ON MY VIDEO-ART

There are 2 people in me, maybe 3, or more... Different worlds, that melt together, sometimes, but most of the time they fight for the right to exist, to reign in my brain. And I watch and I undergo and become confused and sad. And depressed, and the only remedy is work, fight the worlds with images. The images come at random, in a soft chaos, and when I decide to show them, I look around and chose an existing system in which i present them. I have to feel an affection for the particular system, this gives me the reason to use it, to pervert it.

When I started to make video art, it was almost by accident, it just appeared in my life in a very organic way. In the late seventies there was a boom of audio-visual possibilities in the so-called cultural centers of Belgium, an evolution due to the omnipresent political injection  of socio-cultural awareness. Videoassistance and -equipment were available for social interaction on diferent levels, which meant it was also there for artists in specific cases. I first used video as  a means of documentation: at the time I constructed multimedia-installations with a very defined parcours in it, fysically as well as mentally.  Because sound and time were actors in the artwork, video was the ultimate and not so expensive tool to document it. This was around 1980.

In 1970 I read Walter Benjamins essay on the reproductability of the artwork in modern times, in 1972 I found Eisensteins book on montage. I admired the actions of Coum Transmissions and other fluxus artists, read intensely a combination of books of the Marquis De Sade and Wittgenstein... Montage and manipulation, raw lust justified by the highbrow poltical= philosophy, chaos versus the system, any system. Structures, systems, lists... I’m attracted to them, and I love to misuse them, against the cause that created them.

AMVK, Borgerhout. 7 October 2001