What artists are doing now. Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen in Genk
An inspiration and mutual solidarity project for the creative industries
In the current situation, clearly our top priority is to take care of our families, friends and fellow citizens. Nevertheless, while public life is paralyzed and museums, galleries and cultural institutions are closed, in many of us neither the urge to work nor the creative spark have disappeared. In fact, quite the opposite is happening in what is turning out to be a time that befits self-reflection and the generation of new ideas for the future. Although we are at home and self-isolating, we all – artists, creatives and Arterritory.com – continue to work, think and feel. As a sort of gesture of inspiration and ‘remote’ mutual solidarity, we have launched the project titled What Artists Are Doing Now, with the aim of showing and affirming that neither life nor creative energy are coming to a stop during this crisis. We have invited artists from all over the world to send us a short video or photo story illustrating what they are doing, what they are thinking, and how they are feeling during this time of crisis and self-isolation. All artist stories will be published on Arterritory.com and on our Instagram and Facebook accounts. We at Arterritory.com are convinced that creativity and positive emotions are good for the immune system and just might help us better navigate through these difficult times.
From his studio in Genk, Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen answers a short questionnaire by Arterritory.com:
Are you working on any projects right now in your studio? If so, could you briefly describe them?
I am working on several projects at the moment. The most prominent one is the launch of The Battery Channel, which is a direct answer to the situation created by the COVID-19 virus. Venturing outside is impossible, and all expositions, projects, and shows are put on hold, all my travels and expeditions are canceled. The Battery Channel is a platform on which we will share stories, images and videos, but foremost – a series of podcasts. The starting point for these podcasts is the weekly newspaper column I write. These columns seem to be the perfect tool with which to reach out to interesting people around the globe and start a conversation, a debate, an idea. Communication is crucial in times of crisis.
I also continue to work on various artworks questioning the position of nature and culture and their interaction. My Protected Paradise installation, for example, features a fossilized chicken claw above a marble egg, suggesting nature takes over from the human. Remarkably, I discovered that earlier art installations of mine, like Modified Spaces (2011) and Never Green (2014), acquire a new meaning given the radically changed context. It is fascinating to explore that. Thirdly, I am creating a big statue of a blindfolded child who cannot see the world. It’s in quarantine, protecting itself from a dangerous world. Uncomfortable will figure prominently in the park of LABIOMISTA, my studio in Belgium. The park was successfully launched last year and, in normal circumstances, would have re-opened to the public on April 1 after the winter break. We’re using the extra time we have to refine it, to let nature play its role more prominently in the park as we work on the ME BEE TREE project: a bee hive we constructed with the help of a local school and which further fosters the link to Nomadland, our community initiative situated adjacent to the park. Contact with the local community keeps LABIOMISTA fertile. With its allotment gardens, picnic areas, an open space for events, and room for food trucks and gypsy wagons, Nomadland is a place of meeting and collective equality. We all need food for the belly and the brain. This is one of the things I look forward to most when we get back to some kind of normality – to see Nomadland further grow into a contact and discussion platform.
What is your recipe for survival in a time of almost only bad news?
Be alert and never complacent. Do not take anything for granted. An artist is continuously living in a crisis. There is always this pressing sense of urgency. It implies that an artist is forever preparing for an emergency, for the next big one, for survival. Every crisis gives birth to another crisis. Especially in my thematic field. I have been monitoring the precarious interaction between human culture and nature for decades. I was very much aware of and anticipated the moment a counter-attack would take place, considering the rising violence of the human-animal against the web of life. It is essential to know that a moment like that can arrive. It is vital to realize that we, as a species, never ‘made it’. This attitude of alertness takes a never-ending shift in perspective, and invariably implies living on the edge. Every day is a day in survival mode, thinking of and preparing for a future that might happen. That is what I call healing. The crisis is healing.
What is something that we all (each of us, personally) could do to make the world a better place when this disaster comes to an end? It is clear that the world will no longer be the same again, but at the same time...there is a kind of magic in every new beginning.
As a society, we seem to forget the valuable history lessons that are taught to us as children, the predictive narratives and memes which past millennia have bequeathed us. Many old stories remind us that humanity will be defeated when it measures up to the forces of nature. Remember how Narcissus' pride transformed him into a flower. Think of how the vanity of Andersen's emperor exposed him to the world. Icarus’s pride led to a fatal crash to Earth. His wax wings became liquid, his ambition had blinded him. You could say that the crisis did not lie in the act of Icarus’s fall itself but instead in the preparation for the flight and in the action born of greedy desire.
