A man is looking at his own face

The phenomenon of 'video art’ is still subjected to a certain creation of myth. Next to the almost evident frustration against a new and unknown medium, this uneasy feeling from the viewer is mainly caused by a wrongly adjusted expectation pattern. He expects to discover a new and coherent art movement. In my opinion, the responsibility for this misunderstanding lies with the intermediaries, especially the organisers of the events and the critics, who have presented 'video art' as such to the public.

This quote from the article “Videokunst heeft nog geen plaats gevonden” [Video art hasn't found a place yet], written by Jan Debbaut for the magazine Streven in 1977, sketches the difficulty of contextualizing a new medium within the arts. At many stages of the research project ‘Video Art in Belgium in the 1970s’, we were confronted with this conflict. How to define the start of ‘video art’? And, more importantly, what do we consider to be art?

The research project ‘Video Art in Belgium in the Seventies’ outlines the very beginning of the discovery of a new medium: a period of experimentation and exploration. As Debbaut suggested, many critics, theoreticians and researchers wanted to create a coherent and concise new movement. This desire, however, is a pitfall when trying to sketch the movements and experiments that took place in Belgium in the seventies. One that we have tried (often with some frustration) to avoid. Moving away from structured dialectical thinking, we preferred looking for points in this history that mattered and influenced the dynamics of the medium.

One of these is undoubtedly the ICC (Internationaal Cultureel Centrum), an institute for modern art housed in the Royal Palace on the Meir in Antwerp between 1970 and 1998. This essay is an attempt to sketch different movements in which the ICC played a central role, and how it fitted into the wider movement of video art in Belgium in the seventies. It does not present a clear or coherent narrative, but rather a description of elements related to the ICC that I believe had an impact on the way video art lighted up Belgian and international screens. These are categorized into: the institute, technology and geography.

In addition to archival research, interviews with people who played key roles in this history made a very important contribution to this project. They tied together various different traces and videos we came across. We quickly learned that a lot of this narrative is closely connected to a spirit of the times. Quite a few exhibitions that took place at the ICC were planned in informal settings: in cafés such as the Hotsy Totsy in Gent, or at chance encounters. In the seventies, contacts between artists, curators and institutions were often more informal and more direct. A meal as a form of payment, a crate of beer traded for painting the van that would become the Continentale Film & Videotoer… were common. This laissez-faire economy is an important factor, but also makes tracing its history a challenge.

At the same time, this challenge proved the value of this research project today. As time passes, a large part of this history disappears along with the people who can recount their experiences and give context to the works they created. The interviews we conducted provided insight into the environment that welcomed the new medium of video in Belgium. The goal of this research project was not to create a fixed history of video art in Belgium, nor should it be seen as an endpoint. It was an exploration of artists and the video’s they made, but also of the context in which video became an artistic medium in Belgium. The conclusions are mere beginnings from which, hopefully, new stories and art can be derived.

THE INSTITUTE

A man stares into the camera. This image is replaced by an image of the back of his head. He stares at a TV screen. He moves towards and away from the screen. As the back of his head moves away, his face is revealed on the TV screen. Then follows a crossfade in which two hands try to frame the TV screen. His hands shape the contour of his face as it appears on the screen. The soundtrack contains a low incomprehensible distorted voice. The next scene shows a man covering his face with his hands. Then we jump to the shot of a vertical TV screen on which we see that same image. Several layers of hands are shown on top of each other. The following scene shows the profile of a man, jumping from the left side to the right side of the screen. On the soundtrack we hear a piano tune. The same man is shown both on the left and the right sides of the screen. A man is looking at his own face and tries to kiss himself.

Nothing ever happens in Antwerp!

