Video at EXPRMNTL 5 (Knokke, December 1974)

In June 1974, during a visit to the United States to prepare the fifth edition of the EXPRMNTL festival, Jacques Ledoux, secretary of its competition and curator of the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique (which organised the festival), took part in the radio programme The Arts Forum, hosted by critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas on WNYC FM in New York. Avant-garde film theorist P. Adams Sitney, co-founder with Mekas of the Anthology Film Archives, also took part in the discussion. The three had been friends since 1963. The words of Ledoux, a reserved personality who only sparsely gave interviews and public statements, shed an interesting light on his opinions at this particular historical moment, when the audiovisual landscape was in the throes of change: ‘We try not to use anymore the word film because film has taken and will take I suppose in the future so many shapes that we prefer the words moving image to film.’ 1 The increasing diffusion of video technology opened up new possibilities, inviting a reconsideration of the status of images and tools, and dividing the community of filmmakers and artists. ‘I don't know enough about [it], I'm just learning to make statements about video being an extension of cinema,’ Ledoux admits, ‘[but] I have the tendency to believe... I think that in a few years you will not be able to trace the difference between video and cinema or film.’ 2 In a lively exchange, in which assertions struggled to mask uncertainties, Mekas expressed his disagreement with Ledoux, who nevertheless went on to affirm his intention to include video in the EXPRMNTL competition, an event hitherto reserved for works created on film. The only reason not to do so, he explained to Mekas, would be technical. 3 In 1974, in Europe, it was still not that practical to present video images in the form of projections.

Six months later the fifth edition of the EXPRMNTL festival took place in the casino of seaside resort Knokke-Heist, on the Belgian coast, between 25 December 1974 and 2 January 1975. It crystallised a critical phase in the history of moving images in which two distinct technologies (film and video) were thought of alternately in terms of coexistence, opposition, complementarity and even transition. In the context of what would in fact be the last edition of EXPRMNTL, video was not, in the end, admitted to the competition (the organisers had been unable to arrange a projection device), but a specific, non-competitive section was dedicated to it. This focus on video art, set up within the framework of an event primarily and historically dedicated to experimental creation on film, drew attention to a new medium, with different technical and aesthetic characteristics, and to other modes of display. By highlighting this episode, this article tries to elucidate what was at stake then.

A FUNDAMENTAL FESTIVAL

Organised irregularly, depending on the difficulties of gathering the necessary financing (a combination of public subsidies and private patronage), the four previous editions of EXPRMNTL (in 1949, 1958, 1963 and 1967) had greatly contributed to defining a set of practices, referred to under the generic term of experimental cinema, but covering a great variety of proposals, ranging from purely formal exercises to attempts at renewing fiction and documentary. Chronologically, the first EXPRMNTL was also, until the early 1960s, the only international event dedicated to avant-garde cinema. Assigning itself the task of researching and promoting less evident film forms, it helped shape a community, bringing together artists who had previously worked in isolation and mutual ignorance.

Between 1949 and 1967, EXPRMNTL brought into view films by Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos (1949); Stan Brakhage, Agnès Varda, Jean-Daniel Pollet, José Val del Omar, Peter Kubelka, Robert Breer, Peter Weiss, Walerian Borowczyk and Shirley Clarke (1958); Anthony Balch, Vlado Kristl, Ed Emshwiller, Brian De Palma, Arthur Lipsett and Jack Smith (1963); Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Lutz Mommartz, Pere Portabella, Stephen Dwoskin, Dore O., Martin Scorsese, Wilhelm Hein, Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley, Tonino De Bernardi, Koji Wakamatsu, Roland Lethem and Joyce Wieland (1967) – to name but a few. In addition, since 1963, and with the intention of taking into account experiments in all disciplines, and of situating cinema among them, EXPRMNTL also hosted many other events: exhibitions, concerts, meetings and performances, with a remarkable openness to the unexpected.

At the end of this journey, and despite its successful turnout 4 , EXPRMNTL 5 is traditionally considered a disappointing edition, mainly because it had to follow the 1967 edition, with its explosion of inventive and provocative creations. In addition to the aforementioned films, there were works of Robert Breer and Michangelo Pistoletto, happenings, performances and actions of Yoko Ono, Jean-Jacques Lebel, John Latham, Hugo Claus, the EventStructure Research Group and the ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva. And, on top of that, protests from students (including Harun Farocki and Holger Meins) criticised the apolitical nature of some of the films. All of this disrupted the institutional framework of the event, even prefiguring the events of May 1968.


