PR willingness towards realistic explication separates this one from the packets of them, even for casual cliches like “slowing down the act of looking,” helping no one.
The paint/picture/screw doodads are a mystery, of interest, but mostly the show looks like your quintessential european museum show; dry, disparate and academic. Schjeldahl once named all new French art lousy, but its more your European allergy to fun, funny, or visually pleasurable art. The slicing together photo-panoramas is a trope that can die anytime now, just unbelievably dead. But, In the context of its conceptual time period, this stuff is a riot. van Elk (RIP) seems to have weaseled some interest under the Anti-fun-dictatorial-radar as subtle means, the way things are put together always slightly off, strangely chosen, mostly hidden here by piss-poor documentation which takes such for granted, the rigging for the panorama-graph, the airbrushing manipulation of photos, the possibly backlit versions, the what-is-going-on-with-the-man-hanging in the background as sort of “Three Men and a Baby” type ghost myth. It puts him in line with the contemporary materio-surrealists of much new contemporary euro art.