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Martin uit den Bogaard Outre-vivant (Further-living)

EXHIBITION 6th October - 18th December 2011 - Centre dart contemporain Rurart

AgENDA Exhibition: 6th October - 18th december Opening Monday > Friday 10h - 12h / 14h - 18h Sunday 15h - 18h Closed Saturday Free RURART CENTRE DART CONTEMPORAIN D150 lyce agricole Venours 86480 Rouill Tl. 05 49 43 62 59 Fax. 05 49 89 31 54 www.rurart.org www.facebook.com/culture.contemporaine PRESS RELATION Hlne Grisoni-Weibel Tl. 05 49 43 62 59 helene.grisoni@rurart.org High definition images: www.rurart.org/N/espace-presse-rurart

Martin uit den Bogaard watches the post mortem evolution of living organisms. He keeps dead animals in airtight glass cubes, long after their death. He turns the microvolts produced by tissue decay into light and sound signals. He watches the electrolysis process on mammals corpses. Rurart is setting up this artists first exhibition in France. An artist who turns death not only into an act of creation, but also into the very material of his work.

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Outre-vivant (Further-living)
Martin uit den Bogaard watches the post mortem evolution of living organisms. He keeps dead animals in airtight glass cubes, long after their death. He turns the microvolts produced by tissue decay into light and sound signals. He watches the electrolysis process on mammals corpses. Rurart is setting up this artists first exhibition in France. An artist who turns death not only into an act of creation, but also into the very material of his work. In Antwerp, Martin uit den Bogaards studio is located in a former coffee roasting factory, not far from the city centre. From the street, a heavy wooden gate leads to a porch, and then to a small paved courtyard, lined with ivy. There, on the ground, two glass boxes, fifty centimetres long. Some rather dense vegetation has grown in the first one. In the other, an indistinct whitish trace can be seen over dark earth. They are set along a building, and through the buildings window one can see the picture of a rabbit. A dead rabbit. Its fur is of a shiny white, unspoiled. No blood, no stain to hurt the eye. Only the picture of an immaculate rabbit, laid on some earth. Inside one of the boxes, the animals body was placed, preserved from the ground by a stain plate over which some earth was spread. Now that time has passed, all that is left is a thin whitish trace. In the other box, another rabbit was displayed directly on the ground, and vegetation took hold of the entire volume. Martin uit den Bogaard says that it is research he started some years Vue de latelier de lartiste ago now, eager to watch the decomposition process in various environments. Crdit photo : Rurart Passing the yard, the studio. Several rooms with whitewashed stonewalls. Within these large volumes, various elements of medical equipment are stored from anatomical charts to flasks and jugs, and skinless human models, with on-going experiments scattered here and there. Martin uit den Bogaards work is to be read through times influence. Right next to the door, on the right wall, two MRI pictures are encapsulated in a lit box. It is a self-portrait, he says. They were taken about fifteen years ago, when he was diagnosed with early multiple sclerosis. If not informed, visitors will have to look very hard for signs of the disease, if any. They will scrutinize the artists brain, going through the scans one by one, slice after slice, until their look penetrates not the hideaways of thought but the organic matter, the grey matter, the details of cells, shadows and light that make up the medical images. Since they were taken, the disease has affected Martin uit den Bogaard further. He takes his ill-assured steps with the support of a walking stick. His eyesight is also an issue. Undoubtedly, a more recent MRI would show the inexorable alteration of the sheaths around his brain, spinal cord and optic nerve fibres. From this scientific picture, Martin uit den Bogaard made a work of art, as a sign of his own organism changing, beyond what is visible. In his studio, he keeps all the empty boxes of medicines his condition forces him to take painkillers, corticoids and piles them up in Perspex towers absurd monuments in the light of the diseases timescale. Not far from there stands a large black pedestal, on which is a small glass box, a few centimetres long. Inside, a few day old puppy seems sound asleep, with its head on a leg, the other leg folded under it. Its posture is typical from that of sleeping puppies. A misleading sight, if it were not for its damp fur, slightly sticking on its back. It has been there since 1998, intact in its glass sarcophagus. The artist tells us that the piece was purchased by a collector. When he took it home and displayed it, he was confronted to his familys strong and final objection. So he asked the artist to keep it for him in his studio. Where the collector saw a piece of art, his relatives could only sense a macabre and obscure desire to display a dead body. Where work of art and death meet in timelessness, the violence of the memento mori thus brought to mind is unbearable in its prosaic crudeness. History of art has extendedly explored and taken hold of Vanity, underlining the need for human beings to prepare their soul to the Last Judgement, after a lifetime enjoying earthly pleasures. In the XXth century, and all the more in this early XXIst century, Vanity illustrates questionings more than moral precepts. Questions about mankinds evolution and future, when we are now reduced to our capacity to consume, about the ethics of the Living in the light of scientific progress. In a recent article1, Edgar Morin establishes that there has been repression surrounding the issue of death in Western societies for a long time. Families have their dead ones made up in funeral homes, in order to hide away the very fact of their death, also reducing death rites to their lesser portion, even struggling to open the debate on end-of-life practices. According to the philosopher, as he quotes Montaigne, questioning death is actually necessary to find the urge to live better lives. Martin uit den Bogaard is probably filled with this idea in his daily life. The artist perceives death in a continuum. In his studio, other animal corpses are laid in airtight glass windows. Goose, mouse, birds, octopus, as in a menagerie. On a table, in one of these glass cubes, two wires are connecting a dead