CHANGING THE PARADIGM

Between EXPRMNTL 4 and 5 seven years had passed, and the landscape of experimental cinema had profoundly transformed: film distribution cooperatives were born, festivals had been created, there was a network that linked these initiatives, and an audience had been built up. The status of Knokke had changed: EXPRMNTL was no longer the only opportunity for screenings and meetings, it no longer raised the same expectations. Paradoxically, the energy and enthusiasm that characterised the previous decade had dried up. While their convergence had defined EXPRMNTL 4, the separation between aesthetics, politics and eroticism now marked the arts. Moreover, commercial cinema was trying to incorporate the experiments carried out in its margins into feature films. Aware of these mutations, and of the need to reinvent the festival, Ledoux was reluctant to organise a new edition. He knew that this would be the last one. 5

A feeling of boredom and weariness emerges from the reports of EXPRMNTL 5. The influence of structural cinema was predominant within the EXPRMNTL 5 competition, even if there were also other films by Thierry Zéno, Michio Okabe and Barbara Linkevitch. In their work, filmmakers such as Claudine Eizykman, Anthony McCall, Tsuneo Nakai, Colen Fitzgibbon and Bill Brand were interested in the very constituents of the cinematographic medium (the photogram, the celluloid, the projection beam) as well as in the elementary forms of its language (the fixed shot, the zoom). Beyond the competition, a major retrospective was dedicated to the work of Hollis Frampton, a major figure in structural cinema, considered by Ledoux to be the most important American filmmaker of the moment.

Around the screenings, concerts dealt with the question of political music (Luc Ferrari, Dieter Schnebel, Cornelius Cardew, Frederic Rzewski, Josef Anton Riedl), and theatrical performances (Compagnie du Théâtre Musical, Simone Rist, Wieslaw Hudon) and daily debates tackled the question of experimentation in the arts. In addition to the electronic games by German artist Walter Giers, several plastic artworks questioned the definition and limits of the cinematic medium. The entries by Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits, two other structural filmmakers, were strictly speaking unprojectable. Sharits’ film T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) had been cut into strips of equal length, placed side by side, wedged between two sheets of plexiglas placed in front of a light source, allowing for a meticulous observation of the film, photogram by photogram. 6 Tony Conrad’s Roast Kalvar (1974) – described by the employee who received it at the Cinémathèque as a ‘ball of 16mm’ – was a reel of Kalvar film, unwound, entwined 3000 times, wound and then baked. 7


'CHALLENGING THE FILM SCENE'

The early 1970s also saw the spread of video, which appeared as a new medium, with no tradition or culture, an uncharted territory to explore. Video was moving image without the weight of cinema’s history, its hierarchies, its tradition. It was a tool with new properties. Despite its imperfections (an imprecise image still largely limited to black and white), this new format attracted new users because of its immediacy and plasticity. It was used as a community-building and militant audiovisual tool, invested with democratic missions. It attracted visual artists, who used it to record their performances. Many avant-garde filmmakers also tried their hand at it, such as Shirley Clarke, a figure of New American Cinema in the early 1960s, who installed cameras and monitors in her New York flat in order to develop, with her daughter Wendy Clarke and the Tee Pee Video Space Troupe, a form of collective video theatre open to improvisation. Stan VanDerBeek gave video workshops since the early 1970s. Aldo Tambellini was interested in both film and video, sometimes combining them in his performances. Takahiko Iimura, whose first films were shown at EXPRMNTL 3 in 1963, had been experimenting with the Portapak since 1969, and never considered film and video in opposition.

Not all filmmakers welcomed video with the same enthusiasm. Woody and Steina Vasulka, video pioneers and co-founders of The Kitchen in New York in 1971 – one of the first places to devote priority attention to new video practices, at a time when no structure was yet dedicated to it, and neither galleries nor museums were interested in it – never forgot the hostility expressed by many avant-garde filmmakers towards the new format. They perceived video as a competing medium, threatening their preferred medium and therefore, in the long run, their practice. ‘It was clear that film was against video. Video was not against film but filmmakers, they kind of hated it’, says Steina Vasulka. ‘It was very virulent [...] It was unreal.’ 8 In the video versus film debate, two distinct forms of visual information processing opposed one another: while the cinematographic image is composed of a succession of still images, i.e. photographs, the video image is based on scanning and interlacing. The techniques, resolutions and textures differ, as do their media.

