A book between two stools

(Florian Borkenhagen, Thronfolger Seat)

We must start by observing that the double theme chosen by the Boghossian Foundation for its new exhibition at the Villa Empain seemed to us a bit bland compared to its predecessors. The show, with 200 works on the themes of the book and the chair, is indeed more playful and less obviously relevant to the stated aim of being a centre for art and dialogue between the cultures of East and West.

Chairs and books are objects of everyday life, connected to certain developments in human culture and derived, at least in terms of their original raw materials (wood and paper), from trees. Hence the presence of a chair with branches by the Brussels artist Bob Verschueren, which occupies a place of honour in front of the large window on the villa’s ground floor and whose branching silhouette stands out against the foliage in the garden. This chair-tree is just one of many metamorphoses dreamed up by the international artists included: the chair has wings in the case of Krištof Kintera, is proliferating in the work of Elodie Antoine, devoured by crystals in Ka-Lai Chan’s work, crossed with a wheelbarrow by Florian Borkenhagen and with a radiator by Boris Dennler, deconstructed by Louise Nevelson, made up of morphine capsules in Julia Winter’s contribution and of computer parts in Benjamin Rollins Caldwell’s and...of books in Richard Hutten’s Book Chair, which thereby combines the two themes.

(Elodie Antoine, Chaises à bascule / Brian Dettmer, Cutting Gears)

Whereas formal games predominate in the chair works or works devoted to chairs, the book – sometimes folded, sometimes patiently cut up, and sometimes rolled in pearls – allows for more substantial content. The book, a revolutionary invention, threatened with extinction by new technology, a material carrier of ideas sometimes attacked with fire, can also be sacred. A whole room of the ground floor has been devoted to this aspect. In addition to valuable books on loan from the Royal Library, it includes a hyper-realist sculpture, Duane Hanson or Ron Mueck style, in which representatives of the three monotheistic religions are piled up: a prostrate imam, a kneeling priest, and a standing rabbi, each holding the holy book of one of the other two, are the constituents of Eugenio Merino’s Stairway to Heaven. Another work by the Spanish artist presents the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran just alongside, with Robert Indiana’s famous Love picked out on their covers. Dialogue through books is also a feature of a striking installation by the Moroccan artist mounir fatmi, entitled Connexion 02: in a display case, boldly coloured works – volumes of Tout l’univers, several bilingual dictionaries, Savoir communiquer en toute circonstance, and Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures – are connected to each other by cables, suggesting, on the one hand, communication between peoples and, on the other, the assembling of a bomb. Even in the era of the Internet, the book remains...explosive.

A BOOK BETWEEN TWO STOOLS > 7/9, di/ma/Tu > zo/di/Su 10 > 18.30, €4/8/10, Villa Empain, avenue Franklin Rooseveltlaan 67, Elsene/Ixelles, 02-627.52.30, www.villaempain.com