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budgerigar dead for some years to a voltmeter connected to a computer. The voltmeter measures a few millivolts of activity, that of the little energy production due to the birds body decomposing. The computer turns this signal into a graph and sound a nonstop whistling. The experiment is carried out on other organisms, other animals, an ape brain, some hair, a human finger : a friend of the artist, who suffered an accident that left his left index numb, asked for his finger to be cut off and given to Martin uit den Bogaard so that he make art out of it. Every time, the voltmeter measures a different voltage and the computer produces new graphs and sounds of various frequencies. Elsewhere in the studio, four animals are connected to rechargeable batteries, so that the energy they produce can feed the batteries. The device is rather humorous and more of a symbol than an experiment, given the very low level of energy produced, still the symbol matters as it focuses on the idea that life and death are not opposite Vue de latelier de lartiste states but actually interact in a very complex way. Franois-XaCrdit photo : Rurart vier Bichat, founder of modern anatomy and author of physiological research on life and death, used to define life as the sum of all functions resisting death. Edgar Morin completes by saying that life is like a permanent struggle against death, even using death to do so t: in order to find the necessary energy to survive, a living organism feeds on its own dead components. According to Morin, life resists death by using death. The discovery of stem-cells and their regenerative capacities within the body actually led the philosopher to consider amortality, that is to say the theoretical capacity for the organism to prolong its own life forever. This post-modern myth, based on science progress rather than classical mythology, resonates in Martin uit den Bogaards work. The artist raises questions about the very nature of death and its presence at the heart of creation. His approach reminds us of the way Maurice Blanchot could see the link between death and the act of creating, especially in the relation to time that art pieces instill. To Blanchot, death is not an absolute non-being or lifelessness, not an absence of the being, but rather a failing and a negation of presence. Death is the death of presence. The time of death is a time with no present, an absence of time that enables past and future to join, a leap bringing time together This leap thanks to which past and future join underneath any present is the meaning of human death, soaked with humanity3. This time is also that of the piece of art which, beyond present, aims at timelessness. A piece of art conjures the artists death, it survives them and keeps them alive beyond their very death. Through their work, the artist transcends their death. As Andr Gide put it, in his Journal: The reasons that lead me to write are many, and the main ones are, to me, the most secret ones. Maybe this one above all others: to keep something safe from death. It is nearly in a literal sense that Martin uit den Bogaard makes this idea his. If death is often a source of inspiration to artists, who have represented it through centuries of art history, and will do so for centuries to come, seldom comes an artist who uses it as its raw material and takes it as a living matter, using art to draw a continuum between life and death, beyond the act of death. Therefore, Martin uit den Bogaards work is not centred around the hackneyed idea of life after death, but actually the idea that there is life in death, and complex interactions between life and death. Just as literally, he considers the artists immortality in his work as well as amortality, to quote Edgar Morin, by making his own body a post-mortem piece : he aims at having free use of his dead body after his death and to keep it under a glass sarcophagus and record the sound frequency and the graph created by the electric energy produced by the slow decay of his cells. The artist becomes the piece, it survives him as long as it feeds on him. He is both the object and the subject of his work, just as a corpse is no human being, not being an object but rather a state. The state of the artist after his death is the piece, very much alive, further-living. Arnaud Stins

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Lgendes 1 - Painting and singing finger 2004 2 - Rabbit 2003-2004 3 - Dog 1998 4 - Mouse 1999 5 - Kangaroo gives Volt 2001
Crdits photographiques : Martin uit den Bogaard