Jennifer Steetskamp

“The materialisation of a work of art was not really our first concern.”

Servie Janssen was born in Eindhoven in 1949. After his education at the Stadsacademie in Maastricht and the art academy in Krakow (PL), he studied at the de Jan van Eyck Academie from 1972 to 1975, under JCJ Vanderheyden, who had set up the first audio and video workshop there, in 1970. Later, Servie Janssen focused more on performance art, also in the context of the activities around De Appel. He also published his own books and was guest tutor at various art academies and post-academic institutions. Janssen still works as an artist and operates in various disciplines.

 JS: How did you first come to the Jan van Eyck Academie? And how did you get involved in the group around JCJ Vanderheyden?

SJ: I had studied in Maastricht, at the then Stadsacademie voor Toegepaste Kunsten [City Academy for Applied Arts, ed.], where I graduated as a painter and graphic artist. Then I went to Krakow with a grant; I applied myself to painting (under Adam Marcynski) and film (under J. Urbanski). In Poland, film art developed from animation and graphics, among other things. That year was such a wonderful experience that something had changed in me when I returned. I subsequently went to the Jan van Eyck Academie, where I had already been accepted the year before. So after my initial art education I had two options, and I made a choice to go to Poland first. I was young – twenty –, it was all very exciting, especially because at the time I was interested in the theatre of Jerzy Grotowski. This Polish theatre innovator made the body the centre of attention, which, in turn, was important to me because of my fascination for performance art. Anyway, when I returned from Poland, with new experiences under my belt, I didn’t return as a painter, but as a fine artist interested in experimenting. One year earlier, students at the Jan van Eyck Academie had made a final exhibition by simply exhibiting the equipment the academy then had in the corridors. There were AKAI sound recorders, monitors and the like – very impressive. I thought to myself: ‘That is the potential.’ They had set it up as an installation, it was breathing, it gave the impression that loads of things were possible. So when I returned in 1972, the academy had indeed created a space for the so-called ‘experimental department’; a large rather neutral room with spot lights, in which the Theatre Design department had formerly been housed. It had been cancelled after there were only two students left in it. In the new situation, everyone could take Sony equipment into their studios. That’s also where I set up my very first experiments. Tapes that have never been shown before [except for Suiker, at the expo Enkel des Stijl, Neue Galerie, Aachen, 1973, ed.] are now available at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, where the video recordings are being preserved and catalogued. However, we also had ‘collaboration projects’, such as the one where we spent a day in Smakt, the smallest village in Limburg. I stacked all the chairs in the presbytery on top of each other and photographed them; John van de Rijdt documented dead animals that he found in the road. Together, we wrote a text for the newspaper [the Dagblad voor Noord-Limburg, ed.] which was accompanied by our photographs. We also went to Devon (GB), where we visited Beau Geste Press [publisher of artist books, ed.].

 JS: Who was the head of the new department?

SJ: There was no head. I remember that JCJ Vanderheyden was somewhat ‘frustrated’ since he only had a part-time appointment, for one day or afternoon a week. So he couldn’t run that department. He would always come as a guest tutor, without knowing for sure if he’d still be welcome in six months’ time. Later on, things improved, but at the time it was a tricky business – that is to say, the realisation that experiments and the new media could not be fully integrated, not even by way of academy strategy. Quite often, it was a laissez-faire situation. But during this period, which lasted at least four years, you could do incredible things. And there was enough money to order materials; everyone could use Super 8 cameras, photography, video, the new print shop, without restrictions.

JS: What kind of effect did the establishment of the experimental department have on the rest of the academy? What was the atmosphere like?

