ABOUT DOMMY

Dommy Gielen:

A Genealogist of Memory

It was the French philosopher Michel Foucault who coined the word ‘genealogy’ for his ‘historical’ investigations. ‘Historical’, indeed between brackets, because almost every historian puts a lot of question-marks by Foucault’s methodology. One of the most important critiques was that the French eccentric thinker was very selective in collecting his historical data to make his general argument. But, by following his unorthodox strategy – which looks much more as an aesthetic interpretation of the past – Foucault contributed to enormous insights about the functioning of contemporary society, such as the construction of power structures, total institutions, ‘governmentality’ and even sexuality and the constitution of psychological illness. Maybe this is the greatest merit of the method of this ‘genealogist’: he collected in a very selective way the past to make a sufficient analysis of modern society. Even more than twenty years after his dead Foucault’s insights are still used to analyze and describe contemporary phenomena such as globalization or ecological and bio-political questions.
It would almost be ‘indecent’  to put the work of Foucault next to the oeuvre of the artist Dommy Gielen, although we all know a lot of art critics use such strategies. The only point I want to make is that this method of genealogy can open a central perspective on the work of the Belgian artist. Today a lot of artists are interested in history and the functioning of memory. A well-known artist who also builds up his oeuvre around this subject is f.e. the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans. But, although they have a chaired interest and also Gielen works sometimes with paint, every other comparison would be out of the blue. One of the most important differences is f.e. that Gielen often uses real ‘lived’ material in his works such as old newspapers, family pictures (f.e. in City of Lost Memories), typewriters and even hair. So, organical, natural materials are mixed up with man-made, cultural artifacts. As material, both have the same status in the work of Gielen of which we can conclude that they are not only used because they represent a history, but also because they have lived a life.  And, the life on which Gielen is concentrating is mostly ordinary life. Not the big HIS-story is of interest of this artist, but small histories, sometimes even banal anecdotes. Of importance is that these little histories of ordinary people are never presented on there own. On the contrary, the artist ‘weaves’ them together in a self-built network or a very heterogeneous fabric of human happenings – most of the time presented as one exhibition-project. So, history is presented as a flow of interconnected things which maybe in the first place have nothing to do with each other. Gielen is reassembling history in his own imaginative world. This is done with the same heterogeneous materials and sometimes unseen techniques (like carving clay with paint in Kaputte Jungs und Mädchen). It makes some people conclude that Gielen has no oeuvre.  And indeed, if we only look at the surface or at the used techniques and materials it is difficult to detect some consistency. But, as said, this is only on the surface. When you concentrate not only on the themes, but also on the techniques you get an other point of view on this work. The very different used techniques can in fact be seen as a literal, even physical translation of how the human memory functions nowadays. Better: they show us which mechanisms are important to memorize the past. F.e. carving in clay can be seen as carving in the memory. Are it not scars that have an important role in building-up our contemporary memories and traumas as non-remembered memories? In the City of Lost Memories Gielen is laying heterogeneous histories over each other and – more important – he tries to make a new composition of them. The composition works like a mall or a map which tries to transform the heterogeneous to the ‘over-viewable’. Is that not the universal trap of human memory: trying to put inconsistent happenings in a consistent story or picture?  Gielen is not only reassembling histories, he shows us how we are reassembling histories in contemporary society. That’s the work of a genealogist.

Pascal Gielen