M HKA Ensembles

Installation

Collection: M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK7698_M448).

The installation (a video with accompanying story boards) reads like both documentary and art criticism. Koen Theys combines the 1969 essay by Joseph Kosuth, Art after Philosophy, (one of conceptual art's authoritative texts explaining why art should always relate to art in one way or another) with a stream of internet images that he has been collecting for years on end. They are the (occasionally hilarious) images of people displaying their individuality by posing with an object: portraits in the time-honoured tradition (which includes painting) of ‘the proud fisherman with his giant pike’ or ‘the winner with her tiara’, etc.  While Kosuth's work led to his extremely rigid, auto-referential anti-aesthetic of the chair (a ready-made) with an image and definition accompanying it, Theys, in contrast, uses the essay as a supporting structure, but accompanies it with images (ready-mades from the internet) whose aesthetic and narrative character run radically counter to it. The one (the image) refutes the other (the essay). The result is a lively art documentary that not only positions itself vis-a-vis the subject matter, but also vis-a-vis the art.