Op de manier waarop een koe een portret van George Washington niet begrijpt

Exhibition

Under the title ' The way a cow does not understand a portrait of George Washington ', curator Jean-Philippe Paumier presents a group exhibition with eight progressive artists. The focus of this exhibition is on three-dimensional works: sculptures, objects and installations.

The main quality that the works of art in this exhibition have in common is a certain thinness. They address the viewer in a playful and cryptic tone in the interrogative form. This project aims to show how the artists develop different strategies to place their artworks at the right conceptual distance from the viewer, creating an interesting tension in between.

The title of this project is taken from a quote from Rudy Kousbroek's The Cuddliness Factor (1969). At the beginning of his book, Kousbroek introduces the concept of 'cuddliness' as a distinguishing factor between different animal species. With this he categorizes animals that are or are not susceptible to this. He then develops a personal classification of the animal kingdom with the cat as the most evolved animal. The cat is driven by a very refined pleasure principle: it wants to be stroked.

Kousbroek emphasizes the complete incomprehension of other animals for this activity - petting - with the above quote (“...in the way that... Washington...”). It is remarkable that he refers specifically to visual art when he wants to clarify this fundamental misunderstanding for the reader: the contrast could hardly be greater than the experience of a cow and the celebrative function of an image of President George Washington.

Characteristic of this quote is how Kousbroek defines this way with a subtractive method (the fact that the cow does not understand), but also by further specifying how much the cow does not understand. It is then up to the reader to estimate for themselves how deep the misunderstanding can be and therefore how great the distance is between the cow and George Washington.

This exhibition project started with the question whether this quote would also be applicable in the dialogue between the viewer and the work of art and looks for works in which the concept and intention cannot be directly explained. Works of art that offer discursive resistance because they are not easily expressed in words. Works of art that are in a kind of metastable state in terms of meaning.

This puts the viewer in a vulnerable and at the same time refreshing position in which he feels that the work remains partly hermetic for him. In this sense he is in a similar state to Kousbroek's cow, except that he is basically aware of his defective situation towards the work of art. Finally, this project also invites the participating artists to imagine what the mental image of the cow could be and to translate this into their own work process.