Unnatural Resources

Photo by Albrecht Fuchs

Luc Tuymans in his studio in Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007

Photo by Albrecht Fuchs

Luc Tuymans in his home in Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007

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Yes, that’s possible, but the important thing is that this isn’t shown explicitly in its entirety. And when it’s simply acknowledged, I think it’s always more horrific. That’s where the idea of nostalgia as pure horror comes in, and that sense of inadequateness, and of missing reality. And it is possible that all those elements come together in something really banal, when, precisely because of its banality, meaning can be directly inverted.

I should add that I don’t concern myself with the viewer’s prior knowledge of events when I paint. That’s something I’m essentially indifferent to. I work from my personal fascination with images, and I’ve never really believed that same fascination can exist in someone else, or at least not as intensely. Though I don’t believe in some singular experience of these images, it is important for me to know exactly what I’m painting, what it is about. Without having that knowledge, it’s impossible for me to start creating an image—I suppose that’s my own limitation.

Presumably your fascination with the dual roles of artist and viewer of other artists’ work has colored much of your thinking as a curator. I’m especially interested in your ongoing role within the NICC [New International Cultural Center] and how that feeds back, or doesn’t, into your painterly practice.

The NICC was, and is, extremely important to me for a number of reasons. In its early stages, reacting to the closure of Antwerp’s original ICC [Internationaal Cultureel Centrum], it was driven by enthusiasm and affirmative action, which led to the existing hierarchies between artists falling away and a type of solidarity forming on two fronts. On the one hand we had an urge to develop and achieve certain artistic goals. On the other there was also strong social activism, which led not only to the creation of a new contemporary arts venue but also eventually to the special [tax and legal] status that currently exists for Belgian artists. The NICC’s function has now been more or less transformed into a service-oriented one, but before its existence artists in my country were a lot more isolated; it played a vital part in breaking that isolation down.

Of course I’m not the only artist involved in curating. There are people like Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Michel Francois, Guillaume Bijl, Philip Aguirre, and others who have also taken on that double role within an experimental framework, not so much to show that curators are unnecessary, or that artists can do these things better, but rather to reactivate dialogue from within the visual field itself. An artist will, generally speaking, take a very different approach to curating. Artists work from another kind of modality, with a different vision: usually one that’s a lot more oblique and rooted in the visual than that of curators, who tend to apply concepts in a more literal way. That’s the reason why I first started curating.

The first big project I realized, which I experienced as a truly collaborative curatorial experience, one which I still feel is valuable, was an exhibition titled  “Trouble Spot: Painting” [in 1999, at muhka and nicc]. My colleague, the artist Narcisse Tordoir, and I assembled a fairly big show, including works by 75 artists, that dealt largely with the interrogation of painting as a medium. We tried to avoid the tired approach of just placing paintings next to each other, as has been done ad infinitum in the past, reducing painting to wallpaper. We wanted to generate a discourse by allowing painting to expand into a wider field, by, for instance, coupling it with installation works that in our eyes are also situated within an expanded notion of the painterly but differently concretized on a pragmatic level. Those types of juxtapositions turned out to be well received.