But the animosity of many filmmakers is also due to another element. As critic, curator and artist Birgit Hein described in 1975, in an article that dealt primarily with the situation in Germany and Austria, but whose observations can be extended to other territories, experimental film has not succeeded in penetrating the visual arts sphere in a lasting way (unlike artists’ films). If they were opened at all, the doors of museums and galleries were quickly closed to it. In 1974-75, however, video, in the form of video art, was in the process of taking this step 9 :

In spite of definitely belonging to the arts, experimental film has so far not been accepted as such in Germany. Only the films by fine artists are accepted and treated accordingly. The film-makers are not considered as artists. If their films are included in art exhibitions, they are only treated as an additional or supplementary programme. […] The broad development of video also plays a role, as it is much easier to use in exhibition practice.

As a film library curator, but also as secretary general of FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives), was Ledoux not a firm believer in the superiority of the film medium? As expressed in his speech on WNYC, quoted at the beginning of this text, his point of view was more complex. According to Steina and Woody Vasulka, the video section of EXPRMNTL 5 was precisely the result of Ledoux’s intention to provoke avant-garde filmmakers. 10 ‘Jacques Ledoux was challenging the film scene’, said Steina Vasulka. ‘He was being the naughty boy and introducing video that everybody hated.’ According to Gabrielle Claes, a close collaborator of Ledoux, who was then in charge of the competition secretariat as well as that of the Cinémathèque, Ledoux had the intuition that experimental cinema was going to disappear definitively in favour of video. 11 In the juxtaposition and confrontation of the various parts of EXPRMNTL 5, in the tension between its film and video components, one can detect a programming gesture, which takes on a particular significance knowing that Ledoux was certain that this edition would be the last.

In the same way that the curiosity of its programmer had, as early as 1963, opened the festival to all artistic practices, considered from the point of view of experimentation, the exploratory mission of EXPRMNTL could not neglect the appearance of this new field, open to all experiments. In 1974, video was a young medium, still lacking a history, which neither the cinema circuit nor that of museums and galleries had yet appropriated – a question that was precisely at stake at that time. A hybrid event, historically anchored in the field of cinema but with ramifications that extended to other arts and their communities, EXPRMNTL attracted an audience of cinephiles and filmmakers as well as actors and spectators from other spheres, notably the visual arts. 12 This position interested Ledoux, who consciously worked on it, from the conception of the programme to the constitution of the competition jury. He consulted figures from the world of contemporary art at a preparatory stage, such as the critics Irmeline Lebeer and Jean-Pierre Van Tieghem, and of course René Micha, a long-standing accomplice of the festival. Curator Harald Szeemann sat on the jury along with filmmakers Dusan Makavejev and Stephen Dwoskin, critic P. Adams Sitney and filmmaker/videographer Ed Emshwiller. 13

The festival’s interest in video was finally in line with its openness to television productions. Since 1963, the competition had been open to works conceived for both film and television – a timely measure in the context of the collaboration with RTB (Radio Télévision Belge), which contributed financially to the organisation of EXPRMNTL. 14 Ledoux saw in video, among other things, a new language that explored the possibilities of television as a creative tool, even going as far as proposing an opposite usage. As Jean-Pierre Boyer, a Montreal video artist whom Ledoux invited to Knokke, wrote at the same time: ‘Video is anti-television, the rejection of narrative conventions and the reassertion of the electronic image as a specific tool of production.’ 15 Within the RTB, Ledoux maintained privileged links with the Liège production centre, and in particular with its director, Robert Stéphane, who, having discovered the work of Paik, Viola and other video artists at an early stage, was one of the main instigators of Vidéographie, a unique experimental television programme dedicated to the multiple forms of video. 16


TIME LINE

In the early 1970s, international events dedicated to video followed in rapid succession, both in the United States and in Europe. The chronological sequence EXPRMNTL 5 was part of in 1974-75 indicated a gradual recognition of the medium by European museum institutions.

