On August 13th and 14th 2005 KOMPLOT organised a seminar about artists collectives in the UMFblyzer hotel by Simona Denicolai and Ivo Provoost in the exhibition Tijdelijk onbewoonbaar verklaard curated by Bram van Damme with the vzw More Talent Than Space in Ieper (Belgium).

The seminar has been the occasion for the premiere screening of Sad in Country trailer, a video by Kosten Koper & Catherine Vertige (DVD, 17 min, 2005, English dialogue). The artists are working on a full length documentary video on the subject of utopian art collectives, on 13th August they will present an exclusive preview of their work in progress or in Hollywood speak a ‘theatrical trailer’. From the broken pavements of Sofia to the broken dreams of May 1968, they will take you on a rollercoaster ride of cultural idealism being careful not to be sick along the way. We will meet Belgian collectives such as Mass Moving, Club Moral, A 37 9089, listen to the gentle pleas of Marcel Broodthaers and ponder upon Alain Resnais statement that ‘Is it alive, or is it dead?’ is the only question in art. Therefore this video is not a fulfilled document nor clear composition; but a series of encounters raising questions that we, as artists, should continue to ask ourselves. Kosten Koper will make a long winded introduction. The following seminar will be filmed for incorporation into the completed work. 

Attendees to the symposium were:
Art historians:
Paolo Boselli is gallerist in Brussels and supports artists from collectives such as Caminade and Building Underwood. 
Véronique Daneels works at the national visual art Museum of Belgium and is specialized in feminist art theory.
Véronique Depiesse is art critic and curator from Komplot.
Sonia Dermience is a curator from Komplot and works on a documentary about art groups.
Pierre-Yves Desaive works at the national visual art Museum of Belgium and wrote a book about the CAP group in 2002.
Virginie Devillez works at the national visual art Museum of Belgium and writes about the link between art and politic. She collaborated in the restrospective publication about the group Mass Moving.
Frédéric Jacquemin works for the Marcel Hicter Foundation in Brussels conceiving seminars, video and exhibitions on the political aspect of art.
Johan Pas is curator and writes a thesis on the seventies and the ICC in Antwerpen.
Iolanda Pensa is a researcher from Milano who writes on structures for art in Africa and the impact of grants on art in Europe.
Dirk Pültau is chief editor of the contemporary art newspaper De Witte Raaf published in Brussels.
Marko Stamenkovic is curator from Belgrade and writes a thesis on…
Bram van Damme is the curator with MTTS of the exhibition Tijdelijk onbewoonbaar verklaard in which the seminar happened.

Artists’ collectives projects: (absent members are between parenthesis)
A 37 90 89 (Antwerpen, 1969-1970): Isi Fiszman (Herman Daled, Hugo Peeters, Kasper Koenig)
Agency (Brussels, since 1992): Kobe Matthys
Artworkers Foundation (Antwerpen, 1970): Luc Deleu, (Filip Francis, Hugo Heyrman)
Building Underwood (Pyrénées, 1998-2001): David Evrard, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost
Caminade (Brussels, 2001): Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost (Yuri Balcers, Xavier Martin, Gauthier Pierson, Sandra Prischinski, Irvic d’Olivier, Nathalie Mertens & Christophe Terlinden)
Club Moral (Antwerpen, since 1981): Dany Devos & Anne Mie Van Kerckhoven
Dialogist Kantor, Bureau du port, patacycliste (Brussels, since 1992): consortium of art groups with Toni Geirlandt & Carlos Montalvo + many members…
Joe Dalton (Brussels, since 2005): David Evrard + many collaborators
VAGA – Vrije Aktie Groep Antwerp (1970): Isi Fiszman (Panamarenko, Filip Francis, Hugo Heyrman)

Special guests:
Dries Allemeersch is from vzw More Talent Than Space
Rosella Biscotti is an artist from Milano who resides in Rotterdam.
Frédéric Deloof is from vzw More Talent Than Space
Karine Marenne is an artist from Brussels who makes public art projects and video’s.
Stijn Yperman is from vzw More Talent Than Space

Bibliography to be completed:
Véronique Depiesse, Caminade, in: L’art même, Bruxelles, 20??
Pierre-Yves Desaive and Jacques Lennep: CAP, 2002,
Virginie Devillez and Catherine Leclercq, Mass Moving, 2003,
Denis Gielen, in: Art in Belgium, Cera Foundation & Ludion, 2003
Johan Pas, in: Movements, NICC
Hans Theys, in: Movements, NICC
Barbara Vanderlinden, A 37 90 89, in: De Witte Raaf

Theme of the seminar
The issues addressed are about the definition of the art group, the utopian and the realistic sides, their role in art history, their relation to public space, the institutions and the private initiatives. You are all invited to participate. Please book your seat at this e-mail address.

