Page 23 - Studio Internatinal - October 1974

interesting. This is partly because there were galleries as an established Belgian avant garde, comparison witn tnis otnerwise visible
many artists whose work I'd never seen before for consumption and export. Not surprisingly I submit to you four artists' work from this
but which I found as excellent, thorough, and some of the more established avant-garde exhibition which I liked, respected and was
original as what is elsewhere (including in this artists invited did not finally exhibit here — as able to photograph.
magazine) being supported by critics and much for art-political as other reasons. And for

(Top row left and centre left) Eduard Bal showed these airplanes — a set of collages in graduated scale, made in 1973, and a large airplane made especially for the exhibition —
as well as the 'ornithology' film, which he had made in collaboration with Guy Schraenen. Bal has evidently been making paper aeroplanes with a structure analagous to birds
in flight, for almost twenty years. I prefer his work to that of Panamarenko: it is not only more simply universal in meaning, it is more likely to actually fly.
(Top row centre right and right) Alain d'Hooghe from Liege showed his specially-made cyclists' jerseys, which had been worn by the twelve teams of named artists who had
participated in the mini Tour de France which he had organized on 12 July 1974 and which was presented in the exhibition in a 16mm film documentation complete with a
professional sportscaster's commentary, titled Casino de l'Avant garde. The teams included Support/Surface (Devade, Cane), Hyperrealisme (Estes, De Andrea), Minimal (Judd,
Andre, LeWitt), Groupe 70 (Alocco, Maccaferri), BMPT (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni), Pop Art (Warhol, Wesselman, Rauschenberg), Fluxus (Ben — 'I am the king of
the pedal', De Maria, Filliou), Nouveau Realisme (Arman, Klein, Tinguely). I like the wit, scholarship, and largesse of d'Hooghe's version of the art-world rat-race, even
though it is heavily focused on a French and American avant garde.
(Above left and centre right) Roland Van Den Berghe, who lives in Amsterdam and New York, presented his projects of peoples' participatory colouring of Queen Fabiola and
the Belgian comic Eddy Merckx — which had been commissioned and then rejected by the 'Openbaar Kunstbezit' in 1972, as being art and not-art. With an invitation to all
readers to add colour without inhibitions, a drawing of Fabiola had been published in the Flemish tv magazine Humo on 25 March 1971 and one of Eddy Merckx in the
French-Belgian review Special on 12 January 1972. Some of the works sent back to the artist through the magazines were exhibited on a table. On the surrounding walls were
exhibited six series of seven different drawings of Fabiola and Merckx which had been submitted to people of the renown of the Marxist economist Ernst Mandel (who wrote
a treatise across the set of drawings), the poet Marcel Van Maele (whose differently cubistically-coloured drawings were in the row above) and the cartoonist Gal who made
imaginative collages on the set. And I think the association of famous Belgians' images, however politically controversial, is far less important in this work than is the very
effective creation of a network in which 'art' and 'ordinary people' — as well as 'extraordinary people' — can actually and directly participate. It is not only the only work I
saw in Belgium which achieved this, it is also the work which has most thoroughly structured this important relationship which I have seen any place.
(Bottom right) This is a Well-considered Idea of an Art-work by Wout Vercammen — a set of back-projected slides, of registered trade-mark imagery from the culture. The
differently fragmented (abstracted) verbal-visual imagery related together in surprising associations with their referents in daily commerce. Vercammen also showed some
paintings using similar imagery in abstractions whose subtlety and strength of colour, scale, and sheer mental wit was extremely impressive.

Obviously this summer provided some the Society of Exhibitions shares — with similar financially self-supporting — almost like a
extraordinary opportunities to see contemporary societies for film, music and theatre — a private gallery — paying rent, taxes, and its own
Belgian art there. Otherwise regular 'public' building beautifully designed by Victor Horta salaries for three 'professional' and nine other
exhibitions of modern art (let alone for their joint purposes, a central council for staff members. It exhibits both contemporary
contemporary or international art) are now over-all administration, and some of the and older art, chosen by the staff with the
virtually limited to the Palais de Beaux-Arts in government subsidy granted to that council. As advice of the Society's own council; and it
Brussels and the ICC in Antwerp. In Brussels, an officially non-profit organization, it is partly publishes the only two art-magazines I saw in
121