In Cologne, from 6 July to 8 September 1974, video was an important part of Projekt ‘74 in the Kunsthalle and at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, which featured video installations by Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, Frank Gillette and Douglas Davis, among others, and allowed visitors to view tapes produced by 95 artists from the United States and Europe. Visitors to the exhibition also had the opportunity to produce tapes and performances, with the help of equipment and guidance provided by Lijnbaancentrum Rotterdam. Wulf Herzogenrath and David Ross were co-curators of the video section of Projekt ’74, while Birgit Hein was responsible for the selection of films (including works by Marcel Broodthaers, David Lamelas and Joan Jonas, as well as those from the experimental film circuit by Jack Smith, Kurt Kren and Gill Eatherley).

In Lausanne, the Impact Art Vidéo Art 74 exhibition, organised at the Musée des arts décoratifs from 8 to 15 October 1974, under the aegis of René Berger, video art theorist and president of the international association of art critics, aimed to emphasise video as an artistic medium. The list of artists represented included Eric Andersen, Peter Campus, VALIE EXPORT, Frank Gillette, Takahiko Iimura, Joan Jonas, Maurizio Nannucci, Norio Imai, Dalibor Marinis, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Simone Forti, Alberto Pirelli, Richard Serra, the Vasulkas, Bill Viola, Jud Yalkut, Peter Weibel, Groupe C. A.P. de Liège, the Swiss Jean Otth and René Bauermeister, etc. 17

Organised from 8 November to 8 December 1974 by ARC 2 and the Centre National pour l’Animation Audio-Visuelle at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Art/Video Confrontation 74 was the first major exhibition in France to present tapes and video installations by American and Canadian artists, and to produce tapes by French artists (Christian Boltanski, Gina Pane, Martial Raysse, Paul-Armand Gette, Françoise Janicot). A multitude of names appeared on the programme, from Vito Acconci to Lydia Benglis, via Joseph Beuys, Fred Forest, Stan VanDerBeek, Nam June Paik, Simone Forti, Nancy Kitchell Wilson, Robert Morris, Al Razutis, Bill and Louise Etra, Dan Graham, Nil Yalter, Jean-Pierre Boyer, Peter Campus, William Gwin, Rebecca Horn and, once again, the Vasulkas. 18

Drawing on the programme of these last two events, and enriching it thanks to contacts established with other structures, curator Michel Baudson would take over the exhibition circuit of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (whose building also housed the offices of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique) with the exhibition Artists’ Video Tapes, presenting 140 tapes from 25 February to 16 March 1975. 19

In the field of experimental and independent cinema, EXPRMNTL (which juxtaposed them, more so than it bringing them together) was not the first event to include video in its programme either. In June 1973, the Internationales Forum des Jungen Films in Berlin had also presented video productions, most of them socially oriented, by the New York group Global Village Video. In September, the Festival of Independent Avant-Garde Film at the National Film Theatre and the ICA in London included tapes by Peter Weibel and Mike Leggett. In June 1974, Video Film Tele-Aktionen, in Munich, combined films and videos by Tony Conrad, Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, Kurt Kren, Paul Sharits, Peter Weibel, Takahiko Iimura and VALIE EXPORT, all artists whose work Ledoux supported.


KNOKKE / BUFFALO

The documentation kept in the EXPRMNTL archives attests to the fact that Ledoux and his team were well informed about these events. They also followed closely the technological advances in this field, concerned as they were about the possibility of video projection. In the boxes, the catalogues of the companies producing equipment (Barco, Shibaden, Sony, Philips, Akai) were kept alongside issues of the New York magazine Radical Software and publications from meetings and exhibitions organised in Europe and the United States.

From 1973 onwards, Ledoux’s exploration covered both the field of film, through channels that were now known and structured, and that of video, whose network was in the process of being organised.

Paying particular attention to productions from the United States (which had always represented the most important cinematographic contribution to each edition of the festival), he spent two weeks there, from November 18 to December 1, 1973, in order to launch the promotion of the upcoming event. A press conference at the Anthology Film Archives in New York on 27 November 1973 symbolically marked the announcement of EXPRMNTL 5 on the American continent. 20

Shortly before his departure, in September 1973, Ledoux contacted Gerald O’Grady in order to obtain the comprehensive list of avant-garde filmmakers active in the United States that he – according to Jonas Mekas and Annette Michelson – had compiled. 21 Co-organiser, in January 1974 at MoMA, of the event Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television 22 , Professor O’Grady had recently founded the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the first department created within an American university for the study of a field that Peter Weibel (who taught there from 1984 to 1989) defined as nothing less than ‘the entire spectrum of media art – from photographs to installations using slides, from music to film and video performances, from film to film installations, from videotapes to video environments, from computer graphics to interactive installations’. 23 In 1973, Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits were already teaching there. Steina and Woody Vasulka were about to join them, as well as documentary filmmaker James Blue. A spirit of dialogue reigned between the practitioners of the different technologies within this department, the birth of which marked the symbolic recognition of audiovisual experimentation by the academic sphere.

