Supposedly to appease the ghosts that so many weapons had left behind, Sarah Winchester, the heiress to the eponymous gun fortune, spent decades manically remodeling her California mansion with an endless maze of windows that open onto floors, doors that open into walls, phantom staircases. Likewise, the ghosts that young Belgian Jan De Cock addresses haunt the monumental buildings he sculptutrally transforms – museums, libraries, old banks, all freighted with tainted history, hosting cultural heirlooms of sometimes questionable provenance. He calls many of his recent pieces Randschade – collateral damage – referring both to the implicit havoc wrought by the assembly and daily maintenance of these stately halls, as well as to the damage done to them by younger, leaner forms of cultural representation: with art increasingly evolving outside of conventional spaces, how can these creaking monuments be reconceived for today’s needs?

Unreconstructed modernist De Cock skillfully builds sweeping, right-angled structures out of untreated wood and commercial particleboard, whose functions are often as multifaceted as they are indeterminate: cabinets become benches, floors become palettes, stacked panels become towers, like superposed layers in the fossil record, alluding to how museums accumulate and exhibit a specific version of cultural history.

His lucid installations make complex references to the buildings they inhabit; this isn’t art that can be arbitrarily dropped into any white cube. In 2002’s Randschade fig. 7, for example, which was a dual exhibition at Ghent’s contemporary S.M.A.K. museum and its traditional Museum of Fine Arts, he linked the two by displaying in each space photos of his parallel installation at the other, fusing past and present. Yet he didn’t steal the show from the original works housed there: his sculptures’ cinematic sightlines playfully drew attention to those paintings that depict artists at work (a gesture repeated in 2003’s Denkmal 10 at Amsterdam’s De Appel, in the form of Antonioni and Godard screenings). Presenting familiar images from a new angle, e.g. by pushing us closer to a wall or seating us on a raised platform, highlights our sense of watching a staged event, of following a routine that’s been choreographed by architecture. By repositioning the viewer on a bench that thereby becomes a pedestal, De Cock transforms the passive art consumer into an actor, part of the overall work. He also restructures our lazy patterns of perambulation, forcing us to see anew the museal accoutrements we’ve become desensitized to: guards, lights, the Ikea-like paths we dutifully follow from room to room.

De Cock flanks every new installation with photographs from his previous ones (which he calls Denkmalen, or monuments), slyly insinuating himself into the rich pasts and future history of these spaces. His brand of archeology is clearly of the punctuated equilibrium school – the idea that evolution is not gradual and polite but drastic, radically reshaped by powerful events. And this is how things move forward: through evolutionary bursts that continuously reinvent our notions of the past.
Douglas Heingartner