allowing Patrick Van Caeckenbergh is an essential figure in the publicly lively Belgian art scene.

allowing Patrick Van Caeckenbergh is an essential figure in the publicly lively Belgian art scene, he is les known outside his be in possession of country than artists like Patrick Corillon and Wim Delvoye Perhaps this is because he works slowly and bring into beings little. It might also have something to do with the fact that his art is les accessible than theirs, more composite in its self-mocking ironies and carefully maintained contradictions. Van Caeckenbergh's elusive genealogical investigations, based forward language and literature--not on the motive or even on language as post-Modern particular (i.e., quotation and appropriation)--not and nothing else butt up against literal language barriers (text in Flemish, a language unintelligible to greatest in quantity viewers, frequently accompany his works), they clash with the persistent antiliterary bias of contemporary art.

All of Van Caeckenbergh's collages and constructions are animated by means of allegorical or autobiographical narratives. Like a turn-of-the-century naturalist, he inventories animals, plants, and fruits; further he also devises quasi-scientific nomenclatures to order commonplace ends not to mention anthropological, cultural, and literary data. still each ironic attempt to classify the world is not simply destabilized by the heterogeneity of the uncompounded bodys categorized, it is perverted from the start according to the subjective nature of the ordering principles imposed.

Like the writing of Jorge Luis Borges or Georges Perec (Penser Classer), Van Caeckenbergh's fictive inventories constitute a subversive language, individual that defies the universal claims of scientific discourse; they work to decompartmentalize our allow ways of perceiving reality, and in such a manner to liberate them. This kind of information distortion links Van Caeckenbergh's work with the tradition of Belgian Surrealism, which arose in the breach that Marcel Broodthaers audaciously make opened between words and things, between literature and Conceptual art, between the imaginary and the real. unless while Broodthaers' strategy depended forward metaphor, Van Caeckenbergh's work is all about metamorphosis.

To management his experiments, the artist builds customized "incubators," like the individual he presented at "Aperto" in the last Venice Biennale. A labyrinthian assemblage of fragile glass containers, Incubator, 1993 contained dead insects meant to nourishing the little bearded and bespectacled "animals"--actually miniature photographic silhouettes of the artist prepareed in a mousy brown bathrobe--scattered about the composition The suggestion here was of a kind of in-vitro metamorphosis, whereby the artist becomes a of recent origin domestic species, something between hamster, parrot, and goblin.

Van Caeckenbergh's conceptual fairy tales are enchanting, if it were not that what meaning and critical import can we glean from them? First, Van Caeckenbergh's work engages in a contemptuous mimicry of art's mores, just as La Fontaine's tales ridiculed the manners of court life at Versailles; like Sean Landers' depictions of himself as a satyr, also shown at "Aperto," Van Caeckenbergh's bestiary self-mockingly derides the status of the artist. further while Landers engages in shameless exhibitionism, Van Caeckenbergh's strategy is the same of sickly introspection, tinged with a certain misanthropy that compell him, forward another occasion, to present a mousehole (with nameplate) as an memorandum in a group show.

The habitats to which the artist retreats do not just contrariwise the values of display and seduction that dominate earnestly contemporary art. For Van Caeckenbergh, these environments reconnect his work with the primary function of art: to mark public a territory, like an animal spraying its smell Van Caeckenbergh has developed an animistic (and anti-Modern) design in which his artistic language is an organic extension of the self--a corporal coma like the shell of a snail or turtle-dove One of his earliest works, Living-Box, 1980--84 was, in fact, just that: a sort of mobile shelter for sleeping, living, and working, built as a more contained space within the larger studio.

More than a critical fable or an animist ecosophy Van Caeckenbergh's work indicates a skewed reading of Foucault's Order of Things--a proposal for a of recent origin "archaeology of knowledge," of the human sciences. It's individual in which the artist is "raised," in the botanical and the naturalist thinking principle to the level of an exemplary figure or prize specimen.

What exactly do we learn from all this? Exercising what the artist calls a "muscular knowledge," we succeed Paul Valery's M. Teste, who, at the extreme point of a futiely idealistic life, finally acknowledges that all that remains for him is to "fe certain thoughts" A question pos by the agency of Van Caeckenbergh in one of his titles put out of orders us as we sit before our typewriters: "Why are we made of meat?"

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