O’Grady’s name was also recommended to Ledoux by Don Foresta, a graduate in history and a sworn diplomat employed by the United States Information Agency. Since his arrival in Paris in 1971, he had been in charge of programming at the Centre Culturel Américain, a public institution directly dependent on the American Embassy. Experimental film and video, as well as the articulation between art and technology, were at the heart of his programming activities. With Foresta, the institution (which in the 1960s had already been a stronghold of the counterculture) asserted itself as one of the most important places in Europe for the dissemination of video, presenting tapes that were practically invisible elsewhere. Its budget allowed it to invite artists such as Stan VanDerBeek, and John Reilly and Rudi Stern from Global Village Video to Paris. 24 Foresta’s programming and acquisition policy for the Centre was guided by a formalist sensibility and an interest in abstract tapes in which technology was used first and foremost for its own sake, far removed from the militant approach that prevailed in France at the time, or the documentary use of video by visual artists as a means of recording performances. 25

As a programmer, Ledoux had the same intuition. He was interested in creations that revealed the intrinsic properties of the electronic image, works that explored the medium for its own sake – whether they were single-channel tapes, environments or closed-circuit pieces. The latter showed another fundamental characteristic of video: its ability to present simultaneously the image of a subject and that subject itself. While artists’ videos received little attention from Ledoux (although they were, for example, represented that year in the three major European events devoted to video mentioned above), it should be noted that artists’ films, singularly absent from the programme, remained the other poor cousin of EXPRMNTL. 26

Ledoux initially approached Foresta to organise the video section of EXPRMNTL 5, probably also taking into account his involvement in Art/Video Confrontation 74. However, Foresta, bound by his position as a US diplomat on French territory, could not work outside France. He therefore directed Ledoux to O’Grady, an academic and well introduced figure, with whom he had already had the opportunity to collaborate and who, according to him, would be able to offer Ledoux the information, the perspective and the institutional credibility he might need. 27

In January 1974, Ledoux informed O’Grady of his intentions regarding the fifth edition of EXPRMNTL, requesting his artistic and technical expertise, as well as that of Woody Vasulka, in setting up the video section. Of course, Ledoux could just as easily have contacted European structures but, as the following passage from his letter to O’Grady expresses, he remained convinced that research on the other side of the Atlantic was at the forefront, following a dynamic that he had already observed in the field of cinema on the occasion of EXPRMNTL’s previous editions: ‘I think that Europe is far behind the States in this respect and that even things that seem evident or part of the past to you, could still be a revelation here.’ 28

O’Grady’s enthusiastic response came in March 1974, and immediately involved Steina and Woody Vasulka in the task: the three of them would select and collect tapes, which Ledoux would view at the end of May during a visit to Buffalo, enabling them to refine the selection and determine the devices and means necessary for the Knokke exhibition. 29 Their first meeting, which took place two months later, led to the following scenario: a commission, consisting of O’Grady, Ed Emshwiller, Shigeko Kubota, Steina and Woody Vasulka and Ledoux himself, would select the American and Canadian participation for the festival. 30 This would be composed of two sections: on the one hand, three to five individual focuses (two of which were to be devoted to Shirley Clarke and Nam June Paik, who had already responded positively to Ledoux’s proposal), programmed within the framework of environments (or, as Ledoux preferred to put it, a ‘video playground’); and on the other hand, a dozen hours of tapes, at the rate of two hours of programmes per day. 31


EUROPEAN PROSPECTION

At the same time, Ledoux began to look for tapes in Europe. In June 1974, in Paris, he met Pierre Schaeffer and his team at the ORTF’s Research Department, where he quickly understood their limited involvement in the field in which he was interested. ‘It seems that in Europe the only ones who are really involved in experimenting are the people of Köln where I will be in beginning of July.’ 32 The WDR radio and television station in Cologne had invited Steven Beck, Bill Etra and Stan VanDerBeek for two months in November/December, whom Ledoux hoped to attract to Knokke. 33 Although the meeting with the WDR management was not very productive, Ledoux visited the Projekt ‘74 exhibition, of which several works were included in the Knokke selection. 34 There he also met cellist Charlotte Moorman, whose collaboration with Nam June Paik remained famous (there was a brief mention, but unfortunately too late for the project to materialise, of moving their TV Cello to Knokke from the Bochum Museum). 35 In this programming work, Ledoux was assisted by Danielle Nicolas, an employee of the Cinémathèque but also a contributor to the magazine Clés, a monthly published by the Association pour l’Information Culturelle, hosted by the Palais des Beaux-Arts. 36

