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Joelle Tuerlinckx at the Renaissance Society - Chicago
Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Susan Snodgrass
Belgian artist Joelle Tuerlinckx's Chicago Studies: Les Etants Donnes--Space Thesis was a meditation on the nature of objecthood. Part installation, part performance, part archive, the work offered a Duchampian exercise whereby the process and site of artistic production, here the physical and conceptual spaces of the Renaissance Society, were dissected, then recontextualized.
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The title of Tuerlinckx's project references Duchamp's Etant Donnes, his last major work, as well as the gallery's location--another donne or given--on the University of Chicago campus, itself part of a larger urban geography. Intrigued by the Society's unique relationship to this institution of research and higher learning, the artist recorded the interior of Cobb Hall (where the Renaissance Society resides), focusing on empty hallways and classrooms, signage and bits of text, as well as the gallery's administrative offices. These images also included snippets of Chicago architecture and city life in the form of projected slides and videos combined with myriads of found and constructed objects in a series of sprawling installations that changed daily over the course of the exhibition.
The artist provided a loose template for the work, but each configuration was determined by a gallery assistant, with the final outcome guided by chance, also a Duchampian strategy. To this viewer's eye, the installation replicated the atmosphere of a classroom or laboratory, replete with banks of video monitors and desks containing text and image abstracts from the videos. Movable walls postered with rectangular scraps of paper sewed as makeshift bulletin boards and projection screens. A large table displayed several vignettes of objects--wooden sticks, balls, stacks of circular paper cutouts, books, plastic cups and plates--meticulously arranged to emphasize their geometrical shapes. Found objects were mixed with those constructed by the artist to imitate their real-life prototypes, obscuring the distinction between original and fake. According to Tuerlinckx, objects function as "tools that help me see." In the videos, for example, readymades were transformed into tools of calibration (a roll of paper towels used to measure the entrance hall to the gallery) or into frames (paper plates held in front of the camera lens) that changed the viewer's perceptions of a given space.
Tuerlinckx created both a depository and a taxonomy of objects and images that melded her own activities with those of the Renaissance Society. The transitory nature of Space Thesis played upon aspects of perceptual memory and institutional history; the pleasure of the work was the process of discovery/recovery and the accompanying acknowledgment of the viewer's role in its completion.
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