PAINTING AGAINST TIME THE PICTORIAL PRACTICE OF KARIN HANSSEN: A DISCURSIVE CONTEXT Johan Pas
The authentic forgery At a critical moment every artist realizes that what he or she does appears to have been done earlier already. To a large extent, being an artist consists in dealing creatively with this sobering thought. Those who, in the late 20th century, choose for a centuries-old medium such as painting are certainly confronted with this problem. The Belgian painter Luc Tuymans described this experience as follows: ‘When I was eighteen I won a prize of the then Gemeentekrediet with a selfportrait: a sum of money and a book on James Ensor. I was convinced I had painted an original work, until I saw a self-portrait of James Ensor in the book. It was different formally, but exactly the same conceptually. So I had involuntarily made a copy and I felt truly embarrassed. I then realized that there is no other way anymore and that you had better bend this embarrassment into a workable construction. What you can do, is to make an authentic forgery and that is possibly the only thing you can do.’ 1 The anecdote Tuymans reconstructs here as the aha-experience that has steered his practice can be situated in 1976. The young painter realizes that total originality proves to be an illusion and that the only workable method is ‘authentic forgery’ and this implies that the past cannot be denied. In 1976, this conclusion does not only coincide with the origin of punk (the first subculture that turned its back on the future), but also with the rise of postmodernism. In the same year L’ideologia del traditore. Arte, maniera, manierismo by the Italian critic Achille Bonito Oliva appears. In this study on mannerism in the 16th century the Italian art historian launches the term ‘Transavantguardia’ to describe 1. Luc Tuymans, Schilderen is een anachronisme, in Belgisch Atelier Belge. Dertien kunstenaars over hun identiteit, La Renaissance du Livre, Brussel 2001, p. 163.
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