A Taste of Brussels's Strangest Art.

Art Truc Troc

The Biggest Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Belgium

Brussels, Sat. Feb 2^nd

Truc Troc, funny name, funny idea. Basically, it is a modern art exhibition with artwork of all kinds, from painting, to collage, to statues, to photographs, made by young artists from all over Europe. But, what makes this art exhibition so unique is that everyone and anyone can come and offer anything they want to the artist in exchange for a piece of art. When you walk into the exhibition, you are immediately given a stack of post-it notes, each with an area to write your name, email, phone number and offer. You can offer something for as many pieces of art as you want, and the artwork has no limit to the number of offers it can get. If there is a popular piece that many people like, the piece would have post-it notes stuck all around it on the wall. Reading what people offer is one of the best parts of the exhibition. You read more normal things like, “A week in my beach house in the South of France with all meal included!”, and then stranger things like, “I’ll make you the best Moussaka in the world!” or “A case of Jack Daniels!” or “My old racing bike!” or “10 kisses!” or “1 kilo of chocolates!” or even, “Free cigarettes from the ULB (university in Brussels) library for one year!”  I took pictures of some of the most amusing ones, take a look! Some of the post-its are in English and others French. I think many people wrote them in English because many of the artists were from other countries other than France/Belgium.

This is brilliant...every contemporary artist should also know how to play the sax.

Mumfred and Sons...yes!!

"Plenty of kisses everywhere"

Wine...always acceptable. 

"Here, I'll give you a death sentence for your artwork!"

I think I'll take the pancakes :)

Now..it depends what this person is thinking when they say party...

I think this guy really likes Jack Daniels...

So Brussels..

The artwork was quite entertaining... most of it, very strange and random. But many obviously had a message that the artist was trying to get across. And a lot concerning the subject of sex (welcome to Europe..) I told my friend that is this exhibition was in the U.S., you would have to show and ID and be at least 21 to visit. He didn’t believe me.

Take a look at some of the most amusing pieces of art I saw:

Brussels Center!

Room full of  yellow post-it notes...genius!

For some reason, this just makes me laugh

And this too.

Metaphor for how the artists feel when they look at all the post-it notes they have to read and think about until they make a decision. It's hard work!

Very, very strange.

Even stranger... 

Now, this is quite intriguing. The artist removed all the "stuff" from his vacuum bag and displayed it very neatly on pins (like you would with insects or butterflies).  

You can see here, he found q-tips, rubber bands, gum and candy wrappers... Not  really sure what the special message  this art is trying to get across but I thought it was interesting. What do you think?
Ne Change Rien

On Sunday night, I attended a screening of a movie directed by a quite famous (in Europe, at least) Portuguese guy named Pablo Costa. I was invited to this screening (and put on the guest list!) by a friend of this guy that I think I once talked about in this blog before. He is an old guy (maybe 60 years old...but he smokes so maybe he just looks older than he is) I met one of my first weeks in Brussels when I was just standing outside Bozar (the famous art/music organization here). He started talking to me in French, asking if I enjoyed the exhibitions. From then on, he contacts me every week and invites me to concerts, art expos and movie screenings. I’ve already seen impressive art-nouveau furniture, an expo of a famous Belgian painter, a Bach concert with violins and clavichord (which was really cool in the beginning, but after 2 hour straight of listening to the twangy sound of the clavichord, it got to be a little too much).  I also went to an amazing piano concert by a Chinese/British man who was very very young, maybe 25. But he was just amazing. He played all the songs by memorization and with total connection to the music. He was jumping off the piano bench and swinging his hands and arms the whole time.  And these weren’t easy songs either; he played Bach, Schoenberg, Mozart and Schubert. 

This time, Pierre (the guy from Bozar) introduced me to a younger friend of his who invited me to this screening by Pablo Costa. The movie was called Ne Change Rien and (taken from the summary on Bozar website) “born out of the friendship between the actress Jeanne Balibar, sound engineer Philippe Morel and director Pedro Costa. Costa films Balibar, the singer, between rehearsals and studio recordings, concerts and singing lessons, performing her album with musician Rodolphe Burger. Filmed in a highly contrasted black and white, Costa’s work plays on silences and hesitations, the face and voice of Balibar periodically emerging from darkness before returning to nothingness.” The title comes from the saying: “Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent,” which translates to “change nothing so that everything differs.”

The movie was very artistic and you could definitely tell Costa put a lot of thought into the shadows and lights and angles of the camera. A lot of the time he filmed the actors from below, looking up at them, which gave the entire film a kind of dream like effect. He also mixed in some very random, but strangely fitting, scenes, such as a sudden change from a scene of Balibar in her recording studio to a scene showing two older Asia women sitting at a table in a kitchen, smoking and looking lazily off into the distance while listening to some ballroom dance music in the background. Very strange, but that is what art is all about.