All that is solid melts into air, curated by the MuHKA Museum of Contemporary art in Antwerp, takes as its starting point the idea that art is the only viable locale of spiritual experience today. Its title is taken from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto and this exhibition is the artistic highlight of the City Visions festival, which takes the occasion of the 450th anniversary of the archdiocese of Mechelen, Belgium as an opportunity to consider the role of the ‘spiritual’ in our ‘post-secular’ society. Coining a rather Marxist-sounding term, ‘materialist spirituality,’ this exhibition’s curators introduce what they believe to be the kind of spirituality prevalent in today’s Western society, emblematically nourished by and experienced in contemporary art. It is in celebrating the boundaries that make up our material existence, according to the preface to the catalogue, that the world can be re-enchanted and re-mystified as the only ‘spirited’ world that we have. The art on display in the five sections of the exhibition, spread across the centre of the medieval town of Mechelen, treads these boundaries.

Not nothing is the title of the first exhibit, housed in the ‘garage’ space opposite the imposing 13th century cathedral of Mechelen. In the second room of this building is ‘Self-portrait (kissing with Scopolamine)’ (1994) by Douglas Gordon. The projection of a negative photograph shows the artist kissing his own image in a mirror. Literally, one might say, he is embracing the line between material and immaterial—his body and its image, photographic film and natural light (the negative image referencing analogue photography), gallery wall and projector’s beam. This rich tradition in conceptual art, which questions the relationship between absence and presence, is evoked through the presentation of works by Yves Klein. Consciousness was what Klein filled a gallery space with in 1958, in an exhibition entitled ‘Le Vide’. In the last room of this exhibition, Jürg Leni and Alex Rich invite the gallery visitor to compose short messages on a computer, which a special printer then cuts into blank sheets of paper. The circular holes in the paper come to denote the visitor’s thoughts, while the ensuing round pieces of paper become mere litter on the floor. The cut similarly brought consciousness to material in Gordon Matta-Cark’s ‘Office baroque’, in which he sliced geometric shapes into an empty Antwerp building a couple of dozen kilometres from the site of this exhibition back in 1974. A model of ‘Office baroque’ reminds us that Matta-Clark’s cuts filled otherwise obsolete buildings with meaning.

‘Self-portrait (kissing with Scopolamine)’ (1994) by Douglas Gordon

Arguably even the ‘immateriality’ implied in the art just discussed falls within the bounds of the materiality of our existence—of our consciousness, of our perception. It is the bearer of that consciousness and perception—our body—that the next chapter of the exhibition thematises. Man-Made, or Het maakbare mens, which actually translates into ‘makeable man,’ inhabits the vaulted space of the former church of the friars minor. In the abse, a series of small LCD screens show video works which intimate that if this exhibition is about the body, it is about defining limits again.

In ‘Ronnie Lee’ by Ron Athey (2001) we see a man performing an explicit act of self-mutilation, while in ‘Shoot’ (1971), Chris Burden’s detached voice explains the performance in which he is shot in the arm before we are shown the act’s shockingly undramatic execution. The question of pain and control thereof quickly gives way to that of procreation and the limits of man’s meddling in it. In ‘Pase. Aceso ilimitado’, through a series of photographs and an accompanying text, Pilar Delahante Matienzo elucidates her attempt at impregnating herself with the semen of a dead donor. In the video No Whites (2007) the white South African LA Raven documents her desperate search for a black man with whom to father a child for what seem to be purely aesthetic reasons.

It is refreshing that we are confronted here with questions of bioethics beyond that of the limits of our ability to fashion ourselves through plastic surgery, a question addressed through the work of French artist Orlan in many an exhibition dealing with ‘the body’. She too is represented, but thankfully, given the breadth of issues at hand, her work does not dominate. One piece in the nave of the church marks the great divide that separates man from machine. In ‘The body malleable’ (2004) by Philip Brophy, the visitor is prompted to stick his finger into what looks like a large webcam, and thus perform an act of ‘digital penetration’. In reaction to the movement of the visitor’s finger inside this unfamiliar orifice, a computer generates orgasmic sounds and fluctuating anthropomorphic shapes on a screen. Under the great vaults of the former church the comical quality of Brophy’s truly profane contraption points to the fact that even man’s most basic act is about more than mere mechanics.

The encounter-as-concept lies at the heart of the third instalment of the show, spread out across several of its venues and in some public spaces. The Work draws inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s idea that the social encounter is more important in art than the artist or the artistic product. In the courtyard of Mechelen’s cultural centre two wooden trapezium-shaped sawing supports, the smaller one leaning against the larger one, recall two animals in the process of mating. The encounter with ‘found sculpture’ (2009) by Ivan Kožarić in a public space the ensuing deliberation of the meaning of this assembly by two bystanders, may constitutes the social encounter which Arendt alludes to when discussing how art operates.

