INSTALLMENT
Ensemble
In 2005, the US artist, writer, critic, and activist Allan Sekula (1951-2013) travels to Leuven to participate in a large-scale exhibition dedicated to Belgian artist Constantin Meunier (1831-1905). Fascinated by Meunier’s social realist practice, Sekula’s research into some of the sculptor’s most emblematic works, such as Monument au Travail [Monument to Labor], informs his own “critical realist” approach in works he presents that year in significant outdoor locations and later venues, such as Documenta 12 in 2007. The dialogue with Meunier continues in what comes to be Sekula’s final work – the unfinished and open-ended Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010-2013). It is now part of the collection of M HKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen.
What constitutes this work, its components, sequences and discrete sections? While Ship of Fools consists of thirty-three framed photographs and two slide projections (images taken by Sekula between 1998-2010 while traveling the seas), The Dockers’ Museum encompasses ca. 1250 artefacts, metonymically related to the world of seafarers and dock workers. These “objects of interest” – sourced and purchased by the artist via eBay – are not readily to be understood as works of art. Rather, they manifest Sekula’s two-fold “cargo cult.” As ‘textual carriers’ drawn from across time, they form part of the “montage principle” at stake in his final work. What is more, Sekula conceives The Dockers’ Museum as a counter-museum within the contemporary art institution, seeking to construct “a kind of imaginary life world of a phantasmatic collective”; of those “who labor on the sea, or who engage in the cargo from sea to shore and shore to sea.”
From its inception within a concrete exhibition setting at M HKA [Ship of Fools (2010)] and spurred by the artist’s insistent collecting activity, Sekula formulates a taxonomy for The Dockers’ Museum in response to Marcel Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968). He does so by way of outlining several sections (from Latin sectio(n-), secare: “to cut”). Though incomplete as they are today (and contrary to Broodthaers deductive approach), Sekula’s reasoning is foremost inductive, prompted by those roughly 30-90 objects that he exhibits or identifies discursively, taken from an ever-growing reserve. This research presentation departs from the so-called “Mining Section (Bureau des mines)” as yet another clin d’œil to both Meunier and Broodthaers, not to mention Sekula’s own delving into mining history/ies as early as 1983. It is a section that Sekula sometimes refers to as “Bureau of Mines,” perhaps to eschew any fixation; and it allows glimpses into his writing, editing and research practice.
The material presented at Leuven’s Anatomical Theater (objects, engravings, graphics, postcards and archival photographs), reinstigate Sekula’s dialog with his predecessor.1 Central to this dialog is Meunier’s engagement with “the world of work”; the toil, hazards, and threats that workers are exposed to in the “Black Country,” the Belgian coal mining basins of Hainaut and elsewhere.2 Sekula, in one of his notebook-entries, recalls/reflects upon the Anatomical Theater, refashioned in the late nineteenth century to house Meunier’s studio. It was here, that the latter conceives of Le Grisou [The Firedamp] (1887-1889), most likely an artistic response to the 1887 gas explosion at the Quaregon mine in which 113 miners lost their lives. Within The Dockers’ Museum, Meunier’s practice and commitment may act here as a connective link to social struggles in/around docks and mines, similar to Sekula’s appreciation of the dock worker, as intermediary between mine and ship, land and sea.
Taking into consideration the spatial logic of this historic site, the proposed display – connected to an adjacent room as a temporary storage – is, for the most part, composed of unpositioned material: of objets inédits from The Dockers’ Museum. These extend from and point to Sekula’s “Bureau of Mines,” both formally and thematically via cross-/ inter-sections (including mining geographies). Embracing the non-conclusive nature of his work, as well as Sekula’s own working method of rewriting and reediting of his material, this presentation unfolds as a set of speculations in preparation for a future sequence of displays, while allowing to be guided by the work’s intrinsic forces. Forces that spiral outward, beyond museum practices and the art-system at large: “outward towards the world.” Employing a methodology, similar to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-1929), The Dockers’ Museum offers a worldview through the figures of the docker and the miner to critically achieve a more precise understanding of the world we live in.
Anja Isabel Schneider
1 Allan Sekula’s collection includes, among others, a bronze cast of Meunier’s Débardeur du port d’Anvers [The Docker] (1893) and two plaques of Le Mineur [The Miner] (1904), the latter commissioned by Antwerp Coal Merchant Edouard Taymans as a gift for his best clients.
2 Allan Sekula pursued research for a future project in the Belgian Borinage region, which he then had to abandon. Cf. H. Van Gelder, ‘Allan Sekula’s Brief Borinage Investigations - Un bref séjour de recherche d’Allan Sekula au Borinage,’ in R. Pirenne and S. Biset (eds), Atopolis, exhib. cat. (Brussels: Wiels and (SIC), 2015), 34-37.
This research presentation Allan Sekula: Mining Section (Bureau des mines), curated by Anja Isabel Schneider, inscribes itself into a larger research project Art Against the Grain of “Collective Sisyphus:” The Case of Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010-2013) jointly developed by the University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture) and M HKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen.
Allan Sekula: Mining Section (Bureau des mines) is accompanied by the book Allan Sekula: Mining Section (Bureau des mines). Collaborative Notes. Published by ARA, the artistic research series of MER. Paper Kunsthalle and edited by Nicola Setari and Hilde Van Gelder, it includes contributions by Mieke Bleyen, Edwin Carels, Bart De Baere, Anja Isabel Schneider, Nicola Setari, Hilde Van Gelder, and Jeroen Verbeeck — who engaged in a close dialogue all through the presentation’s making process.
With the financial support of the Research Fund KU Leuven and the Research Foundation-Flanders.