Someone, somewhere once said that deeds, not stones, are the true monuments of the great. The Flemish artist Jan De Cock has already shown admirable Tatenkraft at the still tender age of 31. Plenty of deeds and no stones at all, as his monuments are in plywood. He has built installations in diverse buildings and institutions concerned with art in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. For Tate Modern, De Cock created a series of installations and sculptures, mimicking functional gallery furniture, like information desks and seating. But they seemed strangely at odds with the London gallery space as they were constructed from green plywood. As Marc Ruyters wrote in the 13th issue of The Low Countries, De Cock alters spaces using woodwork: the existing space is pushed aside and has to make room for De Cock’s own, usually wooden, construction which makes the viewer see the building, and the history attached to it, in a completely new way.

In his essay Ruyters wondered whether Jan de Cock is an innovative artist. Or is he just a furniture-maker with pretensions? Ruyters’ question was undoubtedly inspired by the fact that already at an even more tender age De Cock was a controversial figure in the contemporary art debate. Ruyters pinpoints this criticism like this: ‘It is because he declines to let himself become part of this debate and is reviving the values of modernism in a way that is almost provocative. And also because he has a rather un-Belgian big mouth.’

Now that De Cock has a special exhibition at the prestigious MoMa in New York, some critics at home will probably claim that ‘Big Mouth strikes again’. But if we are able to convince ourselves – and that’s generally a hard thing for Flemings - that modesty is a vastly overrated virtue and can agree with the eminent Whistler that the art of making enemies is a noble one, the fact remains that this is just one more impressive stage in the remarkable career of an artist who has no talent to be a shy intellectual hidden safely behind the walls of his studio.

So let’s indulge into that other noble art, the art of putting somebody else’s words to good use, by quoting from the MoMa website: ‘For his first museum exhibition in the United States, artist Jan De Cock (Belgian, born 1976) will conceive a floor-to-ceiling installation mixing color and black-and-white photographs with a series of plywood sculptural modules that recall twentieth-century abstraction. Made in response to the particular site in which they are displayed, the pictures will be of specific objects and installation views of MoMA's collection that De Cock has previously photographed from different angles and at times combined with other images culled from the history of art, architecture, and film in an encyclopedic style. The German word Denkmal, which appears in the titles of all De Cock's works, signifies "monument." However, in Dutch (the artist's native language) the expression incorporates two meanings: denk (to think) and mal (mold). For De Cock, a Denkmal is a mold of thinking. The exhibition portrays the myriad photographic references and interdisciplinary links at the center of De Cock's work.’

After this Denkmal 11 (January 23–April 14) De Cock will head off on an American Monument Odyssee, travelling from New York through Pennsylvania, Missouri, Florida, Texas and Arizona to Los Angeles. On his way over there De Cock plans ‘artistic interventions’ in and around monuments like the Seagram Building and the Grand Canyon. Temporary monuments to create fleeting impressions in the Big Wide Open. It certainly beats a traditional show in one or more Flemish museums, of which Jan De Cock once remarked that they have become catacombs, ‘impoverished hospitals’, occupied only with their own little networks. Rather than operating in such stuffiness, this young man has chosen to go west.