Press release

In his work Wannes Goetschalckx (1978, Zoersel) investigates the emotional versus the physical, or the ideological and the hypothetical in relation to the body and space. His oeuvre is a combination of videos, objects and performances in a sculptural setting which are occupied, explored and transformed by his interventions. In his performative installations, the limitations and possibilities of his body, hand-made objects and his own specific visual language play an important role. By imposing physical and mental challenges on his body and mind, he makes us think about our behaviour and place in the world.

Video installation 1 WITHOUT
On show in Belgium for the first time is Goetschalckx’ video installation 1 WITHOUT, which he made for the Liverpool Biennial in 2010. The installation consists of eleven monitors on plinths spread out over the gallery. In the videos the artist performs everyday actions and rituals like walking, counting, whistling, eating, drinking, sleeping, bathing and moving to and fro on a swing, all in hermetic isolation in an enclosed space. These actions make us stop and think about the patterns and habits we develop in our daily lives and about their wearying repetitiveness.

Toothpick
Another recent work by Wannes Goetschalckx on show at M is Toothpick made during his residency at the Casino Luxemburg in the autumn of 2011. The starting point for this project was a 14-metre-high poplar tree from which he cut a toothpick with his own hands, layer by layer and without resorting to industrial equipment. This physically demanding and time-consuming task highlights the artist’s respect for the majestic powers of nature. M is showing the end result, i.e. the toothpick and the video documenting the process, alongside other work, including new work the artist has made specially for M.
Wannes Goetschalckx is also showing new work at M. One to Tree is a video recording of a three-day performance by the artist at Buda arts centre in Kortrijk (May 2010). The sculptureWork can be seen at the window in the corridor (Gallery 29).
Wannes Goetschalckx will be at M in person every Sunday during opening hours.

Während Spielplatz,

Wanner Goetschalckx und Ruben Kinder Man: Spiel D

Games F

Belgian artist Wannes Goetschalckx explores the emotional and physical, and the ideological and imaginative, in relation to the body and space. His practice combines videos, objects and performance actions in sculptural settings that are occupied, probed and altered by Goetschalckx’s own intervention.

By posing physical and mental challenges to his own mind and body, his work aims to reveal to the viewer both the immediately apparent and also the hidden and psychic constraints that bear on human life. The coexistence of comfort and pain, exposure and enclosure, and cage and shelter are frequent denominators in his practice.

For Touched, Goetschalckx has developed a multi-channel video installation comprising short films depicting the artist engaged in everyday actions and rituals within a minimal wooden space. Performed in hermetic solitude, Goetschalckx’s actions reflect upon the behavioural possibilities and rituals that might be enacted by a single human being or creature ‘in captivity’. The setting of the videos reappears in modified form within the gallery as a space for activity and contemplation where visitors can experience a ‘warm’ shelter, acting as a counterpoint to the ‘cold’ white cube presentation of the video installation. The title of the work, 1 WITHOUT, alludes to the composite of words and meanings within Goetschalckx’s spoken language – in Dutch ‘wit’ means ‘white’ and ‘hout’ means ‘wood’ – while also referencing the ‘empty’ twelfth plinth that forms part of the installation and that becomes an occasional platform for live interventions by the artist.

Peter Gorschluter

Wannes Goetschalckx is part of Touched at Tate Liverpool:
Albert Dock, L3 4BB
Open: Tuesday–Sunday 10.00–17.50
Closed Mondays (except Bank Holiday Mondays)
Tel: +44 (0) 151 702 7400 www.tate.org.uk/liverpool
Free Entry / Fully Accessible

Liverpool Biennial presents
Touched, the International 10 exhibition as part of Liverpool Biennial 2010
18 September - 28 November 2010

“In a world packed with countless biennials, triennials and the rest, this madcap event in Liverpool remains distinctive and entertaining. The shows are scattered all over the city, often in pretty strange places, but the overall ambition — to introduce British audiences to up-and-coming international artists and trends — is adhered to excellently." The Times

“Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”¹
Touched presents artworks that affect the viewer through addressing a total context (mind, body and place: relatedness in space and time); artworks whose investment and inscription in the particular and the personal affects the general and the social.
As with the last four International exhibitions for Liverpool Biennial, Touched will consist of newly commissioned artworks made with sensitivity to the specifics of the place, time and audience of the exhibition, while originating in the artists’ preoccupations with the state of the world and with their own personal obsessions. This is articulated in the concept of ‘emplacement’, expanding the more common idea of embodiment. “While the paradigm of ‘embodiment’ implies an integration of mind and body, the emergent paradigm of ‘emplacement’ suggests the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment.”²
While the word Touched suggests the contiguity and bodily presence that is involved in emplacement, it equally conjures the dynamic of affectivity in which the viewer is presented (brought to the present moment) with the artwork equally through the senses, intellect and emotions. This quality of presence starts with affect. Once our emotions are engaged, the resultant disruption to our senses and thought processes makes change possible in our intellectual perspective, behaviour and relation to the world.
This is not to conflate difference. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his unfinished The Visible and the Invisible, the apparent divergence between mind and body, subject and object, self and other is a necessary condition for the constitution of subjectivity. And that is the same difference as exists between touching and being touched, between looking and being looked at, or between the sentient and the sensible.

Both in physical and emotional terms, touched and touching are not simply ‘separate orders of being in the world’, but reversible conditions, coexisting in constant oscillation as in his famous example of one hand touching the other. Perhaps crucially The Visible and the Invisible is an exercise to leave questioning open, not to reconstitute the subject apart from the object, the other, but to exist in and experience the ontological ambiguity of the ‘flesh’ as both object and subject, body and world, art and city.
Can art touch a city?
1. Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag, 1966.
2. Empire of the Senses, The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, published Berg 2005 p. 7