Saturday afternoon. Went on a mini-trip to Antwerp to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art, the MuHKA. I'd heard about this temple of the avant-garde when studying "kunstkritiek" at the KUL in Leuven. I'd signed up for the course imagining it to be a likely forum for "heated debate" and the chance to meet people and talk about the role of art in smokey cafés after lectures. That was clearly the intention of the lecturer who worked really hard to get things going, but it was always an uphill struggle against the stolid passivity and endemic shyness of the students. She made much of the "Crisis van de Kunst in Vlaanderen". I couldn't help feeling rather smugly that it was all a bit of a storm in a tea-cup. It seems to me that we have a crisis of art tout court. Cut off from its natural hinterland of spiritual inspiration and didactic purpose, deprived, for fear of Kitsch, even of simple joy in beauty, many "artists" today seem to be little more than purveyors of vapid trendiness to vapid trendies - flogging an overworn Marcel Duchamp joke to death.
This was certainly the impression one got from the permanent exhibition. Anna was quite ruthless: "Pretentious crap!". The most striking exhibit was an installation by Jan Fabre. His name had cropped up a lot on the course. It would appear that he is very successful (rich) and an accomplished showman who demands (and gets) a reaction from his audience. He'd set up a plastic tent in a bare empty room. As you approached, it looked like camouflage material, but on closer inspection it revealed itself to be made up of strips of raw ham distributed over a transparent membrane. It smelt awful. Around the room were hanging repulsive, what looked like sides of pork reconstituted out of strips of ham like papier maché. At one end there was a series of what appeared to be dogs' doings moulded into some primitive form each on its sheet of newspaper. It could be some profound nihilistic comment about identity and the death of the flesh, but, then again, it could be a nasty little boy showing off.
Downstairs was a temporary exhibit of video art by the Turk, Kutlug Ataman. His work consists essentially of a lot of video footage of ordinary, but weird people telling their stories on camera.
There is an implicit comment on the duplicitous nature of the TV medium itself as the purveyor of dreams and fantasies. The suggestion is that the speakers somehow invent their identity as they speak, but that, in fact, identity is far less certain than we or the interviewees believe.
The most interesting exhibit for me was one consisting of some quite ordinary people speaking quite prosaically of their experience of reincarnation following violent and sudden death. While the artist obviously sees this as another example of the precarious nature of identity, I was much more focussed on the basic issue of metempsychosis. Their testimonies were so unaffected and convincing that one couldn't question their sincerity. Do we come back? Do we all come back? Is there a soul? If so, what is it? Do we all have a soul? One thing which came across from the interviews was the idea that a specific task was to be achieved in each lifetime. What would that task be? What would my task be? Am I fulfilling it just by being alive, or is some specific initiative required of me? Quite a lot of questions really.
Leaving the building, I was struck by the notion that the whole museum was, in a sense, an unwitting exhibit. A blank, modern, empty-feeling, soulless construction housing an incoherent collection of random "works" by artists with their own private, but definitely self-important iconography, each seeking to communicate the impossibility of communication in the modern world. A bit like real life!