Resume of some interventions

Isi Fiszman: VAGA was not really a collective. It is an amalgamation. Coming back from Paris after May 68, we were not happy with the museum of Fine Arts in Antwerpen. There had been the occupation of the palais des beaux-arts in Brussels and the one of the University. We went in the street on Conscience Plein in front of the museum in Antwerpen asking for a free car zone. To impress the public Panamarenko and Hugo Heyrman threw ice blocks on the road. The second week, we occupied the space with children and grass. The third week, the City Hall gave up the Conscience plein to us. Then we went to the Groenplaats to continue the protest. By giving us what we requested, the authorities killed the rebellion movement. We then had discussions a the Wide White Space gallery. In Brussels, there had been a modern art museum since 45 that they closed in 59. In 68, Broodthaers opened his museum des aigles département 19ème siècle at his home that was then closed and reopened transformed as a 17th century museum section in the A 39 90 89 space in Antwerpen.

Johan Pas: It seems that the specificity of the counter-culture art movements in Belgium in the late sixties were about the absence of contemporary art museum. The question then is: if there had been a museum wouldn’t have been any art collective?

Isi Fiszman: They would have found another institution to fight. The A 37 90 89 space was taken over by Panamrenko in 1970 to use it for his zeppelin. We then wrote a letter of protest in the newspaper La Liberté. There were different groups in A 37 90 89. They didn’t always agreed about the actions. Starting from the question: can culture shake politics? We get involved with lodging soldiers coming back from Vietnam and anti-racist actions. We also supported Cuba. In VAGA there were also different work groups and A 37 90 89 resulted from a dissident group of VAGA. I was involved the propaganda section. In VAGA, the science section was the most utopian.

Virginie Devillez: During the Palais des beaux-arts occupation in 68, Roger Somville, Serge Creuze and Marcel Broodthaers have set up the Centre national des artistes plasticiens. But very fast two contradictory visions emerged; one proned the entrance of the artists in the museum and the other the participation in the street. Somville was for a structural contestation that took the form of the publication Cahier des revendications des artistes whereas Broodthaers questioned the system as a whole. He will quit the group very fast. To give an idea of the movement of liberation, it seems that at this time, contestation was a transgressive act that could be expressed by the nudity in public space and this could be repressed by the police. This happened at the Knokke festival 1970? when Yoko Ono participated nude to the miss Festival contest organized by Jean-Jacques Lebel. porno films were screened in the off festival in the café Out Knokke. A lot of things have been discussed in Knokke and disseminated in newspapers like Le Point or Pour! Art and politics were so much linked that Pour! which had been censored received the support of an exhibition made for them: Je/nous at the Musée d’Ixelles in 1975. This collective artistic and political movement will last until the mid seventies. Notably the group Mass Moving that had been founded in 1968 will dissolve in 1976 after years of intense activities in public space.

Dirk Pülteau: Regarding those groups, in what was the ideology of CAP different of the one of Mass Moving?
 
Pierre-Yves Desaive: CAP is a circle founded in 1972 by Jacques Lennep in order to create events. CAP is not politically engaged like Mass Moving or exhibition Je/nous. The aim is to represent different tendencies in art like abstract, concept etc that they identify as separate workshops in CAP. They gather around the concept of relational esthetic after a work by Pierre Courtois titled Relation that was in the Prix de la Jeune Peinture belge.

Dialogist Cantor and the Laboratoire patacycliste: Is not a collective. We (Toni Geirlandt and Carlos M?) started from the desire to make posters with dates and theme and names of artists. They artists would gather one day to improvise a program of performances. The list is completed as the artists make their happening. That is the principle of the Pauvre dimanche for example. Once a year, there is a gathering at Easter in Oostende where one of the members lives.

Club Moral: We (Anne Mie Van Kerkhoven and Dany Devos) met through mail art and started from the idea that artists should help each other showing their works and make a living. We invited artists to show performances taking extreme forms like drawings on which the audience had to walk or hardcore communist or industrial noise bands. We used to exchange programs inside a network of artists interested in performance art. In the late seventies and eighties the model of the couple as a basis for organization was very popular because the idea of the group didn’t correspond anymore with the anti-utopian mentality. This corresponded to the No Future from the eighties.

