Jan Frederik De Cock

MANIFEST FOR SCULPTURE COMMUNISM IN VENICE.

Dear Biennial visitor,

Forgive me when I say that you are permanently being watched, tough no longer listened to.

The business world and its market have relegated you to an object, statistics applied as an ideology for the masses. The approach of this cultural industry is based on one single principle: profit

instead of beauty. I advise you to no longer follow prominent connoisseurs and advisors who reconcile you with the material world, they only propagate a false increase in supply and demand.

True culture, apart from global gigantic galleries and auction houses, reflects a world that is both permanent and infinitely open. A work of art is work; it opens up a space, a new world, a place in a city of your choice. But this opening up does not come about as a matter of course - you have to search yourself for the inner essence of the work of art, scrape it away, and expose those layers that are covered and that only reveal themselves when others have been excavated.

You have to adopt your own tradition in order to understand what I and so many other artists are doing on a daily basis.

EVERYTHING FOR YOU, VENICE is such a layer, a new communist idea - producing art for which there is no demand - where marketing is in vain and cannot be of any assistance. It is an unprecedented exhibition, making all other exhibitions superfluous, because it took place before you arrived in Venice.

EVERYTHING FOR YOU,VENICE is a work that stands for everything that has no immediate purpose on the free market with its art events. Art that, in the age of Corona relevance, openly refuses to answer to consumers collecting by ear.

EVERYTHING FOR YOU,VENICE is a necessary correction of the art economy. Each small and local correction is integrated on a global level and contributes to strengthening a new avant-garde with a vision of freedom.

EVERYTHING FOR YOU,VENICE aims to create new ways of cultural exchange and to be an aesthetic act generating social value.

After all, the experts know the very young Jan De Cock as a mid-career artist with a curriculum vitae of an established value. I declare myself a small radical visionary whose works fit perfectly within a tradition and yet do not generate value at auctions.

An artistic genealogist, as an origin, who has seen sculptures step away from their pedestals into art galleries and who has seen pedestals disappear into the auction houses themselves.

I am a dissident and an accomplice, a radical artist and a traditionalist.

I want to give, enter into the current cultural industry and take the amateur and collector seriously again by creating gifts like Trojan horses, to create delay, an opening in time. These gifts are made to preserve what cannot be preserved: artistic purity and an appeal to an aesthetic value as a religious vocation.

EVERYTHING FOR YOU,VENICE is a model, an example, but does not ask for imitation and does not want to become the norm. Time and again, EVERYTHING FOR YOU,VENICE is a universal workshop with local roots, an oeuvre under construction, here-and-now, independent.

In order to transcend everyday reality, liberated from auction records and collector's discounts,

freed from notions of fine expensive taste.

As works of art that incorporate the element of the gift as content, these sculpted gifts are in presentation and form independent of value and sponsorship. This handcrafted separation presents a new spatial platform, where, when perfected, in contrast to the work of art and its place in the city outside Giardini's Biennial walls, the artist is no longer important.

Nevertheless, sculpture communism is also an aesthetic investment in which the artist sculpts something that is different from all other objects.

It is a sculpted form of social distinction, from which an economic deficit becomes the foundation of its multiplication. Since the sculpted gift is so pure and so exceptional, it must be reproduced in abundance on paper in newspapers.

Sculpture communism is an economic, profitable movement of aesthetic investment.

EVERYTHING FOR YOU, VENICE will function without profit, but does not exclude profit.

Sculpture communism is a work that defies modern forms of work, designed to regain authority through the work of art and its context, out of the hands of the cultural industry.

After all, it should be possible for artists to achieve monetary gain from their works, while at the same time demanding absolute INDEPENDENCE from those who pay their bills every so often.

EVERYTHING FOR YOU, VENICE is as much a gift to capitalism as it is as a gift to protect works of art from capitalism, for the preservation of the independence of the total installation divided between squares, alleys and palazzos in Venice and the GESAMTWERKSTATT in the Belgian pavilion, an activity in itself. The EVERYTHING FOR YOU, VENICE total installation will be copied on scale 1/1 and reconstructed in Flanders by the artist as an ideal model for artistic freedom outside the pop-up art market of the Biennial.

The exhibition - EVERYTHING FOR YOU, VENICE - aims to bring about change without destroying the foundations of the past, because its call to change is limited and shaped by the trajectory of history it is trying to transform; the trajectory of the "free" market, of art history, of the monument of the Wunderkammer and of the cultural exchange that we call "gifts". The total installation will form the background for portraying Venetians with their temporary gifts.

Some of the Venetian group of sculptures will be sold to finance the multiplication of aesthetic paper souvenirs on a large European scale. These pure reproductions may be hung in every conceivable place and free of charge for all.

Without the permission of the Flemish Minister President Jan Jambon, the artist and his curators endlessly multiplied with love, to be given away again and again with the compliments of their creators.

If we cannot save Venice from the downfall, we cannot save the world.

Long live Venice!!

Jan Frederik De Cock