Reinventing Memory and Memorial: Jasper de Beijer at the MCA Denver

Jasper de Beijer’s, “Paperworks” exhibit, featuring “Le Sacre du Printemps,” opened yesterday at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The Dutch artist’s work includes photography and small-scale sculptures of war-torn ruins, mangled combat animals, and portraits of bandaged faces.

The unsettling quality to his work arises not entirely from the violent content (which references WWII), especially in a world bombarded by media images of ongoing war, but most deeply in the play of reality and adulteration. The photographic portraits of wounded soldiers aren’t of in-the-flesh faces, but appear like rag dolls. The sculptures of destroyed towns are made with paint, paper and glue. There is the sense of the artificial and too-real, the historical and present, collapsing into each other to coagulate into the emotional wreckage of memory. De Beijer’s work teaches us how to remember and feel for what many have only experienced second hand on the 10’o clock news. De Beijer provokes, what Russian writer, Viktor Shklovsky, perhaps meant when he said, “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” This political quality of art that teaches us how to reach for and occasionally touch the raw and grit of experience by reaching past desensitization, further exposes perhaps a new (more genuine?) medium of journalism and documentation: the artist and his or her art.

This exhibit is currently on-view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 1485 Delgany St, at 15th St. For more info visit www.mcartdenver.org