The works of The Work are deliberately ‘open’—small poetic interventions that offer themselves up expressly for the service of the viewer. In the same spirit as ‘found sculpture’, two works by Johannes Vogl present themselves as playful metaphors. ‘Watching the waves’ (2005) is a Tinguelyesque construction consisting of a lifeguard’s chair and a set of hairdriers, which by blowing into two rotating flat drums, create the sound of waves in the sea. ‘Small moon’ (2006) consists of a bicycle with switched on headlight, propped frontally against a wall so that the light beam creates an incandescent circle on the wall. The combination of two banal objects is enough to conjure up the image of a lone (bicycle-)rider on a moon-lit night in the viewer’s mind. Conceptual art, which emerged in the 1970s, and one contemporary strand of which appropriates elements of everyday life, comes to be emblematic of ‘material spirituality’. The artist re-enchants the material world we inhabit by injecting ‘thought’ into it.

Chapter four, The Thing, takes up the top floor of the Cultuurcentrum—an unequivocally secular institution in its mission. However, this set of rooms is typical of the ‘white cube’—an exhibition space which blocks out the outside world to facilitate the sole contemplation of the art object—discussed today as the latter-day space for spiritual contemplation. Further, with regard to The Thing, the exhibition booklet reads: ‘In this exhibition it is not so much the artist, artistry or artistic practice that plays a central role as the work of art as a thing: nothing more and certainly nothing less’. There is a claim to purity and hallowedness for the exhibition space and the object in such a statement. The intended sense of suspended timelessness can certainly be felt as one walks through the minimalist installation of The Thing. Upon second look, however, the art works that comprise the The Thing inevitably reveal the strings that attach them to history and society, time and place.

‘Original is full of doubts’ (2008) by Leonor Antunes consists of a black rope which hangs from the ceiling, threading through metal rods in an elegant knot before dropping softly on the floor, a rectangular grid-like net made with the same black rope, a set of metal screens and office lamps which illuminate the objects so that they cast austere shadows on the walls. In another room, in ‘Untitled’ (2008) by Eva Berendes, two elegant multi-coloured screens with wooden frames and taut string seemingly appear out of nowhere, enchanting us in their perfection. As it happens, ‘Original is full of doubts’ is a reappraisal of the architect and designer Eileen Gray’s rationalist 1920s design for her villa E1027. Similarly, an interest in the applied arts can be traced in Berendes’ work—on other occasions she has exhibited subtly patterned veil works that could be described as curtains. Obedient to the dictates of the white cube, the curators occlude such knowledge from the visitor (save the catalogue which includes short but thorough artist biographies). We see in the practice of curatorship one instance (albeit a flawed one, as it cannot fully accept the history and implications of the objects it assimilates) of the process of ‘re-enchantment’ and ‘re-mystification’ of our material world, which All that is solid melts into air professes as key to ‘materialist spirituality’.

The fifth and last exhibit, The Search for the Spirit, is housed in the hall of a 19th century school. A gallery along the sides of the hall enables us to admire the exhibition design from the top: low partitions are arranged at varying angles and in curves, forming a Modernist drawing. This is made apparent by the reproduction of a sketch by the exhibition designer, the artist Luca Frei, which in the catalogue is juxtaposed to drawings by—here she appears again—Eileen Gray. Defying the apparent order and clarity of the installation, the selection of works seems rather arbitrary. We learn from the catalogue that the objects on show ‘are linked by a search for something extra-ordinary’. Indeed this common denominator unites a very wide range of practitioners: from the designer Eileen Gray to the anonymous Indian authors behind the 19th century imperialist label ‘Company Painting’, and the 1970s collectives Image Bank and General Idea. In the video ‘Colour bar search’ (1974), members of both collectives filmed themselves playing in nature with wooden ‘colour bars’, conceived as literary devices through which messages in the world could be deciphered.

If Matta-Clark sought to put meaning into the world by severing it, Image Bank sought to extract meaning from the world by adding matter to it. In both cases matter is in fact merely re-organised (we all know that matter cannot be gained or lost, only transformed). All that is solid melts into air is a feat of such ‘re-organisation’ on the part of the curators of the MuHKA. Marx’s and Engels’ famous phrase ends: ‘all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’. When times change and ideologies are re-shuffled, all we can do is attempt to come to terms with who we are, in relation to our current world and those with whom we share it. The five curators of the five sections of this show prove that art, and the practice of curatorship within it, can help us do that.

Till 21 June 2009