Experiments for Autocommunication, made in 1975, was one of the first videos created in the production studio Continental Video. The two men who appear on screen are Flor Bex and Chris Goyvaerts, filmed in the cellars of the ICC. It was founded in 1969 as an initiative from the Flemish ministry of Culture as a result of several movements in Belgium’s cultural landscape. One of these led to the occupation of the KMSKA (Royal Museum of Fine Arts) by the group VAGA (Vrije Actiegroep Antwerpen). In the aftermath of May ’68, a group of artists including Panamarenko, Hugo Heyrman and Jef Verheyen addressed different social and cultural issues in the cityscape of Antwerp and Belgium more broadly. Among other issues, they addressed the absence of an institute for contemporary art in Belgium. Neighbouring countries already housed institutions such as De Appel in Amsterdam, and in Paris the construction of Centre Pompidou had already started, as promised by president Georges Pompidou. In response, VAGA spread a pamphlet with the motto ‘Nothing ever happens in Antwerp!’. This action quickly received media attention, was picked up at the political level and stimulated attention to the need for an institute for contemporary art in Belgium. After many discussions back and forth, Frans Van Mechelen, then Minister of Culture, was given the opportunity to house a new cultural centre at the Royal Palace in Antwerp.

Ludo Bekkers, art critic and programme maker for public broadcaster BRT specialized in directing art programmes, was appointed founder and director of the ICC. Bekker’s career began in radio, where he directed and presented several programmes. He later moved to TV, where he made programmes on arts, photography and architecture. It is important to note Bekker’s democratic stance on contemporary art and his vision to establish a dynamic space where various art forms could intersect. As one of his policies, he called the ICC a cultural centre rather than a museum, with the intention of creating a more open and democratic space. From the beginning, the ICC always had two or three exhibitions running simultaneously, featuring photography, sculpture, painting, performance, etc. The strategic location of the institute, in the middle of one of Antwerp's busiest streets, made it accessible to both people who followed modern art and curious passers-by. Bekkers organised concerts and film screenings in order to attract as wide an audience as possible. He believed in film as a democratic medium which would attract many types of people. His ideas, however, were not always supported on a political level, which was reflected in the small amounts of grants awarded to the institute. In 1972, two years after laying the foundations of the ICC, Bekkers’ mandate ended. For a large part because of his frustrations with the low budget he had to work with, he refused to renew his mandate and returned to his former workplace at the BRT.

Who needs a new desk every year?

Bekkers' position as director of the cultural centre was opened up and out of 13 applicants, the choice fell on Flor Bex, who was already working for the ICC as a staff member. Bex followed Bekkers’ democratic vision on contemporary art, but showed more ambition to exhibit internationally renowned artists. His close ties with the gallery circuit in Belgium such as Wide White Space and the German gallerist Gerry Shum brought him into contact with the works of upcoming contemporary artists such as Joseph Beuys, with whom he wanted to organise an exhibition. Bex hired curators Claude Devos and Jan Debbaut to help him with the exhibitions and production at the ICC. In his first year as director in 1974, he curated an exhibition together with Claude Devos on contemporary Flemish painting and sculpture featuring artists such as Raoul De Keyser, Hugo Duchateau, Filip Francis and Jef Geys. He also brought international artists to the cultural centre, such as Duane Michals and Pieter Engels, and promoted Belgian artists in his international networks.

Without the luxury of email and the internet, people were more likely to travel to meet artists, curators and collectors in person. Networks were created in bars and at social events. As described already, the Hotsy Totsy cafe was an important place for the contemporary arts in Belgium. This is where Jan Debbaut, who would later become curator for the ICC, met artists such as Joseph Kosuth, John Baldessari, Art & Language, Sol Lewitt and Carl André. (interview Jan Debbaut) Via the Open Encounters on Video, which I will discuss in more detail later, networking days allowed video artists, theorists and curators to debate video at different venues, which played a leading role in the emergence of the medium within the arts.

In order to get more and better quality exhibitions at the institute, Bex sought ways to increase financial and productional resources of the ICC. He worked with conscientious objectors, who were paid by civil defence rather than by the institute. Some of these men, such as Chris Goyvaerts, Chris Eeckhardt and Frank Van Herck, became technical assistants for what would become Continental Video. Bex founded several non-profit organisations dedicated to film and photography and architecture, including the video studio Continental Video. In this way, he created more financial autonomy and did not have to justify every expense to the administration. He officially entered his expenses as office furniture, but actually spent the money on video tapes and other equipment. ‘Who needs a new desk every year', Bex said in our interview with him. The first camera he bought was officially registered as furniture.

