Jacques, Jacques, Jacques and the others in Liège

It is no coincidence that Guy Jungblut, director of the Yellow gallery in Liège, decided in the autumn of 1971 to organise an event entirely dedicated to video, Propositions d’artistes pour un circuit fermé de télévision [Artists’ proposals for a closed television circuit], which is now legendary as it was a first in Belgium. In 1971, it was indeed time for video and artists’ films. Prospect, Konrad Fischer’s initiative at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, was called Projection this year and was entirely dedicated to photography, film and video. The Paris Biennial was also opening up to these new media and created a section entitled Films d’artistes 1 . Alfred Pacquement, curator of this new initiative, stated that it was time to become aware of the phenomenon: 2

(...) Following the exhibition Information (New York, summer 1970), the Biennale wants to show the importance and originality of artists’ films. Indeed, we see art magazines devoting special issues to cinema: one of the best German contemporary art magazines, Magazin Kunst, recently published a very well documented issue on the subject. Moreover, art galleries are increasingly concerned with films, and some of them (Gerry Schum in Düsseldorf, PAP in Munich) now only sell films anymore, even distributing signed and numbered copies as if they are engravings (...). All these examples show how topical the subject is: the proliferation of artists’ films should prompt a response from organisations that disseminate culture by confronting an audience with this new type of cinema (...).

Jean-Marc Poinsot, who directs the Mail Art section of the Biennial, sensed that the event ‘would take an unexpected turn’ and noted that 3 :

modern society, which is no longer based solely on the exchange of goods, has seen its services increase and symbolic exchanges multiply. An object produces more work for its distribution than for its manufacture. The transport of information is more important than that of goods. It is this current contradiction of our consumer society that is in some way affected by artistic activity.

In Liège, it all began a few months earlier, in 1970, during an evening of film screenings organised by Jacques Piraprez at the home of Frédéric Nyst, Jacques Louis’ brother. The selection of films that night was recently shown at the first Wet Dream Festival in Amsterdam, a rather porno-arty event created by Suck, The First European Sex Paper. The evening ended with a – scabrous, one suspects – performance by the Viennese action artist Otto Muehl. Shinkichi Tajiri, an American-Japanese artist living in Maastricht, attended the session. His film A Summer Day was one of the winners of the recent Wet Dream Festival. And while some people photographed Muehl’s performance, Tajiri filmed it with a Portapak camera.4 This was not lost on Jungblut and Jacques Lizène. The Holy Grail was there, in front of them: the famous Portapak, launched by Sony in 1967, was the very first portable video recorder available to the general public, although its price was steep. Jungblut was fascinated by the Portapak’s immediate playback capability. He then planned the exhibition entitled Propositions d’artistes pour un circuit fermé de télévision, for which he sent out forms as invitations (the conceptual aesthetic prevailed)5, asking artists to send him ‘any proposal to be made on the subject of either the process of information in general or this particular medium of information, the closed-circuit TV, or both’. The sender himself was astonished by the considerable number of more than sixty replies he received. Among the Belgians were De Boek, Charlier, Heyrman, Lizène, Nyst, Piraprez, Ransonnet, Roquet, Schwind, Vandeloise, and among the proposals from abroad, there were those from Dan Graham, Huebler, Ben, Mr and Mrs Leisgen, Le Gac, Sarkis, Hödicke, Boltanski, Gerz, Engels, Dubreuil, Dietmann, Locatelli, Tobas, Nagasawa, Andersen, Rainer and many others. Even Vito Acconci responded... but after the event. Jungblut did not manage to find the coveted Sony equipment, forcing the organisers to fall back on a surveillance camera6, which they found in a hurry. The impressive archive of the event testifies to the broad spectrum of possibilities of the medium and all the utopias it inspires. Among those, Marcel Alocco’s filmed lectures showed an interest in the deterioration of signifiers through the interpretation of a text in a phonetic system foreign to the language of the text. In his Message personnel, Jochen Gerz proposed to film a person writing slowly with his finger on the wall: ‘Ces mots sont ma chair et mon sang.’ [These words are my flesh and blood.] And the artist specifies: ‘the camera’s field of vision includes the person in feet, the space of the sentence and the time to write’. Bernard Borgeaud proposed to use television as a sensitive instrument capable of reflecting the impulses, the exchanges of energy, the tensions that would exist between the individuals in the gallery. Christian Boltanski asked an actor to mime the gestures he himself made between 1948 and 1954 as closely as possible, which he had reconstructed in 1970. Tjeerd Alkema wondered about the financing and purpose of a TV circuit on the public highway. He proposed the projection of an interlude: ‘Qui paye tout ça? Et à qui ça sert?’ [Who pays for all this? And who is it for?] Ben Vautier wanted two pretty naked girls to be filmed in the gallery all day long, without any further instructions. Jean-François Dubreuil wondered about information and advertising. Jean-Pierre Ransonnet also looked at news: he would film a man gagged and bound to a chair while on the soundtrack a news programme would be broadcast. Jacques Charlier proposed the retransmission of his interview with Rocky Tiger. Dan Graham proposed a remake of his TV Camera/Monitor Performance, created in 1970. Arnulf Rainer imagined a series of Faces Farces with tape, a non-verbal theatrical monologue. Ugo Locatelli envisaged the broadcasting of a statement on the screen: ‘We know for sure that certain types of communication on certain themes submitted to the attention of certain people under certain conditions produce certain effects.’ Schwind, of course, wanted to appropriate the totality of the projects presented, which is the essence of his work. Douglas Huebler sent a photograph of his own face to be confronted with the indeterminate number of people he would never see or know. These are just a few examples of the sixty-eight proposals sent to the Yellow Gallery, which Jungblut planned to compile into a publication as soon as the event would be conceived.7

