Hans van Houwelingen & Jonas Staal
18 Nov 2011 - 15 Jan 2012
Discussion in front of scale model of De Bijenkorf and the Gabo sculpture, ca 1957. Image: NAi archive
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Hans van Houwelingen & Jonas Staal
The exhibition introduces two remarkable artistic practices concerned with the dilemmas of public art in The Netherlands and beyond. Although belonging to different generations, and conceiving the political responsibility of the artist in distinct ways, the practices of Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal are connected by a sustained polemic within the genre of monumental art, unravelling the political desires and anxieties that monuments thread together and ‘set in stone’, reopening the debates about recent history that monuments seek to terminate.
The artists engage the question of the monument overtly – without recourse to the negative prefix and ironic foil of an ‘anti-’, or ‘counter-monument’ – in a critical scrutiny of paradigms of consensus, modes of commemoration and their political instrumentality.
Hans van Houwelingen & Jonas Staal
The exhibition introduces two remarkable artistic practices concerned with the dilemmas of public art in The Netherlands and beyond. Although belonging to different generations, and conceiving the political responsibility of the artist in distinct ways, the practices of Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal are connected by a sustained polemic within the genre of monumental art, unravelling the political desires and anxieties that monuments thread together and ‘set in stone’, reopening the debates about recent history that monuments seek to terminate.
The artists engage the question of the monument overtly – without recourse to the negative prefix and ironic foil of an ‘anti-’, or ‘counter-monument’ – in a critical scrutiny of paradigms of consensus, modes of commemoration and their political instrumentality.