Mobile museum of modern media

A key event for the introduction of video at the ICC was the Continentale Film & Videotoer (1973), organised by the members of ARFO (Artworker Foundation): Hugo Heyrman, Luc Deleu, Chris Goyvaerts, Wout Vercammen, Ludo Mich and Robbe De Hert. ARFO was a socio-cultural organisation founded by Heyrman in Antwerp in 1971. The idea behind the video tour was to create a moving museum for experimental film and video art. Deleu, who had a background in architecture, was doing research on mobile architecture, and the plans for a mobile museum of modern media were born. Goyvaerts explains:

In the beginning it came down to renovating a truck into a cinema room. We found an old demonstration vehicle from Tomado, a Mack Lanova. A family member put me into contact with someone who owned a big company in Antwerp which produced trucks. There, I got the truck painted white for 500 francs and a crate of beers. Normally that would have cost a fortune, we couldn't have paid for it.

The result was a bus in which around thirty people could sit. At the back, there was a 16mm projector borrowed from the Ministry of Culture’s film service. External loudspeakers played the film’s soundtrack outside the bus. Due to technical issues, the Artworker Foundation never managed to show video art in the truck, but it toured Belgium and the Netherlands with experimental and political films from directors such as Raoul Servais, Norman McLaren, Robbe De Hert, Ludo Mich, Patrick Conrad, Frans Buyens, Aimé Vercruysse, Georges Smits, Willy Verlinden and Jacques Charlier.

The films were donated by different embassies, organisations such as Fugitive Film, several independent film production houses and young filmmakers. The first stop of the tour was the ICC, which was important for the later development of this project as it brought them into contact with Bex. In the course of two months, the van toured several cities, including Turnhout, Breda, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Hasselt, Leuven, Brussels and Ghent. The Continentale Film & Videotoer laid the foundation for the production studio Continental Video, which was housed in the basement of the ICC. This was the first video studio freely accessible to artists in Belgium and abroad who were interested in discovering and using the new medium in their artistic practice.

When the tour was over, Chris Goyvaerts had to do his military service, but he chose to become a conscientious objector. Bex suggested he join the ICC. ‘At a certain moment I brought in Chris Goyvaerts and asked him: “What interests you?” Apparently he was interested in video. Then I decided: I have someone who’s interested, so I’m going to buy a video camera.’ (videointerview Flor Bex) Because of his interest in video, Bex brought along a camera with which they started experimenting. The first video work they made with this camera was Five Acts on Screen by Mark Verstockt.

The First Portapak

As Jan Debbaut, art critic and former curator for the ICC, tells us: ‘It all began with the idea: we need a video recorder to document all the performances. When the recorder arrived, we began to experiment.’ In 1974, Flor Bex invested in the first Sony Portapak, a registration module and a large black and white camera. Many of the first video’s we discover are indeed documentation of exhibition installations and performances. But quickly after its arrival, we saw experimentations with the medium video. An example of this is Experiments for Autocommunication (1975) by Hubert Van Es and Chris Goyvaerts, discussed at the introduction of this article. ‘Try and kiss yourself. Try to come into contact with yourself and kiss yourself. Then you will experience an impossibility to come into contact.’ (videointerview Flor Bex) With Experiments for autocommunication, Van Es and Goyvaerts explore the new possibilities and limitations of video.

Hubert Van Es was the pseudonym under which Flor Bex created his own artistic oeuvre. Before becoming the director of ICC, Bex had already been active as an artist, but later he created works under the pseudonym Van Es. Hubert was Flor Bex’s middle name and Van Es was derived from the first part of his mother’s maiden name Van Esbroek. This double identity remained a secret for many years, after which his dual role as an artist and museum director was widely criticized. Bex sent tapes to national and international festivals under the name Hubert Van Es. Many artists and other prominent figures criticized him for having too much control over the public opinion of his works as both an artist and museum director. Nonetheless, these works are important formal experiments with video. Waterfire (1975), for example, simply shows the Coo Waterfalls, but placed vertically. Because of the sunset, a red-orange colour appears on the waterfall. His experiments questioned the perception of the medium video: both its limitations as well as its possibilities. (interview Flor Bex) During our research, we considered this kind of work as utopian experiments with video, in search of the medium's potential.