Access to material was indeed the first and greatest problem. Jean-Paul Trefois and Greta Van Broeckoven stressed that in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Salade Liégeoise, la création vidéo à Liège organised at the ICC, the International Cultural Centre in Antwerp in 1985. In 1970, Jacques Charlier met Gerry Schum, ‘who had already enabled more than one artist to produce a film or video work in Germany’. Like the German director, Charlier saw the potential of the television medium. With the collaboration of Nicole Forsbach, his wife, he had already made a first film, Canalisations souterraines (1969), a performative work symbolically burying the ‘demobilised earth’ of the Saint-Gilles slag heap in Liège. He even made it into an installation, on the occasion of his exhibition Zone Absolue (1970) at the APIAW, Association pour le Progrès Intellectuel et Artistique en Wallonie. For this, Charlier projected over his film slides, a series of images of canalisations taken from public works magazines, and completed the work with a minimal and industrial sound creation.8 In the protocol that accompanied the work, he wrote about the images of pipes he had selected:

Their enigmatic character can not only rival certain contemporary plastic research, but also surpass it by their monumental capacity of expression. But no one will ever say that, or perhaps too late. So it is with today's art, which hijacks the reality of work, unbearable for the dominant cultural minority, under the alibi of esoteric creation.

For his participation in the Paris Biennale, Charlier wanted to go further and switch to the video medium. As he did not have the appropriate equipment, he asked Gerry Schum for advice and finally opted for film, taking into account that the film could later be converted into video format via telecine. Unfortunately, the Ministry, which generously donated funds to the project 9, did not support that and the film was only made in 16 mm. In a note of intent, Charlier states:

The idea is to produce a 16 mm film, lasting 40 minutes, a film made up of a series of six sequences, each made by different artists. This film will reflect, in a way, the current trends of ideas and positions developed in Belgium. Like any attempt at a collective panorama, it will certainly be incomplete, but the point is to initiate a working method. The film is easy to transport and can be screened either on film or on television, and thus perfectly meets the needs of international communication today.

And he adds:

Strictly speaking, it will not be pure cinema, but rather a carrier for ideas or documents about a work in progress. So there will be no research into special effects, aesthetics or spectacular camera movements. Composed of simple and often fixed shots, it will illustrate a series of investigations into behaviours that you cannot convey without images and sound.