The current crisis had already surfaced in 2002. The SARS outbreak back then affected eight thousand people. Our economic models at the time did not allow global action to be taken to develop a new vaccine. However, billions of euros were released at that time to arm us against every possible human enemy. In our zeal, we completely forgot the laws of nature. Just like Icarus, and the emperor, we were as blind as Narcissus.
Hopefully, COVID-19 forces us to learn something, to look for another balance between local and global, to establish an economy that is more just, inclusive, and less destructive.
I always use the meme of the chicken to talk about this matter. A chicken is smart; it does not burn its wings like Icarus. This remarkable, telltale species flies a maximum of fifteen meters high, and a hundred meters far. It never ventures too high or too far. It captures the information stored between heaven and Earth and unequivocally returns to inform us about the cycle of day and night. We should mind the lesson of the chicken. It is not presenting itself as the centre of nature but as part of it. If we do not learn from the chicken, we are doomed to fail.
The art world and the culture sector is one of the most affected. What is the main lesson the art world should learn from all this? How do you imagine the post-apocalyptic art scene?
This pandemic can hold powerful lessons for the entire world. Can we learn how important it is for a society to invest in future prosperity and health care even when everything seems to be going well? Or, even more forcefully: how important that investment is for the entire world community, and for the planet as a whole? Can we learn to realize the danger of uniformity and monoculture, and understand the importance of diversity, the need for mental and physical space? Can we also learn how important it is to take science seriously? Science signals to us how dangerous the world can be and how ecosystems really work.
As for the art world, it should be relevant. When it really matters, how visionary is the art world and the culture sector? How close is it to the communities, both local and global, who really matter? How can it play a meaningful part in unraveling the complex issues that define our future? And ideally, quite some time before the next eruption.
The art world should finally venture out of the golden cage that was created by neoliberalism and a false sense of exceptionalism. It seems essential to me that we create a new platform together with other meaningful sectors, like science. A platform on which cross-disciplinary fusion is not merely seen as an extravagant filling of museums and gallery spaces, but rather as a meaningful symbiosis for unraveling the complex issues that can help us in the future – as a new tool to measure the crisis in times of abundance, so that we can pro-actively deal with problems and intervene in time to avoid a catastrophe and make the appropriate decisions.
***
The Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen (1965) is an internationally acclaimed conceptual artist. His ground-breaking work deals with biocultural diversity and identity. Central to his oeuvre is the chicken, which, through his projects, is revealed as both an artwork and a metaphor for society. By bringing together and exploring the interplay between art, science and philosophy in his work, Vanmechelen reflects upon our global heritage and examines the way that we choose to live and evolve. Multi-disciplinary scientific collaborations and community engagement are integral to Vanmechelen’s approach. These collaborations have earned him an honorary doctorate from the University of Hasselt (2010) and the Golden Nica Hybrid Art award (2013).
Vanmechelen’s art work is as diverse and hybrid as the Cosmopolitan Chicken itself: a unique mix of paintings, drawings, photography, innovative 3D-techniques, video, installations and wooden sculptures. All of it flows from Vanmechelen’s belief that art belongs in society, engaging with people. The artist’s major on-going projects have a consistent community focus: Cosmogolem, a global art-based children’s rights project; the Walking Egg, a developing world fertility project; and Combat, a WW1 remembrance project. In 2011, the foundations supporting these works were grouped into a new institute called the Open University of Diversity.
In 2016, Vanmechelen launched his Planetary Community Chicken (PCC) project. As the new cross-breed is being introduced to underserved communities worldwide, the MOUTH foundation leads on the sustainable development aspects of the initiative.
Vanmechelen has presented his work on almost every continent, from the U.S. to China and Iceland to Senegal. In Belgium his work has been exhibited in many museums and venues: the Verbeke Foundation, Watou, Museum M and Z33. He has also participated in solo and group exhibitions including the National Gallery (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Museum Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf), Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ (Amsterdam), Macro (Rome), MAD Museum (NY), Belvedere (Vienna), ZKM (Karlsruhe) and Pushkin Museum (Moscow). His work has been shown at the Biennials of Venice, Moscow, Havana, Dakar and Poznan, at the Triennial of Guangzhou, at the World Expo Shanghai 2010, at Manifesta 9, and at dOCUMENTA (13).
Vanmechelen lives in Meeuwen-Gruitrode, in the northeast of Belgium. He is an honorary citizen of his native town of Sint-Truiden. Since 2017, the artist has been based at his new studio, LABIOMISTA, built by Swiss architect Mario Botta and located in Genk.
