At the same time, it reflects how the works in the exhibition function amongst themselves as a collective phenomenon.

Q: what other special events should visitors be looking out for?

A number of animation screenings, accompanied by lectures, will be organised in order to arrive at a better understanding of this aspect of the exhibition. Countless animation films were produced in Central Europe - to animate, ie, to bring to life by conveying movement as a technique, has obvious ties with the Reality of the Lowest Rank [the concept, perpetuated by Kantor, that by their reinterpretation everyday objects in motion can be the stuff of art]. 

A number of artworks will be produced in situ. In the gallery of the Episcopal Seminary, for example, the UK based Czech artist, Pavel Büchler, will be building a sound installation with giant loudspeakers that were recently rediscovered in the now disused Strahov Stadium near Prague. The work follows on from an earlier piece, The Castle, which Büchler produced with clusters of loudspeakers that projected excerpts from Franz Kafka’s eponymous novel read by a computer-generated voice, and was positioned on the outside of various buildings. This new work interacts with the properties of a well-defined, inner space, the Seminary’s gallery; the work thereby gains its impact in part from the overall context of the exhibition, the placement in the building in which it is placed, and from the place it has in the artist’s overall oeuvre.

Luc Tuymans is currently the subject of his first major retrospective in the US (now on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago until 9 January 2011). On 5 November he will be at Phaidon's New York store for a special book signing to mark the launch of his new monograph: Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe?.