Art in exchange for mother tapes

Any artist with an idea for a video was welcome to realise it at the production studio Continental Video. They called Bex or Goyvaerts to make an appointment and, together with the assistants, figured out how to transform their ideas into tapes. The mother tape remained at the ICC, along with a contract granting the institute permission for its screening. The artists were given three copies. There were exceptions, such as Lili Dujourie’s Hommages, for which the artist preferred to work alone. Frank Van Herck, who was working at Continental Video as a conscientious objector, often took the camera home with him to experiment and make sketches for video works. He would then return to the studio the next day to re-record his videos professionally. ‘That’s what I really liked about the medium video: you could see them straight away. With open reels you could even turn with your finger, forwards and backwards. Now this is closed off and you can’t access it anymore. That's evolution.’ (interview Frank van Herck)

Around 1975, many of the exhibitions at ICC were accompanied by video, either as a means of documentation or as autonomous works of art. Goyvaerts and Debbaut had the idea of making interviews with each of the artists who exhibited at the ICC, but that plan was never realised. As Debbaut mentions in his article ‘Some Notes on Video Art in Belgium’, one of the main reasons to buy a camera was also to document the many performances at the ICC. In his book Beeldenstorm in een Spiegelzaal, Johan Pas mentions that ‘reflection and narcissism form crucial aspects of the conceptual body-oriented art practice of the sixties and seventies, which among others took place in the ICC’ (Pas 2005, 26). This not only clarifies the great amount of performance art at the ICC in the mid-seventies, but also the reflection that artists are the main subject of many of the video’s produced. This also made it difficult to distinguish documented performances from video works. As Dagmar Dirkx mentioned in their essay ‘THE 1970s___’, published as the exhibition text, ‘video was an afterthought, a footnote’. Only very few video’s were not made as a means to an end.

674 videos

At the beginning of this research project, I was kindly provided a list of the ICC video’s inherited by M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp) and I was also given access to the ICC archives. The videos had been digitised and preserved by M HKA, but a detailed catalogue was missing. In total there were 674 titles of videos made between 1972-1989, about a hundred of which were realised by Continental Video. The other videos were donations or exchanges with artists and other institutions. Some were clearly documentations of performances and exhibitions, while for others the intention with which they were recorded was not very clear. If artists are often the main subject of their video work, it is difficult to distinguish performance art from video art. Also, the same video sometimes appeared several times in the collection, with minor changes that created different versions of the same work. There were also traces in the archives of plans for a video library that would make tapes available to the public. After extensive research, we concluded that the video library was never formally realised. Every two months, however, the ICC did publish brochures summing up every production created by Continental Video. These brochures give a good insight into which artists were releasing videos through the studio.

NEW TECHNOLOGY

LUVOX

In comparison to neighbouring countries, video arrived quite late in Belgium. In his article for Studio International, Debbaut concluded that this was because there was no recording material available for artists to borrow. This changed with the founding of Continental Video. ‘The relatively late introduction of video hardware in Belgium (compared with other European countries), especially in the cultural infrastructure, has had a direct impact on the quality and quantity of the works realised.’ (Debbaut 1976)

Flor Bex bought and borrowed video material from, among others, LUVOX, a company in electronics owned by Lu Van Orshoven that rented out and sold video material to media professionals. As Debbaut explains:

Actually, you could describe the beginning of video art in Belgium as a triangular relationship: You had Flor Bex and his network, Lu Van Orshoven and LUVOX where Continental Video got their equipment, and then you had the studio in the cellar of the ICC. That explains the hardware, the software: the people and the budget of the ICC. This triangle meant the emergence of video. (interview Jan Debbaut)

LUVOX played an important role because it made interesting deals with the production studio. The ICC did not have sufficient funds to hire equipment, but Van Orsenhoven recognised that experimenting with his material would teach him other video techniques that he could use to promote his material to new clients. ‘Today they would call this field “research and development” in a company.’ (interview Jan Debbaut)

There was a close relationship between LUVOX and the technical assistants of Continental Video. Once they had finished their service as conscientious objectors and could no longer be paid by the government to work for ICC, they went to work for Van Orsenhoven. Even during their time at the ICC, they often assisted on LUVOX productions. They then brought the knowledge they gained in the field back to the studio to help artists with their productions. From 1976, about eighty per cent of Belgian video productions were made at Continental Video.