Charlier thus became a director and producer. He turned to Walter Swennen, Guy Mees, Panamarenko, Bernd Lohaus, as well as an anonymous service worker, Leo Joseftein, born from the imagination of Fernand Spillemaekers. Each artist would be responsible for his or her own production, shooting and sound recording, developing, pre-editing, film stripping, and translations for subtitling. The galleries MTL, X-One and Wide White Space were involved in the project. Eventually, the film was finished in Liège, with Nicole Forsbach playing the key role. The entire production took place during 1970-1971. Charlier himself produced the sixth sequence, Rocky Tiger, a portrait of an office colleague who plays rock music outside of work hours, with which Charlier introduced a professional reality into the field of contemporary art.11

On the occasion of Propositions d’artistes pour un circuit fermé de télévision, Lizène multiplied his proposals and imagined a whole series of experiments. These explored the potential of the medium and/or refered to his artistic and philosophical concerns, with the closed circuit, the very image of autarky, at the forefront. Taming the camera, escaping the surveillance of a camera, filming the bottom of walls during a long urban walk, constraining the body in the frame, filming at eye level, sex level, foot level, interrupting the light, showing suburban civilisation, filming as many faces possible: Lizène would carry out a vast programme, but essentially in 16 mm and thanks to the unconditional support of Jungblut.

Andrée and Guy Jungblut moved into 46 rue Roture in 1969. Guy Jungblut was a photographer and set up his studio there, which was soon to become an art gallery. Lizène took the plunge in December 1969 12. A collaboration followed in which, in the field of photography as well as film, Jungblut occupied the roles of producer, technician, photographer, cameraman, editor and gallery owner! Yellow would help delineate the field of plastic photography, which he described in 1972, after a visit to Documenta, like this: ‘the photographic image as autonomous reality and without reference to a pre-existing reality, hence a study and analysis of its own mechanisms’. The gallery favoured a narrative type of art, marked by sociology and autobiography. The artist’s film would be the hallmark of the Yellow gallery, which produced, realized, showed and distributed films, also abroad. Consider in particular the Neue Galerie in Aachen, which hosted the 1972 exhibition Liège, Galerie Yellow Now, ses artistes en studio at the invitation of director Wolfgang Becker. For this exhibition, Lizène imagined an installation that projected, side by side, a slide from the series Contraindre le corps à s’inscrire dans le cadre de l’image (‘Forcing the Body to Fit into the Image’), and his film Mur. The self-proclaimed ‘minor master from Liège’ would implement two fundamental camera movements: the sideways tracking shot and the forward tracking shot (a forward movement with freeze frames). Contraindre le corps à s’inscrire dans le cadre de l’image showed the camera lens gradually approaching the subject being filmed, with the artist himself contorting his body to remain in the frame. Mur, on the other hand, was a long tracking shot on a brick wall (actually several tracking shots one after the other), a movement from left to right and right to left on a blind wall, on which at the end is written in chalk: Je ne procréerai pas [I will not procreate]. Juxtaposing this 1965 motto with Contraindre le corps à s’inscrire dans le cadre de l’image, Lizène offered us a second reading of the work, evoking a regression to a quasi-fetal state, to the trouble with being born, to paraphrase Emil Cioran. For technical reasons, this project was not carried out, but that did not affect Lizène, a devotee of incompleteness 13. It was not until 1979 that Lizène created his first video installation, a column or totem of monitors, imagined during the filming of Séquences d'art sans talent, which were produced by RTB, the French-speaking Belgian public television. Among the productions supported by the Yellow gallery was also Casino de l’art d’avant-garde by the unclassifiable artist Alain D’Hooghe. In 1974, he staged an art cycle race at the Sart Tilman university estate, which he filmed in 16 mm. Each cyclist represented an avant-garde school: new figuration, pop art, conceptual art, new realism, BMPT, minimalism, Supports/Surfaces, optical art, etc. Twelve teams were involved, as well as motorcycle followers riding in the colours of fashionable art magazines. Unfortunately, all of D’Hooghe’s work has been lost.

