newspaper 39, October 2003

Thinking about the gallery by now means thinking about a major part of our lives. I will try to reconstruct the story. Where should I begin?

Jan and I met each other in April 1987 on a tourist boat in Amsterdam. I was sitting behind him and I thought he has the loveliest head of the whole world. He told me that he wanted to have a museum and I said I wanted to be a writer. We both found each other rather opinionated but from that time on we stayed together. In 1991 we settled with our cat Kornelis on the Avenue Rogier in Brussels. Jan was working for Marie-Puck Broodthaers and I was writing my first novels. We got to know interesting painters who were not being exhibited in Belgium and so we began to organise exhibitions in our three en-suite rooms. We invited people personally. 'Jan Mot & Oscar van den Boogaard have the pleasure to invite ... to the exhibition of ... .' We filled in the names of the invitees by hand and we also wrote the adresses on the envelopes by hand. We knew the names of all the people we invited. Also those of the people who never came. Because we lived and made exhibitions in one space I had to move with my computer into the bathroom when visitors came. I had the feeling I had to make way for art. During those years we were macrobiotic and we regularly organised macrobiotic dinners for collectors and artists in our paradise where good triumphed. After a few years macrobiotics, painting, the handwritten invitations and the rooms with painted ceilings and plaster fittings began to bore us. Kornelis ran away. We moved to the centre of Brussels. On the Rue Antoine Dansaert we opened Galerie Mot & Van den Boogaard. That word gallery was important because it was not entirely self-evident for us to be gallery owners. We began to work with a new group of artists; Jan wanted to concentrate wholly on their development, as a gallery-owner. That was early 1995. We lived in a loft in the backhouse two floors above the gallery. People walked in and out, at any moment a party could start. Many people slept over, sometimes even under my desk. Having a gallery was a way of life. Initially I thought it a good combination to write and preoccupy myself with art but over the years I didn't feel I was in my place there anymore. It all went too fast, those constant changes made me restless; I wanted to concentrate completely on my own work and my own restlessness. What's more, I didn't feel like a gallery owner. I had never felt like a gallery owner. In early 2001 the white enamel sign at the entrance to Rue Dansaert 46 was replaced. I was a little sad about it. It felt as if I had been driven out. I was also relieved, in any case I no longer felt like the man in the wrong place. Galerie Jan Mot moved to Rue Antoine Dansaert 190 and the old gallery was from then on known as AD 46. Soon the name of Galerie Jan Mot is going to change once again. The word ‘galerie’ will be omitted because it is clear that the space behind the large glass store front is a gallery. And also because Jan can never pick up his registered mail because he can not prove that Jan Mot and Galerie Jan Mot are one and the same. And also because it makes sense. He acts in his own name, in a way that is his own, not as a gallery owner but as Jan Mot. Whenever I look at the façade with his name on it I am always reminded of the words of Andy Warhol: ‘The people who have the best fame are those who have their names on stores’.

The changing of the name of the gallery is the second part of the show entitled The Gallery Show* which is organised in collaboration with Joe Scanlan. In this show, a series of elements pertaining to the operation of the gallery are highlighted. Ordinarily these elements are subordinate to the main function of the gallery, which is of course showing art. The idea of this program, however, is to focus on the physical aspects of the gallery itself; to investigate the practical decisions that cause a particular space to come to be defined as an art gallery; and to research how these decisions effect the art the gallery shows, the visitors it receives, and the traces they leave. In relation to this part of The Gallery Show the complete list of all the previous gallery activities is reproduced in the form of an agenda in the supplement of this issue of the Newspaper.

* Title by Tino Sehgal