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.
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| 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.
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| Poster created by Walter Schelfhout, for the exhibition 'Art and Idea', curated by Roger D'Hondt, Museum Oud-Hospitaal Aalst, 1970 |
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.
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| 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 ?
RD: In 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.
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| 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 ?
RD: Every 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.
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Poster (photo 'Endurance Test'1972) for
Petr Štembera's show in the exhibition space
of the University of Antwerp, 1974
|
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.
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| Poster for New Reform's exhibition at the Stadtarchiv, Kassel, 6-24 July 1977, on the margins of Documenta6. |
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| 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.'