Kurt Snoekx (BE)
Life Uncensored
Introduction book memymom by Lisa De Boeck & Marilène Coolens
Published by Ludion
September 2018
Without life, art has no breath; but without art, life is at a loss for words. The one is mute without the other. It is from the almost fathomless depths of this intimate connection that memymom draws stories, gathers imagination, and creates a wondrous universe with nails that claw theatrically at reality.
memymom, the name under which the artists’ collective of the mother and daughter duo Marilène Coolens (born 1953) and Lisa De Boeck (born 1985) have been working since 2004, is grounded in a common past that is formed into visual memories of imagined, dramatized lives. An intimate family archive of analogue photos, taken between 1990 and 2003, was transformed into the artistic project ‘The Umbilical Vein’ in 2013. The images are unaffectedly playful: dress-up parties, and dreamy and fearful visions of the future that show the child as an adult and that so easily let your imagination run wild. Catwoman Uncensored shows a 9-year-old Lisa De Boeck licking her lips in a home-made superhero costume; The Misfit presents her as an 11-year-old who is literally and figuratively out of touch with herself, her generation, and the expectations of a society that has forgotten what it means to have fun; The Junkie High on Love is the logical conclusion.
These are sensitive images, which inevitably confront you with your own gaze. Little children’s grown-up fantasies (‘dreaming of a cleavage’ or of a future as an ‘overambitious’ First Lady) that remain in their right context in an intimate space – where they originally arose without any artistic pretention or ambition – but which have been offered up in public to the troubled thoughts and Zeitgeist of a doubting world. Once exposed, ‘The Umbilical Vein’ becomes a tribute to the games and creativity of children – Lisa De Boeck was 5 years old when the spontaneous photo sessions began, to the power of expression and resilience of fantasy, and to a beloved husband and father who was taken from them in 2002. The death of Jo De Boeck led to the cessation of their common project (in which Lisa’s brothers were initially also involved), and also its revival years later. Like a veil of beauty that is draped over the brutality of life (and death), it is a many-layered, living monument constructed to honour his faith in the artistic quality and power of what were essentially family tableaux.
Mother and daughter took up their game again in 2010, enabled only by the unconditional trust that they have in each other – resulting in ‘The Digital Decade’, the collective name of the photos and series that they made up to 2015. These include photography and video projects such as ‘The Baby Blues’ (a metaphorical return to ‘The Umbilical Vein’, a parody of the gimmick, of the idea that an artist always repeats the same thing), ‘La gloire fanée’ (a trick with simulated time in which Lisa De Boeck adopts the guise of a child star who has grown older), and ‘Whodunnit’ (a series of multi-layered images that shift the enigma from the perpetrator (Who has done it?) to being (Who am I? or: Who are you?), attached, independent, rooted, wrested). They are projects in which, in staggering mises en scène, art and life become intimately entangled, where reality paradoxically shines through all the acted roles because they have been given enough time to get the image to that pulsating intersection.
The staging is another element that contributes to the stunning beauty of what memymom does. You see its pictures unfold as though they were veritable theatre or opera stages. The image sometimes contains so much symbolic and intimate expressiveness that it grabs you by the throat. A person is more than one emotion, more than one history. The fact that Lisa De Boeck often inhabits the same image in various guises (as in ‘Whodunnit’) is closely linked to memymom’s penchant for narrative. Rather than making a series, the duo seeks to imbue a single image with a whole story – like stills, clotted fractions of what has occurred and is still to occur outside the image. This necessarily makes every detail important. The look that avoids the lens more often than not. The skin that shows itself to be the only, fearless constant throughout all the metamorphoses, roles, and stories. Or details such as the backdrops (almost every room on every floor of their house in Molenbeek) and the costumes (often straightjackets or corsets, clothing that fastens and constricts, which Marilène Coolens herself makes in her sewing room or which they go and pick out together at the flea market on the Vossenplein / place du Jeu de Balle).
