UDC-12: Vincent Dams - Almost Good

"I was thinking of V, who one day decides to make a book about his ever-expanding oeuvre. That is a bit like unpacking his library, which has been stored and is now being brought back into the light of day. It may seem that drawings and paintings are retrieved faster from the Cloud or from a USB stick than books, but for V they too are linked to specific events, to people, to temporary influences. They also disappear for a while in a cupboard, at the back of the storage, slip from the mind because they were once sold, or sometimes simply cannot be found. And then V has also made a lot, a lot of work.

Benjamin writes about the haze of mild boredom called ‘order’. That is a sensitive point, one that an artist like V certainly recognises. It is important to shake things up again and again, not to give in to expectations. But there is simply also the body (V's body), the mind (V's mind), the heart (V's heart), which go where the centre of gravity is. V is an artist who delivers himself, to himself, to art, to the public.

The true collector's library—and I would call V a pure collector, and this book his library for the moment—Benjamin calls ‘a magical encyclopedia.’ Vincent Dam's magical encyclopedia is an overflowing reservoir, a tower of Babel, an Alexandrian library, a dubious site, an endless source of joy, a solid boy's hut, a chaise longue for tenderness."

Excerpt from the essay by Margriet Kemper: Everything, everywhere, all at once - how M looks at the work of V.