Rendez(-)vous
Event
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent
28 April 1993 - 27 June 1993
"In the show in Ghent called Rendez-Vous, three artists were asked to do work with people’s favorite objects. People of the city of Ghent were asked to bring in their favorite objects, and we three artists would do things.
Of course, they were silly objects, so many false teeth for example. And how is that even someone’s favorite object? It’s not their own false teeth, it’s their grandfather’s false teeth or something. So it’s not their favorite object, it’s some object they think is funny, they think it’s humorous. (...) In one piece I used teeth from a person as teeth on a big snake. You could see that they were false teeth, so I wasn’t pretending that they were snake-teeth. I was saying, “I put human false teeth into this snake.”
It was very clear what was going on. I wasn't making fun of the false teeth, and I wasn’t denying their past history either. I was giving them a new job since they didn’t have a job anymore. And they are not teeth, they are marvelous plastic made to look like teeth. So it would be very easy in this Rendez-Vous to put people’s favorite objects in some way that plays along with those people’s senses of humor about the objects. But I don’t have any interest in that." [full text here]