Pierre-Yves Desaive: Beside ideological or conceptual common points, artists can gather to help each other. Most often this is the first objective: to share equipment and visibility for example like the photographs collective from Brussels Blow up.

Simona Denicolai talks for Caminade: It is a group à géométrie variable that started in 1999 from the desire of artists sharing a studio to show their work in that space. They were then invited in an exhibition in Antwerp and made a poster with all the names. They organized walks in the city. These walks that lasted 12 hours each we based on the idea that it could be stopped or left by any participant any time. That aspect of fragility and the aspect to be always on the verge of disappearance was fundamental to the group. They made a radio piece. The idea was to make something together without putting too much in it. It had to remain very light for the participants. That gave the fragile aspect to the group and maybe also its force.
Caminade est un group à géométrie variable. Au début ça a commence avec le désire de Gauthier Pierson et  de Xavier Martin d’ouvrir leur atelier (rue pletincx, à Bruxelles) une fois par mois, en y organisant des expositions et des concerts (date à controller avec Gauthier, le début ça doit être jenre 95). A ce moment là Caminade était surtout un lieu, autour duquel il y avait un group de gens qui gravitait. En 99 Gauthier et Xavier ont quité l’atelier, et à partir de ce moment là Caminade a commencé a exister comme nom, regroupant à chaque intervention plusieurs artistes. C’est drôle que ce groupe à géométrie variable se soit constituué de manière plus affirmative à partir du moment que un lieu venait à manquer. Nous avons organisé des caminades : derives psychogéographiques à bruxelles pendant lequelles on choisit la direction à chaque croisement de rue, le groupe doit rester ensemble, chaqu’un peu quitter la caminade à chaque moment. Ces proménades ont duré chaqu’une 12 heures, mais l’idée c’est qu’elles pourraient durer pour toujours, étant donné que au départ on ne se donne ni de but précis, ni des limites de temps. Caminade est  aussi intervenue à la radio (TV caminade, la première télévision radiophonique !), ou dans l’art même avec un poster. Avec Caminade il y a toujous l’idée de faire quelque chose ensemble, sans y mettre trop d’énergie. Ca doit rester assez léger pour les participants. Ca donne un aspect fragile au groupe, mais c’est aussi ce qui fait sa force.

David Evrard: What is important today is the confusion, at the difference with the eighties that were based on the profusion principle. The collective that is based on the idea of euphoria and pleasure to make things, delirious enthusiasm takes different forms that can be political and related to the institution. Those art groups can be based on the model of the micro-institution, the family, the enterprise, the political party or even the orgy. There is a big confusion today that can be good.

Simona Denicolai: There can be synergies, cross-overs, improvisation in a context that the artists set up. The failure is part of the proposal.

David Evrard: Today we don’t know very well where it will end. The myth of the underground is almost over.

Kobe Matthys from Agency: The example of the Dj is very revealing. That figure characteristic the nineties is seen as apolitical. Whereas the apparatus that he set up mirrors how the consumer can appropriate the mass culture with the instruments he has at home. The act is political. It all started with mixing tapes and exchanging them. The material became collective, at the difference with the apparatus of the authorship.

David Evrard: It is the generation of the rave parties.

Johan Pas: The first collectives had to make their own communication on paper whereas today they can distribute endlessly. The media defines the practice. It has changed deeply.

David Evrard: Today the choice of the strategy does not reflect on a certain political positioning. Every medium is equivalent to the other. It is not like 15 years ago when new media for example was a specific choice. Is there any necessity for this anymore?

Kobe Matthys: The collective can be a non-physical place where artists work together like with Linux. This software programmed has been developed by people around the world working at home. The collective platform can consist in putting the material together.

Johan Pas: yes but in art, the gallery system is still very important and determine the practice.

Virginie Devillez: The public institution has the same role. It asks for names as well and this can overcome the desire to work together and party.

Dirk Pülteau: The gallery is also a group that can function on the market. But when the author is diffused then it become difficult to identify him.

Kobbe Matthys: Each film is made by a group of people. The group is hierarchised with at the top, the producer who gets the right for the film as a whole after every participant has taken his right from his contribution. There is a boss and the workers.

Johan Pas: There is a friction. The gallery system works only for individual artists.

