Private Investigations at Beursschouwburg →

‘Private Investigations: A focus on intimate odysseys’ is an extravagant, eleven-and-a-half week-long celebration of the beauty of second-hand and recycled objects, hosted by the Beursschouwburg. Last weekend’s opening was a heady mix of live performance, music, workshops, and installations.

The visual highlight for many will no doubt be wunderkind Pieterjan Ginckels’ Human Disco Bong, an enormous, glittering structure made from over 100 bicycle helmets and oodles of reflective mirror. The museum-scale velodrome and performances got Ginckels nominated for 2011’s Young Belgian Painters Award. Human Disco Bong was first featured in the Beursschouwburg ‘RollerMadness’ and the piece will now be an ‘art work in residence’.

Each piece or performance is based around the artist’s personal recollections: Els Viaene’s snaking wooden sculpture filled with murky water represents her own route through the Amazon rainforest. Documented using Sat Nav, attendees dip special microphones into the water and trail them along the length of the pond-like sculpture to hear distinctive sounds of the rainforest alongside mysterious radio frequencies. Peter Lenaerts audiovisual project also draws inspiration and material from further afield; his Sonic Adventures uses recordings made in the Australian desert, and will be making the Beursschouwburg its home for two months. Lenaerts plans on taking his sound adventuring to the next level with his project micro, in which he’ll turn the Beursschouwburg itself into a massive musical instrument.

Peter Lenaerts

‘Macxorciste’ sees Philip Beloul, a French dancer, performer, and tech guru, dole out advice on useful tricks for iPhones, and workshops on how to hack PCs and turn them into Macs.

Private Investigations’ programme was put together by Tom Bonte, Helena Kritis and Vincent Tetaert and the opening featured music by Flying Horseman and Imaginary Family. Guests were also treated to films by Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes, of ‘Because We Are Visual’ fame,Britt Hatzius re-mastering of her father’s footage of himself riding a unicycle in Afghanistan, as well as an unwanted Christmas present exchange.

Still to look forward to is a conference on intellectual property and spiritual theatre fromFlorentina Holzinger and Vincent Riebeek, alongside the ongoing installations.

Xavier Hufkens presents… Clarissa Dalrymple →

Called “the most aristocratic bohemian on New York’s contemporary art scene” by the New York Times, known for an ability to “pinpoint who and what in art will matter next”, influential New York curator Clarissa Dalrymple shows no signs of slowing down.

Ryan Sullivan. Courtesy: the artist and Maccarone, NY

In her latest curatorial project, Luther Price displays unearthed slides, 87 year-old Alfred Lesliedigitally rearranges his own paintings, and Tommy Hartung presents eerie moving images inspired by cultural relics as diverse as Anna Karenina and the Gnostic gospels. Jay Heikes’s ‘Drawn and Quartered’ is a collection of 18 tools, while his minimal ‘Fields’ is constructed with the help of Purpurissum, a mixture originally used by ceramicists in Pompeii, made up of Murex, Indigo, and Madder. Murex has its own fascinating history; more expensive than gold by the gram, the dye is extracted from a rare Mediterranean mollusc and was used to signify royalty in the time of Pliny the Elder.

The chosen pieces work well within Hufkens gallery, supporting one another rather than dominating the space, but the highlight is undoubtedly Ryan Sullivan’s experiment in naturally occurring phenomena – sedimentation, rust, and cracking – resulting in a topographical surface reminiscent of a military landscape.

Brie Ruais’s ‘Circle Game’ is also a standout piece. Ruais pushed 350 pounds of clay in a circle until its starting point was imperceptible and the colours had spread and blended. It’s a kind of ‘Drawing Restraint’ à la Matthew Barney, in which momentum is hindered. Rather than ceramics, Ruais uses the clay to explore both its and her own limitations. Her other piece, ‘Five Ways Out from Center’, is a glittery-grey explosion, lying on the ground as if a marker on a map. Both pieces take this demarcation of territory as a starting point.

Brie Ruais: Circle Game. Courtesy: the Artist and Nicole Klagsbrun, NY

Along with six American artists, Dalrymple has selected British artist Sarah Lucas to exhibit her new work. Well-known for her avant-garde and occasionally confrontational output, Lucas uses her lively sculptures to explore misogyny and exploitation as expressed by the language of consumer culture. Rather than working with typical materials, Lucas’s mobile sculptures make use of everyday, seemingly unremarkable objects with which we are in perpetual engagement, like garden furniture, tights, and buckets. Originally created for the Britten studio at Snape Maltings, their friendly humanoid shapes warm the space and lighten the mood.

Fit to print →

A trio of graphic designers and zine publishers have found their spiritual home in a renovated 1970s print shop in Anderlecht. I sat down with Peter de Roy, Axel Claes, and Thomas Billas to talk about their workspace, its role in the artistic community and its art-activist inspired beginnings.

