INTERVIEW WITH NEW REFORM CURATOR ROGER D'HONDT

Door Sophie Gayerie

From 1970 to 1979, Roger D'Hondt ran the avant-garde art centre New Reform in Aalst, where he organised happenings, performances, exhibitions and numerous other cultural events. In this interview, he talks about what led him to start New Reform, his experience of running the gallery and his collaboration with artists from Eastern Europe. 

New Reform's first exhibition space on Schoolstraat 17, Aalst, Belgium 

Sophie Gayerie: When did you start organising exhibitions ? 
Roger D’Hondt: I organised the exhibition ‘Art and Idea’ at the Museum of Aalst, which was on concrete and conceptual art. That was my first big exhibition, in 1970. And then, after maybe one or two years, I moved to performance art. 

SG: How did you discover conceptual art ? 
RD: In 1967 and 1968, I was a soldier in Kassel , I was 18 and. I spoke German.  At the same moment, Kassel was preparing for the documenta. Christo was there with his big balloons(laughter). I became Christo’s help, and I assisted him with construction for a few days. It was volunteer work. Me and some others would help with installations and some handy work. And this is how I started, as the help of Christo. 


Poster created by Walter Schelfhout, for
the exhibition 'Art and Idea', curated by Roger D'Hondt,
Museum 
Oud-Hospitaal Aalst, 1970
SG: It must have been great to be in contact with artists from all over the world ! 
RD: Yes. During documenta, there were many galleries from over the world showing installations in spaces they rented in Kassel, and that’s how I met Rolf Ricke. He was one of the most important gallerists at the time in Germany. He had a gallery in Kassel and, after a while, he moved to Cologne. I had never seen such a professional gallery before. It was a really big gallery. We kept in touch and I visited the gallery monthly in Cologne. I founded New Reform in 1970 after we closed the Reform Gallery which I founded together with my friend the painter Walter Schelfhout in 1967. The first exhibition space of New Reform was on Schoolstraat. It was the basement of a large house. You went inside and then down. I painted the walls white and started with the exhibition ‘Concept-Makers’. The same space as Ricke in Kassel.

Invitation for the exhibition
'Concept Makers' at New Reform, 1972 

SG: At the time, had you met Anny de Decker from the Wide White Space Gallery? 
RD: Yes, but we were different. In Flanders, we had three avant-garde galleries: New Reform,  Wide White Space and MTL. There was also X-One in Antwerp, but it only lasted a short time. In Liège, there was Yellow Now. An exhibition with these galleries was organised in Dendermonde, not so far from Aalst, by Adolf Merckx, who was a teacher and an art critic. He ran Celbeton, a cafe, a regular cafe. There he organised every month an exhibition or a discussion about art or literature. In 1972 he organised the exhibition JUNGLE ART JUNGLE with New Reform, Wide White Space, MTL, X-One, and Yellow Now. It was the first art fair in Belgium! But it was an art fair with avant-garde art! 

SG: Did you see any of the exhibitions in Celbeton ? 
RD: Yes, I was there in the sixties, of course. However, these were a different type of exhibitions. It was mainly painting, not avant-garde art. Adolf Mercx invited the writer Louis Paul Boon, who was also a painter, or Hugo Claus for example. It was more literature and poetry. 

SG: Were there many artists in Aalst when you opened New Reform ? 
RD: Yes, there was an art academy in Aalst with many, many good artists. Their work was more classic, however. Abstract art was too classic for me. At that time, I was more interested in the new tendencies. I was interested in art that people can participate in, like Fluxus and performance art. My first contact after Kassel was with Jochen Gerz a Germans artist in Paris. He was a student at La Sorbonne, and he was also a correspondent for the Deutsche Presse-Agentur. He was one of the first artists with whom I made artists books.

SG: When you opened New Reform, was the audience from Aalst or from elsewhere ? 
RD: From everywhere. From Belgium, mostly from Aalst, Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent and also from France, Holland, Germany and England. We had an international audience. I printed 2000 invitations with my mimeograph and sent them everywhere. It was just before offset and Xerox printers. There was no computer, I had to do everything with my IBM Machine. I typed the invitation on a special paper, then put it in the machine and printed 2000 copies. It was the only way at the moment, or you had to go to a print shop, which was very expensive and I couldn’t do that for 2000 invitations. But it was possible to do so with the mimeograph, and that’s how we were also able to make a magazine,  New Reform Nieuws. 

SG: The goal was to send out as many invitations as possible to convince people to come to Aalst ? 
RD: Yes. Sometimes artists came from France, Holland, or Germany and they slept in the gallery or in my home. I was living day and night in the gallery. Especially with the performers, I did this ten years, but after ten years it was… Performance artists have to prepare again, and again, and again, and it was very intensive work. 

SG: You were one - if not the only - gallery in Belgium working with artists from Eastern Europe. How did you meet them ? 
RDIn 1972, afther we visit Documenta 5, we travelled to the Czech Republic and met Petr Štembera and other artist’s. When we arrived at the frontier we were arrested by the police, and had to get all our things out of the car. I had brought books from the documenta and other documentation that I had gathered in Belgium and Germany, but it was impossible to bring anything into Eastern Europe. I invited also artists from South America and Eastern Europe.