It might be interesting to know that in that period there was ‘student participation’ (although we weren’t really called students – after all, we were already ‘artists’). I myself was a member of the admittance committee for two years. We managed to achieve that the academy became accessible in the evenings; all students received keys which enabled them unlimited access to the building. That new policy – opening up the studios, giving each student a key to the building – made it possible for people to virtually live there. There was also a change in terms of the professors – they  became more like tutors, there were specialist subject teachers – which followed on in the new free department. The atmosphere after the cultural revolution of 1968-69 did create some essential changes, out there in the sticks. That really meant something and contributed to the acceptation of such a thing like the experimental department. In my year, we started with only eight people. Within the academy, a split materialised between the classically schooled painters and sculptors and our department. Up to a point, they occupied two separate worlds. You could say that this split led to the current situation. At the time, these new developments were fully supported by the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social work: they also really wanted to finance this new direction. So there was something at stake; it had to become a good institute and our department was its forerunner. If you look at the results of our experiments, you should also look at the things that weren’t commonplace then, but were partly initiated by us. For instance, it was quite unusual for artists to make books, or brochures and other publications. At some point, this became possible, because the academy got a print workshop, set up by Mr Meurders, father of Felix Meurders [presentor on the VARA programme Kassa, ed.]. It started out as a classic printer’s with a type setting machine. Later on, there was an offset proof press, so that especially the people in our department could make ‘solid’ documentations of everything they did with new media. Nowadays, it has become quite normal for projects to result in publications. That started in that period. For us, the graphics department was also interesting. Photographed elements from our research were used to make negatives, which were then put on film to make silk screen prints. This ran parallel with the developments within the graphics department of teacher Han Seur. Which, in turn, connected with what was happening outside the academy in the field of images and graphics. In other words, the ‘old’ graphics department was sucked into these new developments. So there was a fusion between experiment, video or new media and the graphics department, with the development of book publications being the new extension of artistic activity in the printing workshop.

JS: Were you already doing performances in those years?

SJ: Well, it was too early to call it ‘performance’. But I was looking for action in that direction. That started in 1971; in 1975, what I did was first labelled as performance art. In that year I did the public performance De analyse van het alfabet. I had drawn a big square on the wall. Before, I had analysed the alphabet: diagonally, horizontally and vertically. By simply repeating and drawing the sum of lines in the square, I had ‘rewritten’ the alphabet and then summarised it visually within the square on the wall. This short action was filmed, was open to the public and announced. That was my first short performance outside the walls of the studio.

JS: Were there any events or initiatives outside the Jan van Eyck Academie that influenced you at the time?

SJ: There was Sonsbeek ’71 [also known as Sonsbeek buiten de perken, a pioneering exhibition with, among other things, land art, in the Sonsbeek Park in Arnhem, ed.]. At Sonsbeek there was this tent with two video cameras; everyone could play with these. Simultaneously, there was a telex machine that was linked to five cities. The machine kept spewing out telexes, whereas nobody ‘manned’ it. That seemed very mysterious. This mysterious aspect of new machinery was also present at that Jan van Eyck exhibition I mentioned earlier. You couldn’t see any works of art, it was just an exhibition of equipment. It was showcasing the new potential; once in a while, students would be present, showing or doing something. It wasn’t promoted too much as art, but rather shown as a protocol or informal process.

JS: Going back to the activities at the Jan van Eyck – JCJ Vanderheyden said that the recordings that were made were very often erased again; hardly anything was kept. So the fact that some of your own material was kept is an exception to the rule. Could you perhaps tell me what type of work was produced, and what your working methods were?

SJ: I think that the camera was often seen or interpreted as an extension of the eye. By discovering the space which was thus brought inside, that space was, as it were, occupied by research – all kinds of research. That was not, by the way, true for all students in our department, since some people were really fascinated by silk screen techniques and photography. Many specialised in that. But there were others, like Sef Peeters, who began to make spatial installations using new media, or who worked more interactively or even in a sociological sense. I think that I was one of the few, together with Richard Menken, who took the medium to do visual research and inserted a kind of ‘psychology’, which, for me at least, was rather bewitching. In fact, what happened was that a new ‘poetic’ dimension opened up, in which I increasingly dared to engage in various things. Making works of art was not really our first concern. Tapes were often wiped and re-used. Registrations were often just snapshots in time. I wanted to keep the material, I wanted to do something with it afterwards. Most others had an open and flexible attitude. Materialising works of art was not a major concern. That was also true for experiments with recorders and sound. Sound tapes were erased, unless you thought that you had something special, which you wanted to keep. In that case, you would withdraw the material from the stock. Because the tapes were available to everyone.

