Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Study Of A Sitting Dog, 1637, black chalk on paper, 82 x 99 mm.
Sean Snyder’s practice frequently revolves around formats, standards and protocols—and their disruption. In February of 2017, while teaching at the art academy in Braunschweig, Sean Snyder came across a newspaper story about a drawing of a dog from the local Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum being reassigned to Rembrandt. With a brand name attached, this sketch now had an entirely different status. […]
That same year, student protest erupted at the academy because of the limitation of student access to the studios in the evenings and weekends. Seeing resonances with late-60s protests, Snyder and his class began examining the 1966 Situationist-inspired Strasbourg student stunts and provocations, which included the founding of a Society for the Rehabilitation for Karl Marx and Ravachol. Ravachol being a bomb-throwing 19th century anarchist. Before long, an entity calling itself The Rembrandt and Ravachol Appreciation Society began using the Rijksmuseum’s online platform Rijksstudio, which allows “members of the public” to select and crop images of artworks and other objects from the collection, to make image sets and to download these materials and “[use] them in a creative way.”
In 2019, the museum invited such members of the public to submit their own artworks for an exhibition celebrating Rembrandt (Lang Leve Rembrandt). Among the 8,500 submissions was one by The Rembrandt and Ravachol Appreciation Society. […] The Society noted that “the inventory number (Z 719) of the ‘New Rembrandt in the museum’s classification remained unchanged, revealing both the extent of the mutability of reality and the immutability of the abstract systems that govern it.” In a reenactment of the Richard Mutt affair, the museum rejected the Society’s muttley submission.
The Rembrandt and Ravachol Appreciation Society investigates lost images and the loss of radical ideas. Blending free association with systematic rigour, the Society uses standards and grids not to equalize and make commensurable, but to tease out resonances between the dissimilar. The Society links “lost and found objects” such as Rembrandt drawings, or the shells that were listed in the inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions, to “the shell game of global megacorporations.” If such corporations are the true artists and designers of the 21st century, branding and forming our world, then what would it mean to genuinely celebrate Rembrandt, or art? […]