Wanna make a video?

Despite their extensive technical knowhow, Continental Video's assistants often found themselves challenged by the artists’ wild ideas. Goyvaerts recalls:

They came with an idea, and then we explored the possibilities together. Some were very reasonable, such as Nyst. Al we needed was: a camera, a piece of paper, pencils, a few objects and that was it. Others took a mile when you gave them an inch. A film with Byars, for example, was unbelievably difficult to make. A not-moving still image was a very big challenge at that time. A freeze frame at that time was not a freeze frame, it was a shiver frame. (interview Chris Goyvaerts)

There was also the idea of throwing a camera from the third floor of a building, but that video work was never realised.

In the early days of video art, Debbaut saw two movements on an international level:

On the one hand, you had artists such as Nam June Paik who experimented with a new medium. This is about pushing buttons and turning wheels to see where the medium can take you. On the other hand, you had artists such as Lili Dujourie, who used video purely as a documentation of a performance, an example being her Hommages à. (Jan Debbaut, interview)

Many videos from the 1970s belong to the first category: artists exploring the possibilities of the new medium. And it was not just any new medium, but one that was easily reproducible and could be used as mass production.

Leo Copers describes: ‘It had just been invented: video. They came and asked me: ‘Wanna make a video?’ You’d be stupid to say no.’ (interview Leo Copers) For him, video was like a tube of paint. You use it and try to make something with it. The discovery of video as a medium also meant a whole new language and set of tools with which the artist could work. This included technical issues such as direct reflection, which was not possible with film, the ‘snow’, and the portability of a video camera, which brought the outside world inside. But also content-related aspects such as references to TV and mass media.

In his essay, Debbaut writes: ‘Most of them could not be realised, or were realised under unfortunate circumstances technically. Since there is insufficient equipment in museums, academies or galleries, hiring more sophisticated material is a handicap for such works.’ (Debbaut 1976, Studio International) Despite close cooperation with LUVOX, the studio at the ICC was not sufficiently equipped to realise the full potential of video art in Belgium. As written in other articles, there were also collaborations with the RTBF, but in general there was very little technical support.

End of an era

After all kinds of possibilities had been discovered, many artists started using video more often to tell stories. At this point, Bex began to lose interest in video, because according to him the applications of the medium were no longer innovative, the utopia was lost. (interview Flor Bex) Rather than technical or substantive experiments, video was used like narrative film. An example of a video that crosses the line is Ludo Mich’s Lysistrata (1976), a soft-porn feature film recorded on video in the cellars of the ICC. Lysistrata was based on Aristophanes' classic (feminist) comedy and all the actors were naked, to emphasise Aristophanes’ anarchist ideas.

GEOGRAPHY

Internationale kunstenaars in België

As Jan Debbaut told us: ‘If there were hundred people working with video in Europe, that would have been a lot already.’ (interview Jan Debbaut) Everybody knew each other. People got together and at big art events you probably knew everyone. Letters were written, but most arrangements were made face to face. When travelling to arrange exhibitions, people were most often introduced to each other’s networks. One of Bex’ aspirations for the ICC was to make it a prominent place for contemporary art in Belgium. As mentioned, he came into contact with artists such as Joseph Beuys through his network in the gallery circuit. By 1975, Bex had programmed Dan Graham, Lea Lublin, Michael Druks, Gerald Minkoff, Fabrizio Plessi, Christina Kubisch and Sacha Sosno, who were working with video in their exhibitions. Some of these artists also made new productions at the ICC with Continental Video. These exhibitions were not the first in Belgium dedicated to video, as galleries such as Elsa Von Honolulu-Loringhoven in Ghent had already organised some. But exhibitions at the ICC were accessible to a wider audience. Due to its already mentioned democratic ideals, the cultural centre reached a wider audience than galleries, which were more focused on the private sphere and intimate circles.

