11. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture Part II’, in : Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (Eds.), Art in Theory. 1900-2000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Malden, Oxford, Carlton : Blackwell, 2003 : 832. 12. Philippe Van Snick, Eclats (1979), Ghent : Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, 1984. 13. Drucker 2004 : 4.
Snick’s image sequence is about dynamic, performative space, because it seems to document the act of throwing a wheel down a hill. In the post-Second World War avant-garde, the car wheel was not only a symbol of modernity, but also a means to represent dynamic, unfolding space. Thus Allan Kaprow, in Yard (1961), randomly heaped wheels in a backyard in order to make the viewer climb in and around, or Robert Rauschenberg created Automobile Tire Print (1953) as a 23-foot-long automobile tire track imprinted on paper by a car driven by John Cage. No doubt that Van Snick alludes to this kind of process-related, performative space, though he doesn’t conceive a linear time-space as in the case of Rauschenberg. A closer look at the four photographs reveals that the sequence is divided in two, each consisting of two pictures, one showing a man throwing the wheel, the other depicting the wheel suspended in the air. Furthermore, the wheels are not identical : two of them have no rim. From this it follows that the idea of progressive and dynamic space is not the primary concern of the work. The photographs of the wheel sequence, which show the circle of the wheel in various elliptical forms, demonstrate that in our perception the form and shape of an object shifts permanently according to its position in space. In this regard, Van Snick’s position is close to the phenomenological approach of such minimalist artists as Robert Morris, who wrote in Notes on Sculpture that “the very conditions under which certain kinds of objects are seen” must be taken into account.11 As a kind of conceptual counterpart of the wheel photographs, the contemporaneous series of schematic drawings investigate systematically the formal and perceptual aspects of the ellipse [27 / 28, pp. 50-55]. The “Specific Potential of the Book” (Jan Hoet) The publication’s form as a constitutive element of the work and the interplay of cognitive, perceptual and formal features are also two salient aspects of Eclats, Van Snick’s first real artist’s book from 1984.12 Published on the occasion of his 1984 solo exhibition at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent, Eclats is Van Snick’s first artist’s book in terms of a highly original and self-reflecting art work. It consists of 10 pages, each presenting a single black shape placed in such a manner that the assembled ‘éclats’ would constitute a monochrome black page [240, p. 261]. On account of the paper’s partial transparency, the shapes of the following two pages appear, gradually attenuated, thus revealing to the reader-beholder the book’s puzzle concept. If we agree with Johanna Drucker that artist’s books are “almost always selfconscious about the structure and meaning of the book as a form,”13 Eclats is a perfect example. No wonder, then, Jan Hoet, in his preface, highlights the artistic autonomy of the book. According to him, Eclats does not document
Alexander Streitberger
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