In Liège or elsewhere, notably in Dendermonde, Duisburg, Lausanne or Paris, the Yellow gallery showed films by Marcel Marïen, Jacques Lizène, Jean-Pierre Ransonnet, Alain D’Hooghe, Raoul Marroquin, Maurice Roquet, Schwind, Paul-Armand Gette, John Broderick and Laurent Sauwerein, Bernard Borgeaud, Jochen Gerz, Barbara and Michael Leisgen, and of course Jacques Louis Nyst, the essential pioneer in the history of video in Belgium. After a few experiments with 8 mm and super 8 mm film, Nyst was the first of the small Liège scene to switch to video in 1974, thanks to the Antwerp ICC. Continental Vidéo produced L’objet, the artist's first significant work, and in 1977 also L’ombrelle en papier, a compilation of various earlier works: Le paysage, Le voyage de Christophe Colomb, Le tombeau des nains, La mort d’une poule, Le robot, Révolver and Ombrelle descendant un escabeau. Yellow Now, which has closed its doors and is now devoted to publishing, put out two books about these works. They have the same titles: L’objet and L’ombrelle de papier. Philippe Dubois notes:

Nyst systematically starts with objects small, everyday, fragile, often personal, a little derisory, always isolated. Even images, television, cinema or photos, are first and foremost objects for him, just like the words of language. And these objects, which constitute his basic material, are manipulated by Nyst, as a good bricoleur (in the sense given to this term by Lévi-Strauss), that is to say by subjecting them to a singular poetic treatment, by systematic displacement (of status, of value, of meaning), generating metaphorical short-circuits and multiple analogies.

The result is a kind of innocence, a poetic humour made of shifts and coincidences. ‘This poetry of the object is also conveyed by discursive narrative devices: all his works tell one or more stories, neither linear nor direct, but rather labyrinthine, all in twists, turns and returns.’ 14

Nyst joined the CAP group in 1973. 15 He hosted the group initiated by Lennep on several occasions at his home in Sprimont, for weekends devoted to video experiments. And it is worth noting that public television took up the cause of video creation during this period. At the RTB’s production centre in Liège, Annie Lummerzheim created the RTC video studio, a precursor of regional television, which back then still leaned on French-speaking public television. In 1973, she welcomed Gery Schum and his Berlin-based TV Land Art Gallery to RTB’s Liège premises. In 1974, Lummerzheim agreed to support the experiments of the CAP group and to provide technicians and equipment for the experimental weekends in Sprimont. The first filming took place at Nyst’s house on 7 September 1974. In 1975, in the programme RTC Information, Lennep specified the videographic field invested by the CAP group in relation to relational art, with the first of its concerns being ‘the relationship between the artist, the camera and the screen, the relationship between the screen and the viewer, the relationship to the image, to its analogue or narrative scenarios’. This is, in a way, self-evident. For Lizène and Nyst, joining the CAP group would allow them to be part of international networks, notably the Bruges Triennial in 1973, the Art Vidéo Confrontation at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1974, Artists’ Video Tapes at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1975, but also and above all the Open Encounters on Video in London in 1974, in Ferrare and Buenos Aires in 1975, in Antwerp in 1976, in Caracas, Barcelona and Mexico City in 1977, and Tokyo in 1978. For the record, it was in Caracas that Lizène’s Civilisation de banlieue was lost, a film of which the ‘minor master’ had not made a copy... Caramba! 16