JS: You clearly withdrew a number of tapes from circulation, or they would not have been kept.

SJ: Yes, that’s what I did. We got an enormous amount of support from the academy, which included providing new tapes if they were ‘gone’. I’m not sure that the disappearance of the tape was duplicitous; withdrawing the tapes in these cases was more a kind of artistic appropriation than seizing them in a material sense. After all, it was not necessary to tape over the work of others because there weren’t any tapes. It just happened. Because, as I said, it was not so important to promote your own artistry. That would come later. It was all about the process. The academy also went through new developments in terms of content and managerial processes. I mentioned the process of democratisation; well, this was also extended to the new equipment, the ‘free’ and ‘open’ set-up of the new department. In the beginning, everything belonged to everyone.

JS: JCJ Vanderheyden said that a lot of equipment was stolen at some point.

SJ: Yes, that was at the time, I remember it well, when new equipment had been purchased and we were made to lock up all rooms, whereas before everything was open and accessible. One of the disadvantages of this new procedure was that every student got their own studio and a key to it. All rooms were locked up. That caused a kind of silence in the building, which made it possible for people to wander through it without it being suspicious. And I suspect that a number of people who were also into video, in town – but not as students at the academy – abused this situation at some point. Things weren’t stolen by one of the students, I was really convinced of that at the time. One morning we came in and everything had gone. But understand this: on the very same day, they ordered new equipment in order not to disrupt developments and the process.

JS: According to JCJ Vanderheyden, that was the turning point, after which the whole initiative lost its momentum.

SJ: What we were doing in those early days was experimental. Some started to do something different quite quickly. For me, making books, writing, drawing and performance, but definitely also installations or environments became more important. In 1973, there was already a small programme showing videos of our department, at the Neue Galerie in Aachen, organised by Jürgen Becker. Then came a moment when the then curator of the Bonnefantenmuseum, Alexander van Grevenstein, organised an exhibition in the old museum [Film en Video Manifestatie, 1977, ed.]. It looked like people were plucking up courage to bring video art into the museum, and that this openness, this reception of video art, would be given ample space within the art world – at museum level and at the level of the Ministry of Culture, Leisure and Social Work [Ministerie van CRM, ed.], even within the world of television. The then chairman of the NOS, Erik Jurgens, gave an opening speech in the Bonnefantenmuseum: he encouraged the public and video artists alike when he said: ‘We shall do everything to get your videos on Dutch television.’ However, it later turned out that he couldn’t live up to this promise; he just said it for that moment, there was no concrete follow-up. It then became clear to a lot of people that there was a gap between what was made, on the one hand, and the reception options, on the other. That contributed to the fact that many turned away from the medium. I think that this is what Jacques [JCJ Vanderheyden, ed.] meant, among other things. Meanwhile, the new media are fully integrated. But there are only a handful of explicit video artists left.

JS: For JCJ Vanderheyden it very clearly was a phase. New media are still important to him, but in a different manner.

SJ: It’s the same for me. I barely did anything with my tapes, I didn’t exploit them or offer them for sale in the arts market. The fact that they now come out of the archive and that I surrender them, on a long-term loan basis, is a gesture towards history. It still has nothing to do with money, but everything with the artistic wealth of that era.

 JS: It was really only from 1980 onwards that you could speak of an institutional video workshop, with Elsa Stansfield as its head. The studio which was then set up looked like a kind of TV studio. What struck me was that a lot of work made in that later period was on the verge between performance and installation art. People worked a lot with the live aspects of video, as well as with image manipulation and montage. There were, of course, quite different technical options compared to the seventies.