It is impossible to directly measure the impact of these exhibitions on Belgian video art, but they opened up the medium to a Belgian audience. In 1975 there were eleven Belgian artists who produced works with Continental Video: Leo Copers, Pierre Courtois, Jacques Lennep, Jacques Lizène, Filip Francis, Hugo Heyrman, Danny Matthys, Hubert Van Es, Guy Mees and Ludo Mich.

Belgium International

The advantage of video was that tapes could be easily copied and so Bex often sent them to festivals and happenings around the world. Because of the medium’s technical reproducibility, the tapes often found their own way. This gave Belgian video art international visibility. An important event aimed at international networking were the Open Encounters on Video organised by Jorge Glusberg.

Smuggling cameras

Bex met Glusberg in 1974. He was an Argentine artist, businessman, author, curator and professor and the director of CAYC (Centro de Art y Comunicación), which he had co-founded. Glusberg was also the owner of a company that dealt in electronics and video material copied from other companies. His dual role as company owner and CAYC director made the medium of video accessible to Latin American artists associated with CAYC. It was therefore no coincidence that CAYC became one of the most important centres for video in Argentina and South America.

Glusberg opened his home to artists and intellectuals, offering them a safe haven for artistic and political discussions. The main focus of the CAYC was communication, architecture and visual arts. The programme included lectures as well as exhibitions by internationally renowned figures such as Jorge Luis Borges, Lucy Lippard and Umberto Eco. Similar to what Bex did for the ICC, Glusberg invited both local (Argentinian) and international artists to the CAYC. He also strove to promote Latin American artists abroad. This resulted in the 1974 exhibition Kunstsystemen in Latijns Amerika [Art Systems in Latin America] at the ICC, for which fifty artists – including Glusberg himself – were given the opportunity to exhibit their work.

In his contribution to the catalogue, Glusberg wrote:

The cultural process of Latin America is different from that of the countries of the First World. We may say that Latin American countries, which belong in what has been called the Third World, are characterized by domination, underdevelopment and the expression of this domination and underdevelopment at different levels: political, social, cultural, institutional, artistic. (...) the cultural development of Latin America is closely connected with a search that will not take place without the distraction of external domination. We may therefore speak of an art of domination of the countries that have the power and the wealth. (Glusberg, 1973)

Doing so, Glusberg emphasised the need for cultural exchange between different nations and continents, questioning the frameworks within which artists and institutions function and the mechanisms which suppress the art produced by non-western nations.

The introductory text, also written by Glusberg, clarifies and builds on this statement. He describes how he asked each contributing artist to stay within the limits of the IRAM restrictions 4504 and 4508. IRAM (Instituto Argentino de Racionalización de Materiales) had been founded as an independent organisation to regulate technical standards in Argentina. Code 4504 referred to the format of the page, which western standards recognised as A4, and code 4508 referred to a set of layout guides and lines used to indicate sections and cuts in technical drawings. These guidelines were a part of all contributions in the exhibition catalogue. Glusberg’s reference to the IRAM stemmed from the focus on communication embedded in the philosophy of CAYC, but also clearly referred to the dominant systems from the West that were not as evident or accessible in places like Latin America. In the year this exhibition was organised, Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay were under military rule. The focus on communication is a response to that oppression, but also to the aftermath of colonial rule in Latin America. Glusberg recognised video as a communication tool that crossed borders. Very early on, he saw the medium’s economic and political importance.

Alongside ICC’s exhibition, the event ‘Videotapes van de coöperatieve Third World Edition’ [Videotapes of the cooperative Thirld World Edition] was organised, featuring video works made in the context of the exhibition. Participating artists included: Luis Pazos, Hector Pupo, Jorge Gutierrez, Edgardo A. Vigo, A. Alvarez, Z. Corrdia, D. Gomez, Enrique Torres, Jorge Velturtas, Jaime Davodavich, Juan Carlos Romero and Eduardo Leonetti.

Glusberg was later sent to jail because his political activism was seen as a threat to the Argentinian government. Roger D’Hondt says: ‘Together with a few other people in Europe, we sent a telegram to the president of Argentina. I wrote letters with Glusberg and then he was released.’ (interview Roger D’Hondt)

Open Encounters

After the exhibition Aspects of the Belgian Art in Argentinia (1974), Glusberg and Bex organised the 5th Open Encounter on Video in the ICC. Between 1974 and 1978, there were a total of ten international Open Encounters on Video, video exhibitions and conferences that took place in both Europe and South America.