The year 1978 marked an important turning point, when the new association Vidéo? Vous avez dit vidéo? was created. Its first event took place from 22 to 27 September 1978 in the hold of a barge moored at Passerelle Saucy, a footbridge in Liège. The team of Vidéographie, the first programme in Europe to be devoted exclusively to video that was created by Jean Paul Trefois and Robert Stéphane in 1976, travelled to the United States and brought back a selection of video art not yet distributed in Belgium, with tapes by Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, Ed Emswhiller, Joan Jonas, Bill Viola, Terry Fox and William Wegman. It was a sort of preview, since the videos would be shown on RTB. This week of screenings, entitled USA vidéo, l’Amérique au travers du miroir vidéo, ended with a Rencontre nationale de vidéo-animation. Most of the Belgian groups working in this field were invited. Tapes were shown continuously throughout the day while the participants discussed ‘their differences and similarities in objectives and methods’. Participants included: RTA Jambes, TVC Gilly, RTC Canal Plus Liège, Vidéo 600 Andrimont, Vidéo Saint-Josse, Vidéo Bus de Bruxelles et du Hainaut, TVC Gembloux, No Télé Tournai as well as the Dardenne brothers and their association Dérives, i.e. some of the action groups that would give birth to future community television stations. 17

Vidéo? Vous avez dit vidéo? brought together four operators from Liège: Jeunesses artistiques de Wallonie, Cirque Divers, RTC (Radio Télévision Culture) and RTB (via Vidéographie). The association had the short-term objective to show video works in a lively setting: ‘presenting videos in a space open to the movements and reactions of the public’. The collaboration of Cirque Divers is therefore very appropriate as it organised evenings of screenings in relation to the Vidéographie programme. Artists and professionals were invited to meet the audience. The programming reflected a desire to establish a balance between Belgian and foreign works. There was a is deliberate emphasis on what is known as video art, but video documentaries weren’t neglected. For example, on the occasion of a first evening devoted to Canadian video, Cirque Divers invited Peggy Gale, director of the film and video section of Art Métropole in Toronto, who had – in 1974 – curated the exhibition Videoscape, the first museum event in Canada to recognise video as a fully-fledged artistic practice. After that, they would have New York video artist Dimitri Devyatykin, founding member of The Kitchen and collaborator of Nam June Paik. He presented his latest work conceived with Paik: Media Shuttle New York Moscow, a film that raised the question of world television, as in their Global Groove, but this time set in the context of the Cold War. In January 1979, the focus returned to Paik’s work, with four screenings (Guadalcanal Requiem, Global Groove, Tribute to John Cage and Suite 212) in collaboration with Jeunesse et Arts Plastiques (JAP), as well as to independent production in the United States (Bill Viola, Terry Fox, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas), in the presence of Joan Jonas. Then followed more local productions: Gary Bigot, Lili Dujourie, Michael and Barbara Leisgen. Collaborations included the ICC in Antwerp and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Cirque Divers was particularly interested in feminist movements, alternative theatre and performance art, which influenced its programme. They invited Bob Wilson, who was directing Prologue pour le 4e acte du Regard du sourd in Liège. This led to an evening on the Nouveau théâtre américain à travers la vidéo, presented by Guy Scarpetta, an expert on Wilson’s work and a columnist for the magazine Art Press. They screened Video 50, a series of fifty small, frontal sketches of 30 seconds in which Wilson presented singular rituals, equally anodyne and whimsical. He pushed the logic of television to the point of nonsense, reconstructing the fragmentary and discontinuous vision, close to zapping, that the viewer has of it. In the form of brief irruptions, these short spots could parade through people’s lives like an accidental projection, as Wilson envisaged them being projected in places of transition such as subways, banks and shops. Cirque Divers also welcomed Richard Foreman, founder and artistic director of the Ontological Hysteric Theater, for the projection of his City Archive as well as Maniac Production, a variable collective active from 1975 to 1979 and led by the Belgian Michael Laub and the Italian Edmondo Za. Their work is unclassifiable, with a combination of minimal art, repetitive musical compositions close to the creations of Steve Reich, body language (what was called body art at the time), happening (to be understood here as the intervention of chance) and, of course, the video image. Cirque Divers also welcomed Susan Milano, who coordinated the New York Women’s Video Festival at The Kitchen since 1972, an event that promoted the work of women video artists as a reaction to the small number of female selections at other festivals.