SJ: Absolutely, we had no studio. We didn’t do montage. We made our own hard cuts by using stops. We left the camera lens open or used the pause button. For instance, I remember a long take, whereby I had just set up the camera in front of the studio window. It was morning, I was listening to Bach. For about five minutes, you see the window of the house on the other side of the street. I could not know beforehand that that window would open at some point and someone would stick out his head. Or that this person would take a very long look to the left…. and to the right, and then carefully close that window again. That situation – the camera is aimed at a wall in which there is a window; music by Bach in the background – was all about the atmosphere in my studio. A spontaneous incident turns out to be the essence of one moment – this can be the work of art. In other words, we also didn’t have any idea of the possibilities of studio interventions or the notion of editing afterwards. The refinement, the polishing of rough recordings, which apparently was important in the period of Elsa Stansfield and Madelon Hooykaas, was of no importance to us. I think we had a somewhat different attitude, a different focus.

JS: How would you describe the position of the Jan van Eyck Academie compared to other academies in the Netherlands at the time?

SJ: Apart from the Jan van Eyck, there was also Ateliers ’63 [then based in Haarlem, since 1993 in Amsterdam, renamed ‘de Ateliers’, ed.] and the Vrije Akademie in The  Hague – all places drawing in people who wanted and sought renewal. In 1972, we visited Ateliers ’63 to talk to the students there. There were also some Americans there. The Jan van Eyck, too, already had a kind of tradition to admit foreigners: for instance, there were people from Indonesia and Norway (like Arild Bergström). But I clearly remember the moment we visited Ateliers ‘63; we had video equipment, which they didn’t have yet. Ateliers were more geared to traditional genres like painting and sculpture. In that sense, we – as students and as academy – were working in more disciplines. Frans Zwartjes, who was important then, was at the Vrije Akademie. And Moniek Toebosch. When we went to The Hague one time, it was nice and exciting to see that they were also doing experiments – though more geared at film art, but at any rate, using new media. For the rest, there was hardly anything going on in the Netherlands. In that sense, it was a short, not very revolutionary, but fruitful period, in which all kinds of things were researched.

JS: If we’re talking about contacts with other institutions and initiatives, we should also mention Agora Studio, in Maastricht. Students of the experimental department, like Raul Marroquin, were quite active there, weren’t they?

SJ: Yes, Raul and others had this collaboration agreement with Equipo Movimiento, in which Rod Summers and – if I remember right – a certain Young Tjong Wu (of restaurant Nanking!) and Anton Verhoeven played a role. Nikolaus Urban did a performance, Milky Way, in Agora, which I attended. Before, I had become familiar with this gallery as a classic gallery; Belgian artist Dan van Severen presented his minimal paintings there. But because of Raul, with whom Theo van der Aa and Ger van Dijck [founders of Agora Studio, ed.] had a good relationship, new media were introduced there. Raul was someone who immediately translated the range of possibilities within the academy to the outside world. He was a great engine, also for us, his fellow students – he often took the initiative. He organised many actions then. For instance, together we organised an exhibition in the hallways and rooms of the Jan van Eyck. Also, we celebrated the ‘birthday of art’ with an open reception in Arild Bergström’s studio. That, by the way, was the initiative of Robert Filliou, whom we had called; we ended the contact with his motto ‘POI, POI…!’. Raul went to Amsterdam to make videos. He tried to generate collaborations with all kinds of institutions and museums in order to get things done. I remember him having people put in the niches of the Bonnefantenmuseum as living sculptures, it was a spectacle … with tower wagons! The project was called Living Sculptures. Raul already did that type of experiment outside the academy then, while I worked mainly in my studio and inside the academy building. When I returned from Canada, where I went after my studies at the Jan van Eyck, my very first performance took place in gallery Michael Leaman in Düsseldorf, thanks to a response to my contribution in the publication Kontexts [magazine on language art, published by M. Gibbs, ed.].

JS: Were there any contacts with De Appel, after its foundation in 1975?