The three met in a typically serendipitous Belgian fashion: though Dirk and Axel attended the same school, they only found each other while in Brussels working on How to Make it Without Ikea , Thomas’ collection of nifty DIY guides, and Dirk’s friend Peter completed the trio. Peter acknowledges the significance of Thomas’s book in bringing them together, calling it ‘the belly button of the world’. The ideas contained in the collection are observations on the practical applications possible with everyday objects, and the series will be made up of ten books, with number three on the way in March.

Photo by Joke de Wilde

Peter is the proud owner of three letterpress machines, one of which is a Heidelberg from the early 60s that he uses for finer projects. He’s also an avid collector, and has been building up an extensive array of type and symbols. “There are bigger collections”, he admits, “but this is a good working one. If you’re lucky”, he tells me, “you can find the beautiful old fonts on eBay for €50. The wood-type are especially collectible.” Downstairs is an enormous letterpress dating from the late 1950s that he found for next-to-nothing in England. Using his three letterpresses he creates vintage-inspired posters, notebooks, business cards, and invitations, for workshops, the Gillis press, and his own design company, Signbox. Peter has been teaching typography and graphic design at KASK for the past 16 years, and also works part-time as a graphic designer in Sint-Lukas in Brussels.

There are regular workshops upstairs, alongside Peter’s letterpresses and the Risograph printer. The workshops are attended by everyone from high-school students to housewives who come to learn how to typset and stencil. There are also frequent collaborations with Nova Cinema and Atelier Urban. Though these days they get requests from graphic design bureaus as well as individuals, in the early days, collaborations and clients were limited to schools or groups sharing similar interests to PTTL, the collective Axel helped found in the late nineties.

Photo by Joke de Wilde

PTTL – Plus-tôt Te laat – was founded in 1998 as a reaction to the treatment of unemployed artists by the Belgian government, and was originally based in an unemployment office in Sint-Joost. Axel talks about what it was like to be on the dole at the time: “Though today in Belgium the situation has changed, at that time there was no real help, advice, or even interaction at the unemployment offices – you just turned up to get your stamp from the local authorities. Whether it was a heated building or a van in a parking lot depended on the wealth of the commune in which you lived.” In Sint-Joost, the civil servants issued a pamphlet inviting artists to present their artwork in the offices, both as a way of brightening these dark buildings and giving them an opportunity to exhibit their work.

Photo by Joke de Wilde

Then came the infamous case of an unemployed woman whose self-published book sold a modest number of copies: she was singled out by the government for cheating the system, who then demanded reimbursement for her success. The government’s attitude was seen by Alex and others as an assault on free speech and inspired the formation of a national platform for artists, whose aim was to encourage a change in society’s attitude to artists.

Photo by Joke de Wilde

Peter talks about the fetishisation of print, and the increasing attention paid to minute aesthetic details. He uses old and new technologies in his work, such as the QR code, imagery we associate with ultra modern technology, painstakingly set by hand. The Risso machine itself is deeply symbolic, combining as it does processes previously confined to the sphere of the hand-crafted in an incredible digital machine. Peter calls it a ‘post-digital letterpress’. “These techniques have been around forever but only recently are they becoming hip – it used to be exclusively the territory of the posh bibliophile. The difference might be that now they mix styles.”

An interview with Wiels curator Devrim Bayar about her project Le Salon →

A firm favourite among followers of Brussels’ art scene, Le Salon has became the go-to website for original photo reportage, features and interviews on local and international contemporary art. Founder Devrim Bayar developed the project with graphic design kingpins Donuts and friends Virginie Devillez, Martin Laborde and Valerie Verhack. She has also spent the last six years as curator of Brussels’ leading contemporary art institution, Wiels, where she mans the gallery’s residency programme, alongside her role as art teacher at renowned city academy La Cambre. Le Salon’s success all comes down to a unique and knowledgeable take on art shows both in Brussels and abroad, all presented in a suitably stylistically-savvy format. As the website celebrates its first birthday, Bayar fills us in on the driving forces behind the project, some of Le Salon’s most important gigs, and her own influences as the project’s original creative force.

So, tell us about how Le Salon came about.

Le Salon is a combination of all my past experiences; my job as curator here at Wiels and my work at CODE Magazine. CODE started here in Brussels. When some friends finished their studies at La Cambre they felt that there was no real support available for the young local art scene, and thought it would be nice to have a free magazine that could present – in a very simple and attractive way – the works of young, local artists.

How did you get involved with CODE?

It was back then I was a student studying art history in New York. When I returned, friends asked me to join their team as editor-in-chief. They were all artists and needed someone with experience in writing and editing, so I developed CODE with them over the next four or five years. Our openings and readings were filled with people, and there was strong support for the whole project. After five years of volunteer work, we began moving in different directions, getting tired of the effort involved in publishing a magazine and having no money to work with. We also didn’t want to sell too much advertising because we had a very strong idea of what we wanted and didn’t want. CODE still exists which is nice for us – some contributors took the project to Paris and have renamed the magazine CODE 2.O.

Did you also spot a gap in the market for Le Salon?

