La librairie des livres interdits

Marc Levy

Description

How many newspapers and magazines do people throw out every day? How many unread masterpieces appear on your bookshelf? How many old exams and assignments are gathering dust in the attics of schools? For 50 years, the Belgian artist Denmark – the pseudonym of Marc Robbroeckx – has transformed tonnes of printed paper into art. He creates sculptures and installations using books, newspapers, and magazines. His main ingredient is always paper – cut, pressed, stacked, or folded. Since the early seventies, Denmark has been cutting up, dissecting, and (re)assembling books, magazines, and newspapers. His archive installations are a critical reaction to the overload of information we are confronted with daily, opposing the abundance of information, symbolized by the gigantic masses of discarded - and often unused - paper. These surplus newspapers, magazines, books, and archives are cut up, folded, glued, bound, pressed, sanded, and ground,... by the artist to create new visual archives, no longer for consulting but purely for viewing beauty as resistance to excess. 'anarchives' provides a sober and in-depth overview of the artist's many years of practice.The ideas of rereading and recycling are both central to Denmark's workIn looking for the essence, Denmark developed a unique, artistic approach, that would gradually include print, media, such as books, newspapers, and magazines, and folding, screwing, and sanding them, gluing them together, freezing them, and preserving them in water, gelatine, or paraffin. In doing so, Denmark is targeting not only the media industry, but also the art world, and in that sense, his work echoes the institutional criticism prevalent in the 1970s. Denmark's archival installations can be interpreted not only as unusable, and therefore between 'unruly' archives, but also as purified, silent disruptors: contemporary vanitas still lifes, which confront us with the hysterical 'information fetishism', that has characterized the past few decades.

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