SG: Did all of these artists come to Aalst ? 
RD: Some of them, but not all of them. Jolanta Marcola, Janusz Haka, Zdzislaw Sosnowski, Kzryztof Zarebski, Krystyna Sachniewicz and Miroljub Todorovic  yes, they did a performance in New Reform.

 Janusz Haka, Jolanta Marcolla and Zdzislaw Sosnowski (Actual Arts Agency)
at New Reform (1974)

SG: You also collaborated with mail artists. 
RD: Yes, I worked with performance art and also mail art. Mail art is not performance art, of course, but mail art has to do with performance. For instance, I asked the artist Chuck Stake to make a show in New Reform and he agreed. His project was to send a letter to a few hundred of artists from all over the world, asking each one for a piece. The show was a month-long, and the pieces kept coming in, day after day. It was a performance of course - a performance with the audience, as they could come and see a new piece every day. 

SG: Was it easy for the artists from Poland or Hungary to come to Aalst ? 
RDEvery time there was a problem. I met Petr Štembera during the Paris Biennale. He could only come to the Biennale if he left his wife and children in Prague. He had to go back. That was the problem for many artists. The problem in Czech Republic was bigger after the end of the communist regime than before. Once we visited Petr in Prague. An artist from Brussels, Maurice Roquet, had given me a pamphlet in three langages about art, freedom and creativity and I had to distribute it in the streets of Prague. I told Petr Štembera what we were about to do and he was very nervous. We began the distribution the last moments of our stay. Petr Štembera did his performances in a house but there was no audience or just some friends. Otherwise he had many problems with the police. They were coming to the performances or had heard about the performances through leaflets. Most of the time artists were sending me a letter with instructions to make the exhibition, along with some materials, most of all photographs, but also paintings sometimes.
Poster (photo 'Endurance Test'1972) for 
Petr Štembera's show in the exhibition space 
of the University of Antwerp, 1974
SG: I read that you became interested in the relationship between art and politics in the 1970s. Was it because of your connections with East Europe? 
RD: Not especially. In Eastern Europe and South America, most of the artists were political, because it was not the same democratic situation as we have here. Most of them were working around this theme. But politics in the sense of freedom - freedom for the artist, freedom of creativity. 

SG: The manifesto of New Reform reads ‘New Reform is an information centre, a communication centre for ideas’. It’s quite different from saying ‘it’s an exhibition space’. 
RD: Of course it was more than that. It was not just an exhibition space. It was my idea to have ideas moving, activities going on. I saw exhibitions of abstract art or Hard-edge, but it was too static, I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to have ideas moving, activities going on. I wanted work, ideas, movement, and communication every day, always something going on. That was the difference between Wide White Space and New Reform for instance. Wide White Space had many good artists, like Broodthaers or Panamarenko, but the gallery itself was quite traditional, though the art was not at all traditional. 

SG: So your idea was not to have a gallery but to have a space where you could organise performances - all types of live events. 
RD: Yes, there was always an artist at home, sone time they were 30 !  

SG: It was like an artists-in-residence program ! 
RD: Yes, kind of, avant-garde right ? Once I invited Yoshio Nakajima to do a performance. He’s a Japanese artist and he was living in Sweden at the time. At the end of the sixties, he was involved in the happenings in Antwerp with the students from the art academy. For his action in New Reform, he invited artists from France, Sweden, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and they all came to do a performance with him. So I constructed beds for 30 persons ! 

SG: Did you sell some of the artworks that were presented ? 
RD: No. Once I sold a piece from Hugo Roelandt, this piece from Kassel with his boots in plaster. Actually, he sold it himself. I was not interested in that and most of the time there was nothing to sell, only documentation. Some performance artists were doing installations, like Hugo Roelandt, but only museums are interested in that, not private collectors. 

Poster for New Reform's 
exhibition at
the Stadtarchiv,
Kassel, 6-24 July 1977,
on the margins of Documenta6.
Hugo Roelandt, Solo-Performance 
at the Stadtarchiv, Kassel,
on the margins of  documenta6 (1977)




1. From 1968 to 1970, Roger D'Hondt ran with his friend the painter Walter Schelfhout the Reform Gallery, also in Aalst. 
2. An introduction to the activities of New Reform was published in 1974 in the Belgian Government Gazette and reads as follows: 
‘New Reform was founded in 1974 as a non-profit centre. New Reform previously worked as a marginal organism - a non-official organisation.
Statutes: The association makes its object to arrange, organise and co-ordinate without making any profit all kinds of cultural manifestations paying special attention to visual arts. It pursues to achieve its purpose by all possible means such as talks and debates evenings, exhibitions, courses and education, periodicals & publications of art editions. Furthermore, it aims at the establishment of a centre or museum and the acquisition of a permanent collection. Its activities effect all layers of the population of any nationality. Action and organisation of the association are subject to a creative attitude of all fellow-workers.'