Jan De Cock
ENCYCLOPEDIA DENKMAL VOLUME II, 2005, DENKMAL ISBN 9080842427
On Sunday the 19th of February, the second artist book by Jan De Cock was presented to the public. The book is an essential part of the oeuvre of the artist. His first book won the Plantin Moretus Prize in the category best designed book. The jury praised specifically “the great daring of the artist who deconstructed the book and revitalised it. It is not only a means to document his work, but in itself an essential part of his oeuvre”.
The jury clearly acknowledged the artist’s intentions. Jan De Cock develops his oeuvre in time and space, and however taking different forms, it forms one coherent entity.
An important artistic consideration the artist made for the book is the element of the sequence. Books bring the fourth dimension time into art. The artist controls the sequence the viewer has to follow when viewing the work. This is also what De Cock aims at in his sculptural work. The contact between the viewer and the book can be very intense. It is the artist creating a motion, as in cinema. Furthermore, the book is a ‘gesamtkunstwerk’: it is plastic art, graphic art, sculpture, literature and architecture braught together in one object. It is a Trojan horse: people observe a book differently from a work of art.
With his work, Jan De Cock tries to combine various elements: useful information is combined with high-quality visual material. Even the text files have been graphically incorporated in the book. The book holds the attention from page to page, from ‘start’ to ‘ending’, even though these categories aren’t always very clear in the book. Concept and contents as well as graphic design and finishing indicate skill.
De Cock’s work of the last two years has been included in the book, especially his recent solo-exhibition at Tate Modern occupies a prominent place. This exhibition can be seen as a synthesis of his previous work. It formed an ending to a period and manifested itself meanwhile as a new form of a retrospective. The works itself from the previous period were not rebuilt, but the exhibition showed the acquired insights and the continuously evolving formal language.
The text has been edited by Wouter Davidts and contains essays by Tim Martin, Kirstie Skinner, John Welchman, Jon Wood and Wouter Davidts. Each views Jan De Cock’s work from his own work area, and different themes are being examined, such as the idea of the studio, the relation between De Cock’s work and cinema, the ‘monument’.