Ledoux’s attempt to collaborate with the research departments of ORTF and WDR, on the recommendation of RTB-Liège, was prompted by the recent creation, in September 1973, of the network CIRCOM (Coopérative Internationale de Recherche et d’Action en matière de Communication), which aimed to promote relations between European research centres in the field of television. 37 At its foundation in Venice in September 1973, CIRCOM presented ‘three evenings of public screenings reflecting three major trends in experimental television: public participation in television programmes, the renewal of genres, and the abstract image’. 38 A collaboration with CIRCOM for a session, and the possibility of financial support from them, was one of the avenues being explored for the programme. For the American part, which was much more expensive because of the transportation (six artists, in addition to Woody Vasulka) and the technical complexity, Ledoux hoped that O’Grady would be able to find resources from an American foundation. 39 By August, it appeared that none of these specific funding opportunities for the video project would materialise. 40

In October, the plans for the video section still seemed unclear. It was not until mid-November, just six weeks before the opening of the festival, that the programme was finally confirmed, following Woody Vasulka’s preparatory visit to Brussels and Knokke: ‘Video exhibition will definitely take place.’ 41


EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO

The EXPRMNTL archives have preserved three successive versions of the press release on the video programme. All three were used in the communication of the event. First diffused under the title ‘Video considered as a performing art’ 42 , then ‘Exhibition of Video-Theatre’, 43 and finally ‘Experimental Video’, this text, of which each version reformulated and specified the intentions, insisted on the following elements: the novelty of the technology presented (in full exploratory phase); the specificities of the medium; the playful and participative dimension of the event. ‘The main ambition of the video section in Knokke is to allow the filmmakers and other artists to discover a language and technique that is revolutionising our perception of space and time.’ 44 The three sections of the programme were presented as follows 45:

1. a selection of tapes which set out to explore the language of video;
2. installations;
3. environments and live-shows, created on the spot by an important group of American and Canadian video-makers […]; these games/shows will also provide an opportunity for sharing in the artistic experiments of technology.

Within the casino, these three parts were developed in adjoining areas. In a space the artists remember as a large (approximately 30 metres long by 15 metres wide) but somewhat dilapidated room 46 , partitions cut out the volumes intended to house the various parts of the programme. In this makeshift environment, tables covered in kraft paper (as were the partitions), monitors, cameras, tape players, effects generators and synthesizers filled the space. In order to present video, EXPRMNTL, whose presentation of moving images had so far been centred around cinema, projector and screen, had to adapt: tapes were presented on monitors, and it all looked more like an exhibition, demonstration workshop or laboratory. Dozens of machines from different companies sat in the casino rooms, stacked and wired. They had been rented or borrowed from no less than 19 different suppliers, from the ICC (Internationaal Cultureel Centrum) in Antwerp, to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, via Sony, Akai, Revox, Philips, the American Library in Brussels and RTB-Liège. The technical coordination was carried out by the American artist Kit Galloway, who had already been involved in the Parisian event Art/Video Confrontation 74, both as an artist and as a mediator. 47 The realisation of the project required considerable effort, and a substantial budget. All items added up, the cost of the video section was estimated at nearly one million Belgian francs, which represented almost half the expenses of EXPRMNTL 5. 48