The first was in 1974 at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in London, the second that same year at the Espace Pierre Cardin in Paris, the third in 1975 at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Ferrara, the fourth that same year at the CAYC in Buenos Aires, the fifth in 1976 at the ICC, the sixth that same year at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas and the seventh in 1977 at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. The next two editions were the same and took place at the Galería Continental in Lima and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico. The final edition in 1978 was at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo.

In many cases, Glusberg organised the exhibition Art Systems in Latin America in the same institutions as the Open Encounters on Video. Both the exhibition and the encounters worked towards the mission of confronting Eurocentric art practices with those from Latin America. By the fifth encounter in Antwerp, there was a wide range of artists from all over the world: Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Italy, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Holland, Poland, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, USA, Venezuela and Yugoslavia. The submitted videos were presented in a loop and the exhibition was accompanied by different talks on video.

Belgian artists already participated in the second Open Encounter in 1975: Groupe CAP, Jacques Lizène and Hubert Van Es. At the third edition in Ferrara, Bex was invited as a panellist alongside Claude Devos and Jacques Lennep. There were 14 Belgian video artists contributing to this Open Encounter. Most of the works returned in future editions.

The fifth Open Encounter on Video was organised at the ICC. The article ‘Video in musea en culturele centra’ describes:

The main purpose of this seminar is 1) to familiarize the staff of the targeted institutions and services with the medium video and to lead them to work with it 2) to create a discussion or opportunity around the possibility of using this medium in museums and cultural centres. In the activities of this seminar, we therefore make a distinction between 1) the morning, which provides an invitation in the form of four short presentations, and 2) the afternoon, which provides opportunities for questions and debate.

The Open Encounters on Video were not only for artists, but also curators and institutions interested in using the medium. According to the annual report, the edition at the ICC welcomed 2600 guests.

Collaboration with Wallonia

Although the ICC was based in Flanders, it maintained a fruitful collaboration with the Walloon art scene. The members of the Groupe CAP in Liège often visited the ICC and made several videos there, such as Une poussière dans L’oeil (1975) by Lennep and L’ombrelle descendant un escabeau (1976) by Nyst. Many of these videos were promoted by Bex through events such as the Open Encounters on Video. Flemish artists such as Frank Van Herck and Lili Dujourie were also promoted through the RTBF (Radio-Télévision Belge de la Communaute Francaise) in the programme Videographie, which was created by Robert Stephane. By the end of the seventies, political changes made cooperation between Flanders and Wallonia more difficult and there was less exchange across the language border.

CONCLUSION

This article focused mainly on three different perspectives (the institute, technology and geography) and discusses the context in which the ICC contributed to the emergence of video art in Belgium. If the reader puts the puzzle together with the other articles published within the research project ‘Video Art in Belgium in the 1970s’, it will become clear that there is never one complete narrative. Especially since not all encounters, events and happenings were documented. Nevertheless, I have come to admire the informality in which all this happened. Despite Belgium’s important international role in the arts, video art and even modern art were not welcomed with open arms. There was very little budget, a great amount of passion and a lot of messing around with administrative formalities. Perhaps we can learn a thing or two from this history: the will to create an institution for the arts that is democratic and accessible to all, the hope for new possibilities with the emergence of a new medium in the arts, painting a van in exchange for a crate of beer, and the exchange with non-Western systems of thought. It is hard to imagine this spirit today without a sense of nostalgia for the utopia that video represented back then.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jan Debbaut, ‘Some notes on video art in Belgium’ in Studio International, nr. 981, vol. 191, 1976, pp. 273-275.

Jan Debbaut, ‘Videokunst heeft nog geen vaste plaats gevonden’ in Streven, nr. 31, 1977, p. 55.

Jorge Glusberg, Kunstsystemen in Latijns Amerika, Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, Antwerpen, 1975.

Johan Pas, Beeldenstorm in een spiegelzaal. Het ICC en de actuele kunst 1970-1990, Lannoo Campus, Leuven, 2005.

v.a., Vijfde Open Encounter on Video, Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, Antwerpen, 1975.