MoMA Museum of Modern Art

For his first museum exhibition in the United States, Belgian artist Jan De Cock has conceived a floor-to-ceiling photographic and sculptural installation in response to The Museum of Modern Art's collection, Roy and Niuta Titus 1 Theater, library, conservation labs, and architecture. De Cock's installation is titled Denkmal, from the German word for "monument." However, in the artist's native Flemish the expression incorporates two meanings—denk, which signifies "'think," and mal, which translates as "mold." For De Cock, a denkmal is a mold for thinking. The number in Denkmal 11 refers to the Museum's location at 11 West 53 Street. The exhibition is the starting point for De Cock's American Odyssey, an ambitious yearlong project initiated to document the country's landmark monuments. Informed by experimental European cinema, chiefly by Jean-Luc Godard's collage film Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), De Cock's installation offers a kaleidoscopic view into the lineages of modernism through his own interdisciplinary lens. The artist shot the pictures with two cameras (an analog Sinar and a digital Hasselblad) serially and from different angles, in a filmic manner. The results are straight photographs and photomontages. De Cock juxtaposes the works of artists ranging from Constantin Brancusi to Barnett Newman and from Edward Hopper to Donald Judd with images culled from the history of photography, architecture, and film in his signature encyclopedic style. Central to the project is the artist's use of repetitive framing devices, extreme close-ups, and fragmentation, and the inclusion of the black strip of film dividing photographic frames, which allows him to present a picture from a dual perspective: both the right side of the left-hand frame and the left side of the right-hand frame are visible within the same image. De Cock's freely associative approaches to image-making and nonlinear display seem to ask, "What is the most important thing that remains: the images or a way of looking?" Constituted as a potentially endless atlas of pictures within pictures, Denkmal 11 underscores the idea that there is no closure or definitiveness in the interpretation of the history of modern art.

The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography.

The exhibition is supported by the Society of Friends of Belgium in America.