The collaboration between the four partners was a de facto association. Geneviève Van Cauwenberge of Jeunesses artistiques de Wallonie, key figure of Vidéo? Vous avez dit vidéo?, suggested to perpetuate the initiative. With Jean-Paul Tréfois, she sent the Ministry of Education and Culture in Brussels a proposal to create a Centre Vidéo in Liège. It was necessary to give the action a wider impact and to multiply the links, among others with the Agora Studio in Maastricht, the Neue Galerie in Aachen, the ICC in Antwerp and Image Vidéo in Brussels. ‘While there is indeed the ICC in Antwerp and Image Vidéo in Brussels, there is no Walloon production workshop’, Van Cauwenberge notes. She proposed to create a centre essentially oriented towards diffusion, ‘a centre that would function on a regular basis and would constitute a place of meeting, animation and reflection on this new communication practice’. She insisted that video was a cutting-edge medium, with the electronic image replacing the filmed image, and also pointed out its extreme handiness and the possibilities of immediate reproduction. The proposal highlighted what video art could possibly bring to the audiovisual field and contribute to introducing the general public to the language of the image. The text also looked at the Belgian art scene, citing the work of the CAP group, Jacques Charlier, Jacques Louis Nyst and Jacques Lizène, and opened the debate to include other applications, such as video and music, and the increasing use of video in the field of psychiatry, in-service training and even teaching. In short, it would be necessary to coordinate, welcome and diffuse systematically and continuously, which would of course reinforce the activity of Vidéographie, ‘which provides a unique overview of the various trends in contemporary video in the European audiovisual landscape at the rate of one hour every fortnight, but whose handicap is the late hour of its programming, after 10 pm’. In the margins of the proposal, Van Cauwenberge also opened the door to the creation of a production structure, which could be done at the beginning ‘with rather limited material means: a ¾ inch broadcast video recorder, a camera, two monitors, an editing bench and the help of a specialised technician’. The Ministry of Culture never followed up and the project never saw the light of day. However, the RTB production centre in Liège took over in 1979.

This was not, in principle, the primary concern of the Vidéographie team, which was created in 1976 under the impetus of the tandem formed by Robert Stéphane, at the time director of the Liège production centre for public television, and Jean-Paul Tréfois. Dick Tomasovic 18 recalls: ‘Driven by the utopia of technological modernity and the desire for audiovisual democratization, Robert Stéphane was first and foremost concerned with the didactics of new technologies.’ The programme was a real UFO in the audiovisual field, and ‘would also relay militant or alternative audiovisual discourse’. It is also broadcasted video art, mainly due to the interest of Jean Paul Tréfois and director Paul Paquay in these new creations. In the wake of this, Vidéographie would also capture and broadcast a series of theatrical and musical performances such as the Fluxus concert organised by the Cirque Divers at the Palais des Congrès in Liège in 1980, a concert that brought together Robert Filliou, Guiseppe Chiari, Ben Vautier, Takako Saito, Milan Knizak and Wolf Vostell. Finally, there was the determination to pursue a production policy. Since 1979, undeniably influenced by American and German public television, Vidéographie had invited Belgian and foreign artists, often spotted by Tréfois at international festivals, to come and produce at RTB-Liège, notably Michèle Blondeel and Boris Lehman, Jacques Louis Nyst, Jacques Charlier, Marina Abramović and Ullay, Antonio Muntadas, Gérard Fromanger, Fred Forest, Léa Lublin and Jacques Lizène. The latter’s broadcast of Quelques séquences d'art sans talent, directed by Paul Paquay, scheduled for April 1, 1980, was cancelled at the last minute by order of the RTB hierarchy. The collaboration between Cirque Divers and Vidéographie ended in 1982. The programme continued until 1986, a story that remains to be written in detail. The Liège scene was thus at the forefront of video creation throughout this decade, demonstrating an interest in film and audiovisual creation which, on the banks of the Meuse, never faded.