Let me be your guide: Media art in Flanders, a hybrid history of its origins
digital article by Ils Huygens.
published on 15 Apr 2021 in Flanders Art Institute
[Excerpt]
In 1981, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven and Danny Devos founded their famous Club Moral, the Antwerp underground venue that combined noise and punk performances, performance, video, film screenings and electronic art.
As the name suggests, Club Moral was interested in ethical issues in art, science and society, without pronouncing a moral judgment of its own. The focus was on an unbiased exhibition and revelation of the underlying codes of mass media, resulting in a mix of punk, trash propaganda and eroticism.
After a turbulent period at Club Moral, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven began to explore digital media and artificial intelligence in increasing depth, focusing more on the development of websites and computer animations. In her iconic work Headnurse, for example, she explored her fascination and disgust with the female body in visual culture by means of digital computer animations that she unleashed on the internet as a ‘healing’ force.
Expo ‘Headnurse’ by Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven in Zeno X Gallery (c) AMVK
In the art academies of Ghent and Brussels, meanwhile, a new generation of video makers (and young teachers and critics such as Chris Dercon) had also emerged, who were broadening the traditional vision of audiovisual art as ‘film’ and championing video art as an autonomous genre.
Like Van Kerckhoven, they were fascinated by the raw, radical and absurd aesthetics of the material. Figures such as Frank and Koen Theys, Dirk Paesmans, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys caused an international furore with innovative experimental video work, despite an embarrassing lack of recognition at home in Flanders. Due to the lack of production facilities, they founded De Nieuwe Workshop under their own steam, run by the experimental filmmaker and teacher at Sint-Lucas, Frank Vranckx.
It was almost the only place in Flanders at the time where video artists had access to production facilities (besides the audiovisual department at the KU Leuven, which turned a blind eye to artists using the studio when it was not in use). This collaboration was later continued by ‘t Stuc, one of the few places in Flanders that presented media art to an audience during that period, for example under the impulse of its programmer at the time, Dirk De Wit.
read online: https://www.kunsten.be/en/now-in-the-arts/mediakunst-in-vlaanderen-een-hybride-ontstaansgeschiedenis/
Related solo exhibitions: HeadNurse
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