The Vasulkas were responsible for much of the work selecting tapes, as well as taking charge of the process of obtaining permission from the artists to show their work. Their close knowledge of the American video scene, in which they had been involved since its infancy, and their commitment to serving this community of artists, made them ideal for this task. Three of the four programmes were composed by the Vasulkas, in dialogue with O’Grady. These consisted almost exclusively of American productions from the West Coast (Eric Siegel, Wolfgang Stoerchle, Skip Sweeney, Stephen Beck and Jordan Belson, Don Hallock, Dimitri Devyatkin) and East Coast (Steina & Woody Vasulka, David Cort of the Videofreex Collective, Rudi Stern, Peter Campus, Ernst Gusella, Bill and Louise Etra). Some of the tapes were provided by the American Cultural Centre in Paris. Under a cover designed by Woody Vasulka, a publication that was prepared by the Center for Media Study in Buffalo presented these three programmes, accompanied by an essay by Seth Feldman (a Buffalo graduate and future expert on the work of Dziga Vertov). A fourth, European selection completed the panorama, presenting videos by Italians Maurizio Nannucci and Alberto Pirelli (provided by the Florentine structure art/tapes/22), Swiss René Bauermeister and Janos Urban (members of the Impact group), Peter Weibel (Austria) and David Hall (Great Britain). In addition to these four programmes, which were repeated daily, specific sessions were organised with work by Nam June Paik (the world premiere of Suite 212), Jean Otth, Muriel Olesen, Gerald Minkoff (of the Swiss group Impact), and the Vasulkas (among others). All the tapes, and others not included in the programmes, were also available for viewing on request. Most of the videos were on 1/2’’, some in the more recent 3/4’’ format. The programmes as a whole reflected the initial programming intentions, adopting René Bauermeister’s motto: ‘From my point of view, making video consists first and foremost of a search for the criteria of specificity of the electronic image.’ 49

The installation proposals were more complex. In Scape-Mates in Scale and Time, Ed Emshwiller combined the broadcast, on a monitor, of his video Scape Mates (USA, 1972) with the projection of a 16mm transfer of the same material. In this work, an electronic landscape of interlocking abstract and figurative elements features dancers whose images have been transformed using an analogue video synthesizer. This simultaneous but unsynchronised presentation of two versions of the same piece is a mixed work, playing on both the cumulative effect and the differences in size and light intensity. It happily combined video and film media at a critical moment when they were so often opposed. Emshwiller’s approach and itinerary were certainly exemplary in the eyes of the organisers, who had supported his work since the third edition of the festival in 1963. His position was indeed revealing of the intention behind the festival, as Pierre Vermeylen, president of the Cinémathèque, indicated in his inaugural speech for EXPRMNTL 5 50 :

Mr. Emshwiller offers the remarkable example of a filmmaker who has moved on to video, but who continues to make films using the specificities of each of these languages as the case may be. This is exactly what we wanted to show in Knokke with this video exhibition: to highlight the differences and similarities of these two media.

Peter Weibel presented three tapes but also two actions: Investigation of Identity (1973) and Timeblood (1972-74). Nam June Paik presented two versions of TV Buddha, a closed-circuit piece conceived a few months earlier to complete an exhibition at the Bonino Gallery in New York. 51 In its original museum version, TV Buddha places, face to face, a wooden sculpture of a Buddha dating from the 18th century, and a white monitor with rounded shapes, typical of the 1970s, on which the filmed image of the Buddha is broadcast live. This iconic and visually effective piece puts spirituality and technology, East and West, tradition and modernity, in dialogue through video. Today, TV Buddha has undoubtedly become one of Paik’s most emblematic works. Ledoux discovered this work at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, as part of the Projekt ‘74 event (it was also presented in Paris at Art/Video Confrontation ’74). In Cologne, Paik showed a modified version of his piece, taking the place of the Buddha statue himself. In Knokke, the more complex installation version unfolded on a triangular platform, on which Paik had arranged the Buddha statue, two cameras, four monitors and also the sculpture of a monkey bust with its mouth open. This new version of TV Buddha was punctually activated by Paik. Etienne Bernard’s photos show the artist moving the monkey bust to take its place, sitting on the platform in the lotus position, eyes closed.

To designate video environments, Ledoux used the term video-playground, a notion that was dear to him because of the playful dimension it implied. Video offered the possibility of playing, by intervening in the image in real time. It also made it possible to construct environments in which cameras, players and monitors are arranged in such a way as to create closed circuits and open situations. The interaction between the devices was as important as the freedom of the visitors to intervene, as they were invited to abandon the position of passive spectators to perform, film, be filmed, turn the knobs, and actively discover the possibilities of the new medium. This immediate but also participatory, social and relational dimension of video use was an important aspect of the video section.

