Posture Pockets N° 5: Christophe Van Gerrewey

When is a work of art finished, done, terminated? In this essay, Christophe Van Gerrewey suggests that the incompleteness of art mirrors the un de-cidability of the world, about which the last word hasn't been said yet either. An artwork can be unfinished in seven ways: it is completed by the audience, it suggests a better world, the artist can't leave it behind, it is a collective process, it reflects modesty, it is too utopian (for the time being), or its value has yet to be discovered. The photographs of ateliers and studios that illustrate this essay, show the places where all these thoughts and con-siderations can originate.

Van Gerrewey's philosophical essay is enriched in this issue with a photo section. For this image sec-tion, Katrien Daemers photographed fifteen studios of contemporary artists, leaving the artist absent but allowing the (un)completed work to speak all the more. With studio photographs of Nel Aerts, Kasper Bosmans, Ria Bosman, Michael Borremans, Luc Deleu, Jan De Vylder, Sophie Nys ...
Christophe Van Gerrewey (1982) is an author, critic and teacher. He published three novels and a collection of essays between 2012 and 2017. He has been an editorial board member of architec-ture magazine OASE since 2010 and, since 2018, of art magazine De Witte Raaf. From 2015 to 2024, he taught architectural theory at EPFL in Switzer-land. In June 2024, the survey work Something Completely Different. Architecture in Belgium will be published by MIT Press (London/Cambridge).