Page 21 - Studio Internatinal - October 1974

course the two (French and Netherlandish) St Pietr's Abbaye in Ghent, the Biennale catalogues (some for sale), as well as a
National Ministries of Education and Culture exhibition of sculpture in Middelheim Park and kindergarten/creche (which exhibited their
where the visual arts can be the concern of two the 'Aspects of Contemporary Art' in the resulting art-works) and a tea-room bar. As a
departments in each language-cultural ministry: International Culture Centre in Antwerp. place-to-be, it was an extremely civilized and
the departments of Arts and Letters (interior) In Bruges, `Triennale 3' was subtitled 'An humane exhibition. And the work selected by
and Exterior Relations (where the sub-section informative exhibition of contemporary art in the small and truly knowledgeable 'work
is called 'Art Propaganda'),which has as parallel Belgium'; it focused primarily on painting, committee' made as good and lively and
departments those of Sport, Youth, and sculptural installations, and that mixture of internationally-relevant a national exhibition of
Popular (Adult and Continuing) Education and physical means called 'conceptual art' — noting forty artists as I believe could be made (or
Libraries. With such a complicated structure of in its very clear and informative catalogue that found) in most EEC countries. The two main
national administration (and of national funds) monumental sculpture was being exhibited stylistic tendencies visible were variations on
it is not surprising that anyone who wants to simultaneously in Middelheim Park in Antwerp. `realism' (mostly in the left-hand section) and
organize something in the Belgian contemporary With a budget of 2,600,000 Belgian francs 'conceptual art' and 'minimalism' (in the right-
art world (or life) must be a more-than- (about £27,000) — half from the city 'and half hand half). About one-quarter of each half were,
competent strategist. from the province — the exhibition committee to my mind, as good as anything of parallel
Obviously there are some people with this hired the town's beursalle, constructed `style' anywhere else — not a bad thing; and
sort of talent who have been operating with installation-walls giving each of the forty where work seemed weak it was usually in terms
great energy during the past year or more, for invited artists a box-like space 7.5 x 5 m, paid of wallowing in local traditions of Surrealism
this summer in Belgium I saw no less than four each artist an honorarium of 10,000 francs (over and representation (the 'realists') or floating
large exhibitions of art by living Belgians: in the £100) — and provided a programme of mindlessly between international publicity of
'Triennale 3' in Bruges, a retrospective of Roger informational video-tapes and films, a section of informational reproductions (in the 'conceptual'
Raveel in the Centre for Art and Culture at informational documentation with books and section). Some of the work I noticed and liked
I show here.

(Top row) General view of 'Triennale 3' from the entrance of the Beursalle, Bruges, showing the outside of artists' cubicles (left), the bar, bookstalls and information centre
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(centre left).
(Top row) A distance (centre right) and close-up (right) view of Pjeeroo Roobjee's The rural but none-the-less extremely cosy funeral chapel of a just now alive-and-kicking
Gestapo sergeant shows how — — with all the seriousness of a well-researched second-class horror-film — — Roobjee juxtaposed an empty Nazi uniform, priestly surplice, a plate
for calling cards, caskets, and funerary flowers, to evoke an extremely lively mortuary situation. In the catalogue, Roobjee gives it a lengthy and image-packed description in
the tone of a circus-barker inviting crowds to the Big Act. And at the exhibitions opening, he led the rock and roll band in a spontaneous exhibition of pop-singing: a
moralistic success never seen before.
(Bottom row left) Roger Raveel Come Look Through the Window was one of the most witty uses of the box-like spaces in the Triennale. The four equal-sized paintings of
squared windows were set centrally in the four walls, playing witty games with the traditional notions of painting as picture of the wall and window into a world. The equally
abstracted chairs and shiny fibre-glass table in the cubicle's centre further accentuated the cosy sitting-room atmosphere of the whole installation as an integrated joke on the
seriousness of high art. As an installation it made a great deal more sense and wit than did the fatiguing sprawl of Raveel's too-enormous retrospective exhibition in St Pietrs
Abbaiye in Ghent.
(Bottom row centre) In this photograph of Marcel Maeyer's Queen Maria Hendricka Square painting, from the St Pietrsstation — Gent series. One can see the almost
photographic realism (the pavements around Ghent's main railway station) and flattened elegance of composition (which would do justice to the School of Paris) and the
closeness of tonality in these acrylic-on-canvas paintings. One cannot see the vibrancy of colour contrast amongst the cool silvery hues, which take the paintings out of the
realm of elegantly abstracted documentation and into the exciting tonalities of the world of late Van Gogh.
(Bottom row right) Dan Van Severen's Untitled paintings have an almost misty translucency of white paint on a dark ground and hang in spacious isolation as a pair of
differently quadranted entities, as if the focus of a disciplined mystical meditation.

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