Frédéric Jacquemin: Names of artists as well as collectives are comodified anyway. The cultural institution Fredericanium in Kassel organized an exhibition titled Collectives at work. This project was supported by IBM. They asked the artists groups to work on the idea of shaping the future. Cultural politics give also legitimacy to art groups. The public art market is still more for collective oriented than the galleries. Recuperating the contestation movements is a tactic of the institutions and companies, which functions since the seventies as interface to make those oppositional movements digest and fashionable to the public. This does not change the situation of the artists who still receive small money.

Virginie Devillez: There is something striking in the collectives is that it is always made by young artists. With the time, they separate and go for individual work.

Véronique Depiesse: The group gives strength to start and show the work in pubic sphere.

Simona Denicolai: the network system works also for older artists. Ce n’est pas si systématique, on est jeunes donc on travail ensemble et on s’entre-aide, et puis il y a quelques personnalité qui sort du groupe et qui fait sa carrière tout seul. Quand on pense en termes de réseau aujourd’hui, on voit que enfait il s’agit de projects collectifs, plutôt que de groups spécifiques, de personnalités (plus ou moins déjà reconnues) qui se regroupent sous un titre pour un projet donné à un moment donné. 

David Evrard: Anyway I would speak more bout collective projects that about fixed groups. That is closer to reality.

Virginie Devillez: It all comes from the organization of the happenings, the party, the political agitprop in the street.

Pierre-Yves Desaive: The only true collective today is the gallery. It gathers artists to create an identity to the group. The artists is sometimes only identified by the gallery.

Johan Pas: They are cyclus in history. With conceptual and relational art, the aesthetic and the politic were different from what followed in the eighties that was more painting oriented. The first movement corresponds with the emergence of the artists groups in art history.

David Evrard: The art in the sixties corresponded to a way of life.

Anne Mie Van Kerkhoven: The artists is the creator that the market will transform into a fashion.

Toni Geirlandt: the group is not something fashionable for us. It s a statement to help each other.

Virginie Devillez: What could define a group as a collective is the manifesto. The theory that bind the artists. That is the difference with a gathering of artists to make something.

Véronique Depiesse: The idea to infiltrate the public sphere is maybe a way of affirmation of the group.

Kobe Matthys: the notion of the street can not be the only aspect to define the public sphere. The media are a more important public space today that artists can use to communicate their message even if it is monopolised by mass media.

Dany Devos: There is no question of recuperation. When an artist can use the medias, it is a victory.

Ivo Provoost: Recently I found a good example of collective. It is a group of people  from all different kind of professional fields, not only biological scientists but also antropologues and other social scientists around the world that made the report of the earth state. They also took in account the esthetic services that the earth provides, it’s the first time we do this, esthetical arguments never had a weight in these kind of discussions before. This was not an ideological discussion, really down to earth practical and concrete matters, and that’s what collectives are good at.

Sonia Dermience: What about the Artworkers Foundation Luc Deleu? I understand there is a problem of authorship under the name of a temporary project that permitted to publish three issue of the magazine Artworkers Satrs and a video screening in a bus through Belgium.

Luc Deleu: Artworkers Foundation was not a collective. Everybody signs his own work. It was just a magazine and a performance with the bus. It split very fast.

Véronique Depiesse: What about Building Underwood, isn’t it the same case? Un temporary project that gather artists who will interpret and contribute individually?

David Evrard: Each participating artist could take something from the project to make a personal piece from it.

Ivo Provoost: We became spectator of the project more than initiator at the end, everybody could recuperate material for his own work.

Simona Denicolai: The collective project itself lasted three summers in the Pyrénées. The idea was to build a camp une sorte d’habitat éclaté sur un terrain en pleine nature. There were between 2 and 25 persons present at certain moment on the field to live there and construct the structures. Then the participating artists could use elements from the project in their own work and present it as derived products. Everybody was participating to defining the project.

David Evrard: Nicolas Bourriaud wanted to invite us in a project and present Building Underwood as a hippie utopian community. Whereas we started from a lightly defined project from which any concept has been very fastely overcome by the human and natural elements.

Ivo Provoost: We were supposed to create the camp in one summer and it lasted three summers. It was also the time needed to create a relation with the people from the village next to the field. And even after 3 years the people we were the closest with still hesitated and believed we were doing porno movies or starting a secte.

Véronique Depiesse: What did you do to connect your experience with the neighbours? Did you extend the collective beyond your group?