The footage shot by the Belgian Flemish television station BRT shows Jean-Pierre Boyer, Wendy Clarke, Walter Wright, Woody and Steina Vasulka in action, demonstrating, in a friendly atmosphere, the possibilities of immediate intervention on the image, thanks in particular to the use of the Rutt/Etra scanning processor (developed the previous year) which the Vasulkas brought to Knokke. 52 With the help of several cameras and monitors, Wendy Clarke built participatory pieces that directly involved the visitors. For Walter Wright, a close collaborator of Emshwiller, the video synthesizer (be it the Paik/Abe, the Scanimate or the Rutt/Etra) was a tool that allowed video artists to create live images, just as musicians produced sounds. In addition to his abstract electronic transformations, created in the same spirit as those of Wright and the Vasulkas, Jean-Pierre Boyer, as a Quebec citizen involved in the social movements of his time, seized the opportunity of his presence in Knokke to plea for a free Quebec with his partner. Peter Campus installed his closed circuit piece mem (1974), confronting visitors with distorted images of themselves.


FADE OUT

A simple description of the video section gives an idea of the complexity of its realisation. Technically, logistically and financially, the project required efforts that the festival could hardly afford. The organisation of EXPRMNTL rested mainly on the shoulders of the small team at the Cinémathèque, which was mobilised daily by the tasks of conserving the titles in the collection, but also of preparing, screening and checking the prints for the three screenings organised each day of the year at the Musée du Cinéma. Under normal circumstances, the organisation of an event of this magnitude would already have been far beyond its means. Adding a virtually unknown technology to the programme made things even more complex.

“[EXPRMNTL] was connected to the needs of a certain period, and as the situation and needs changed, the Festival had to change or not to continue”, remarked Jonas Mekas in 1988. 53 The mutation of the field of the moving image, with its multiple tensions, which nourished the programme of EXPRMNTL 5, also appeared to be one of the causes of the festival’s demise. The technological paradigm shift, experienced with enthusiasm and fear, the evolution of the cultural context, the split between aesthetics and politics in the 1970s, and the structuring of avant-garde film networks also contribute to explaining it. At the end of EXPRMNTL 5, confirming the conviction already shared with several interlocutors before the event, Ledoux confided to several artists and friends that there would not be another edition. 54 He did, however, take steps, around 1978-79, to set up an EXPRMNTL 6. But for all the reasons mentioned above, and for others (including the devolution of culture from central to regional government in Belgium at that time), EXPRMNTL 6 never saw the light of day.

A few days after the end of the festival, Foresta thanked Ledoux: ‘These days have been very constructive and enriching for everyone and bode very well for the future of video in Europe.’ 55 The video wave will indeed continue to sweep across the continent. Barely two months later, in March 1975, when the Artists’ Video Tapes exhibition had just opened at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Steina Vasulka wrote to Jacques Ledoux: ‘I see that the video exhibit is going on in your Palais right now. I wonder how long Europe is going to take this video before they throw up.’ 56 In the summer of 1977, documenta 6 included both films and videotapes in its programme: the former under the curatorship of Birgit Hein, the latter under that of Wulf Herzogenrath, continuing the division of tasks that each had assumed at Projekt ‘74 in Cologne. ‘The reaction to film at the documenta was like zero’, recalls Birgit Hein. ‘No art critic would write about film, it was all video, and no film critic either would go to documenta.’ In parallel with her numerous efforts to study and recognize experimental cinema at an institutional level, she had been developing a practice of radical structural cinema with her husband Wilhelm Hein since 1967-68. documenta 6 functioned as an eye-opener to her, definitively confirming the intuition she had already expressed in 1975 in Studio International. 57 ‘That’s when we decided: OK we quit the arts. Finished, you know. We started with performance and we started to present ourselves in pubs, because we were so disappointed and frustrated that film was out.’ 58

The correspondence between Ledoux and Steina Vasulka also reveals that a videotape archiving project was briefly imagined after the festival. This is humorously referred to by Vasulka as ‘B-B (Buffalo-Brussels) video archives’. 59 But the conservation, like the exhibition, of magnetic works raised problems quite different from those of film copies. It required expertise, tools and a budget that the Cinémathèque, an underfunded institution with a precarious existence, did not have. Ledoux was aware of this. Film and video would therefore remain separate here, just as the sections dedicated to them remained almost completely sealed off from each other for the duration of EXPRMNTL 5, bearing witness to a time when technological and aesthetic issues were hotly debated. ‘There was no communication at all between film-makers and video-artists in Knokke’ (Steina Vasulka). 60