Yes, when CODE went to Paris this gap appeared again. I also realised that it was tricky for international artists coming to Brussels to get information about what was going on here. There are some good art newspapers and magazines, but they’re either entirely in Dutch or French. They’re also not freely distributed. From my own experience of working and browsing the Internet all day, it was the perfect place to document art and share information. It’s also much cheaper than printing a magazine.

And, of course, distribution…

Exactly. So, instead of creating a new kind of CODE, I decided to do something online with the possibility of doing projects. That’s how the idea of Le Salon was born.

How is curating online different from in a physical space?

I’m glad you refer to it as “curating”, because it really is a curated project, in the same way that a magazine is curated by an editor. Le Salon was an important name because it also refers to a physical space, a sense of gathering people together. We used a friend’s apartment in the Tour Albert, the highest neighbourhood in Brussels, to launch the website last year. Le Salon is about sharing experiences with other people, so we didn’t want to just make an announcement online. One of the problems with websites and magazines is that everyone works behind a computer and never gets a chance to actually meet and exchange ideas in real life.

Is the website’s name a comment on that?

The name was inspired by nineteenth-century Parisian salons, artists gathered to share what they do. At CODE Magazine the aim was to be mainstream; readable by large audiences. In contrast, the idea for Le Salon was to narrow down the readers to people who already have knowledge of art. It’s more intimate. It also gives us greater freedom to feature projects that are little bit more hybrid. There are classical reviews, but there are also artist projects.

Tell me about some of the projects.

We organised an exhibition for Brussels Art Days. Attention at that time of year is focused on the commercial part of the art scene – the galleries. We wanted to create an event with people working in the non-profit part, an incredibly active and important part of any art scene. We invited three groups, and gave them carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. We also invited a small Brussels-based group who distribute a lot of artist editions and fanzines to present a selection for people to buy during the show.

What websites inspire you?

In terms of content one is definitely Tim Barber’s Tiny Vices, a New York photographer. He uploads portfolios of his favourite artists. Because he’s good friends with hip artists like Ryan McGinley, Tiny Vices got a lot of attention. I also check Contemporary Art Daily – their selection is excellent. Unlike Le Salon it’s much more neutral as they get galleries to send them images, but this means that you can visit shows from your laptop.

In Le Salon you can display lots of different media within the same kind of structure – how did you develop that idea?

It took some time for me to develop the concept. I knew I couldn’t do it on my own, so I talked with Donuts, friends who are graphic designers. They’re known locally for their collaborations with artists – even though they also do projects for big companies like Delhaize, they do artist books and websites for galleries. They came up with the visual identity and layout of the website – they really understood what Le Salon could be visually. I wanted something that wasn’t too flashy and distracting, but allowed the reader to focus on what is written and shown. That’s why they came up with the idea of having a front cover like a newspaper. To me, it looks a little bit like the New York Times.

So the Inserts section was born, featuring those mad stereoscopic .gifs from Nicolas Bourthoumieux, a video by Benoit Plateus, and a lecture by Eric Thys on space and the soul.

We imagined it like an insert from a magazine. I worked on finding collaborators for the website. Most of them are very good friends, which is often the case when you work without money and in such a small city. I contacted my friend Virginie Devillez, an art historian who works at the Royal Fine Arts Museum in the archives. She has access to an incredible number of documents relating to the past of the local art scene, and an incredible knowledge of its history. We try to include things that are meaningful to what’s going on right now. There aren’t so many yet, but we’re working on it.

Many of your writers are artists and curators themselves – Rebecca Lamarche Vadel,Michaele Van den Abeele, Robert Suermondt, and Aline Bouvy to name a few. Anything for novices?

It’s people in art, but it’s not only for established artists. It’s definitely meaningful for people who have a certain knowledge or references in contemporary art. For others it might be a little bit obscure or complicated. Of course, we try to have a variety of contributions; texts that can be more theoretical or more analytical and then to have others like photo reportage that’s much easier to understand and perceive as an inexperienced.

In your studio visit with Harold Ancart, you discuss his move to New York and choice to live in Brooklyn. Do you think Brussels could ever have the same mythology surrounding it that Brooklyn has?

At the moment Brussels definitely has a mythic quality. I also like the mongrel feel to the city. When you come from here you might not realise it because you can easily get bored in a city that’s small and rainy where people are always complaining. It can feel like the city doesn’t have big ambitions or is glamorous, which is true in a way – but at the same time it has a very long and very interesting history with art deco, art nouveau, and with music.

Brussels might be considered a work-in-progress whereas Berlin, for example, is definitely growing less and less rough around the edges…

More and more people in the art world are getting tired of Berlin. It’s beautiful and seducing and cool, but when you’re a professional artist, being cool and young is not your aim for the rest of your life. I hear more and more that instead of relocating to Berlin people are relocating to Brussels.

What are you working on at the moment?

We actually don’t have anything planned for the birthday – we’re all so busy. I want to do something very small with Le Salon, but at the moment since I’m curating a big show here at Wiels I don’t have the time to work on it. We all have full-time jobs – this is our hobby.