Denmark

Denmark, born in Antwerp, 1950
1972, Master’s Degree History of Art and Archaeology at Ghent University.
Lives and works in Prouvy (Belgium)

The artist Denmark uses the printed products of the information age, including daily papers, leisure, job, beauty and lifestyle magazines, and the mountains of books we produce, as materials for his art. He has rendered this over-whelming flood of information and sensory stimulation into unintelligible matter since 1972. His works symbolize the consequences of our waste-producing culture by suggesting a way to deal with the ceaseless flood of information. In making print products into art he combines traditional forms of conservation, such as storage in preserve jars, bottles and sealed plastic bags, compacting and freezing, with forms of disposal including pulverization, cutting and burning.
To liberate himself from the mounts of information Denmark physically attacks them by, for instance, folding up pages of editions of magazines as small as possible ; by hand-kneading into pulp the war coverage of the entire daily press ; by filling preserve jars with the pulverized editions of daily papers or carefully filling bottles with the pulverized remains of important periodicals. Referring to the fast-paced, ephemeral nature of information and our attempts to hold on to the meaning of words inflated through overuse, Denmark also refers to these works as Dead Archives or Dead Letters. Not unlike bales of newspapers awaiting recycling Denmark wants to give us pause by reducing information products to a hermetically sealed, illegible mass.

Beatrix Ruff, Art at Ringier 1995-1998