The playful element of their images does not disappear after ‘The Umbilical Vein’ – on the contrary – but blends with a certain gravity, the realization of their public dimension, the urge to tell stories and to touch people, and the insight that you can only do that if your approach is pure. This requires adaptability and the willingness to put yourself on the line. Indeed, the gesture remains overwhelmingly intimate and the relationship evolves. Marilène Coolens is portrayed by her now-adult daughter Lisa De Boeck, often on her back, veiled or masked; both make self-portraits … The reciprocity of the very natural development of their mutual relationship results in scintillating tableaux, which occasionally stray outside the boundaries of the staging and – faithful to the roots of their shared project – are captured spontaneously. Pure.
It is that willingness to surrender themselves completely to their project, with total conviction and faith in what they are doing, that adds the extra dimension that was already budding in ‘The Digital Decade’ and has moved to the foreground in memymom’s new series, ‘Somewhere under the Rainbow’. It is the seemingly paradoxical thought that to make something that transcends you, you always have to expose more of yourself than you are really comfortable with.
Art – born from a story so intimate and unique that gets under your skin, makes itself vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life; the personal journeys of Marilène Coolens and Lisa De Boeck – briefly parted ways owing to a move. Both continued to make work independently, teasing and pushing each other. But blood will out. And this led them to join forces again, and to travel to the promised land that they had conjured so playfully in the past. As in a hall of mirrors, images emerge of inhospitable but impressive American moon landscapes, weather-beaten huts on the banks of bled-dry gold veins, little motels, long hotel corridors, celebrity homes, beaches brimming with the nostalgia of youth … and an Escape from Vegas, a story that simply refuses to end in the warmth of the setting sun.
It is in this image that the expressive power of ‘Somewhere under the Rainbow’ unfolds: a woman in fishnet stockings, a short, black dress, and Minnie Mouse ears lies stretched out on an abandoned highway that winds its way across a scorching landscape. We do not know what happened or how she got there. And yet this figure exudes an ineffable power. Exhausted but combative. Undoubtedly counting her losses, but the gain was her independence. An image – stubborn, determined – like a wake-up call that snaps you out of an enticing mirage. Humans and their quivering mirror image.
‘Somewhere under the Rainbow’ leaves ripples in the surface of the water. Ripples that softly spread out to encompass humanity as a whole and to touch upon a certain universal sense: the human person as an island, by turns indomitable yet yearning for whatever lies beyond their own guarded boundaries. We are both an inevitable truth and a transparent but equally inevitable lie. The antidote we administer to the resulting doubt is a tenacious affirmation to the world of who or what we are (or would have wanted to be), as in To Force the Light upon Yourself (from ‘The Digital Decade’).
memymom’s work is so powerful because in all its ambiguity, it hides nothing. Their images all contain the theatre and the world, representation and identity, masquerade and unmasking – like a veil across reality. But they do not veil the world. Precisely by covering and concealing, they make crystal clear that there is something to be seen, as in The Pig-faced Lady or Lampekap. ‘Somewhere under the rainbow’ there is a world of meaning behind the dream of money (Eating Pennies), fame, power, and consumer culture (Eating a Can of Coke). A world where expectations may weigh too heavily, where the I that shouts so loudly for fulfilment may no longer remember the tissue that brought it into the world, and where wounds need time to heal.
A world in the wings, behind the scenes of the stage that is Under Constant Construction – to borrow the title of the beautiful image that provides a unique glimpse into the staging practice itself. This ‘showing’ is the wondrous and wonderful core of what memymom has been doing for all these years. A core that germinates in the unconditional love they feel for each other, and that transforms the power that it gives them into a subversive act. Because there is undeniable rebellion in the ways in which Marilène Coolens and Lisa De Boeck expose themselves, throwing off the corset or uniform. It is unruly, breathtaking, irresistible, and yet also incredibly fragile. But precisely in this vulnerability and openness lies an indestructible power. Like a wisp of breath on your skin, a naked truth that falls from your lips. The power to disarm and to resist.
It is that power that has enabled the child who playfully peeked through the curtains at the stage her mother had lovingly built (Nothing is what it Seems) to evolve into a woman who fearlessly points her naked gaze at the lens of her artistic other half (Agnès). This is who we are. Who are you?