Ivo Provoost: We used to see the field like an entertainment natural parc for which there was no entrance fee. We organized cocktail parties etc…

Simona Denicolai: To attract visitors, we made announcements on the sound system of the village. We created something like a fiction to tell our story in the public space. Le texte était écrit par Paul Quinones, pendant qu’il passait une période sur le terrain.

Véronique Depiesse: isn’t it also a project of autonomy? A project of independent life?

David Evrard: We can not talk about autarcy but about independence from the institution. We had visits from the local FRAC and people from the village but that didn’t change anything to the project. It was more lived like an absurd event. There was nothing to see.

Véronique Depiesse: You could have asked for an entrance fee if you follow the model of the company.

Simona Denicolai: It is not that we were for or against. Every project requests its own economy. We had received money from the State and everybody was welcomed to participate.
Dans ce cas ça ne nous est pas venu en tête de demander une entrée. Chaque projet a sa propre économie, qui est directement liée à son sense. Dans ce cas nous avions reçu une subvention de l’état francais, plus le soutien de Marc Hotermans qui nous avait prété le terrain. Pour Buiding / Underwood c’était important  que tout le monde soit le bienvenue, vu que l’une des choses qui nous paressait inévitable était de lier ce projet à la vie locale du village.

Marko Stamenkovic: Your views on the artists collective is different from the Eastern countries. For us it is still connected to the communist ideology of the past. The example of the NSK is striking. They build a secondary discourse regarding mainstream art history through artworks following a very well structured strategy in visual art but also music and theater. Boris Groys made a good summary about the Western view on art that is bas on the market economy and the East that comes from an political ideology dominating the system. Still the trend to work in group is also clear in the east. We can mention the collective of curators WHW from Zagreb and the Theoretical Group, a collective of artists and theoreticians from Serbia. Even if the manifesto era is over, there is a need to bring back radicality into the practices. These shifts into the art trends has also to be understood as movements that can be local and specific to a certain space/time context. After the fall of Communism, capitalism spread all over the world, and we can see the emergence of terrorism as a collective form of resistance with terror. Terrorists groups being the paradigm for the rizhomic form of collective made possible through the new communication modes. It represents the model of the multiple body combining complementary competences. From that, the state of positive norm present itself as something that has to be accepted. The project based character of the collaborative works in general correspond to the need of gathering energies and expertises from different disciplines. Today the collective is the body that will enable to achieve a goal, an artwork.

Véronique Depiesse: Your model reminds me of the anarchistic system.

Frédéric Jacquemin: For me, it is the opposite. The choices are guided by the need to find the good person for every function and task required by the project in order to achieve the goal.

Véronique Depiesse: yes, but still people accomplishe things following their expertise and not following a hierarchy.

Johan Pas: This corresponds to the early seventies vision of the group.

Ivo Provoost: What I like in Marko’s definition is that the group aim at achieving something. What counts is the result. And that this result contains a collective thinking.

Frédéric Jacquemin: I think this model correspond to the activist model more than to anarchy.

Marko Stamenkovic: Yes especially because the curatorial discourse today asks for radicality.

Sonia Dermience: In reaction to the efficiency requested from that model, I prefer the model of the romantic group that is based on affinity and desire.

Marko Stamenkovic: yes but that reaction creates then the problem of having an art that does not criticize the economical system. Art being part of the capitalist system, it has to address its positioning into the field of economy.

Iolanda Pensa: I would insist on the importance of subjectivity and complexity that need to be expressed and represented. I understand that one of the major issue with the gathering of artists to create is the combination of complementary expertises and the signature. I think about a collective like Multiplicity that work very well as one body.

Johan Pas: In some discourse about East and West, there is sometimes a confusion between collaboration and collectism.

Kobbe Matthys: What Marko expresses as the “situatedness” of a phenomenon correspond to exoticism in the West. This reflects on the projections that on’es make on the other. We must remember that capitalism is based on the rules edicted by the states. This allowed for the patent system that was defined even before the end of the Balkan war. If authorship is there to define a singularity, it always belongs to the group as well. The act of act will be repeated to become a generalisation. The public makes also the artwork. The when does start and ends the creation? If autonomy is a given, the artwork never stand by itself out of the relationships that link it to the world.

Dany Devos: To balance and enlarge the possible definitions of the artists group, the example of the Ruan Grupa based in Indonesia is revealing. The artists gather to organize big video festival with large screenings in the street of Bangkok. The gathering of the organisators and invited artists into a group of buyers of audiovisual equipment enable them to acquire equipment at a low cost. This form of collectivity permits them to have a festival and keep material.