SJ: Well, I established those contacts, right after I got back from Halifax (CA). I had done two performances there, one at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, the other in the Anna Leonowens Gallery, also in Halifax. I approached Wies [Smals, founder of De Appel, ed.] with the photo documentation of those two performances. She and Franck Gribling (then member of the programme committee) were fascinated by the material. Wies then enlisted me in her programme. From that time on, I belonged to her ‘stable’ – that lasted five, six years, until her sudden dramatic death. The work took me to New York and to many European countries.

JS: You’ve already mentioned a number of artists that were active in that period. Is there anybody else who, according to you, played an important role and who hasn’t really been given the attention he or she deserved? 

SJ: There is Jack Timp; I saw his ‘performance’ in the new, wild, garden of the Jan van Eyck, where he sat meditating in the garden like a monk, clad in a rough rag. You could follow the whole thing on a monitor inside. As a young guy I thought this was brilliant. People like Anton Verhoeven or Martine Desoomer from Bruges were working extremely conceptually … I later often wondered what has become of them. The last time I spoke to Timp was at my exhibition in the Bonnefantenmuseum, in 1978. Has he turned away from art? Many people have chosen other paths or are working in anonymity. It’s something you don’t know. People always have the right to isolate themselves from the art world.

Thinking of other artists from that period, I have to say that the Wiener Actionists were very important to me. What they did was my frame of reference for my earliest research, around 1971/1972. They were first presented with photographs at Documenta 5, in the context of the theme of Individuelle Mythologie [Individual Mythology, ed.]. It had a kind of shock effect all over.

JS: If you look at events from that period – you mentioned a few already –, were there any other activities in the seventies that you consider to be of importance to the development of video and media art in the Netherlands?

SJ: Not as far as Maastricht and its surrounding area is concerned; in the end, the Bonnefantenmuseum stopped doing anything in that area. Films by Frans Zwartjes were already very well-known; they were also broadcast on TV, by the VPRO. But the world of TV did not pick up anything else. Or just very incidentally, at most. Let’s see… I remember that a magazine like Vrij Nederland published a photograph now and then, for instance, a photograph by Ben d’Armagnac of by Oscar van Alphen. Out of the liberal left press, Vrij Nederland was the only weekly magazine that had any interest in this type of thing. At the same time, those photographs were a strong statement for the artists doing that type of research. Video was regarded more as a registration medium than as autonomous art. The Ministry of Culture, Leisure and Social Work did organise a tour of a small collection of tapes, including a rather long one of mine, but that was it, I think. That’s when I left video art behind.

JS: Perhaps it was too early?

SJ: Yes, perhaps it was. That is not such a bad thing in itself, because that moment helped shape every artist, who was working with the medium, with his further development, whatever direction it may have taken. Henk van der Rijdt, for instance,  [older brother of John van de Rijdt; see above, ed.], a colleague/friend of Jacques’, turned away from art and became a campsite owner  – but apparently he made a lot of tapes which have never been shown. I have no idea what happened to them. I met him two or three times, I thought he was an interesting guy, but perhaps he was too much ‘on the road’ or too much of an anarchist to want to be involved in the art world.  Livinus van de Bundt [mentor of René Coelho, founder of Montevideo, ed.] was a name that went around; I never saw any of his work, unfortunately. But you knew he was one of the very earliest media pioneers. There was Gerry Schum in Germany… he represented Jan Dibbets, Richard Long and Bruce Nauman. By the way: the well-known ‘fireplace’ by Dibbets [TV as a Fireplace, 1968/1969, ed.] was shown on TV here. There was Dick Raaijmakers, who, with the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht –  where Jacques studied for a year –, had an enormous influence on the development of electronic music. But his name meant a lot in fine art, too. Those were rather important people then. Their names had resonance.

JS: Is there anything you would like to say in conclusion?

SJ: My working period at the Jan van Eyck Academie has been very important to me.  I still think it is a very important institute, which has had a wonderful development. I went to the ‘Open Days’ twice. I saw and heard many interesting things from the ‘researchers’. I fondly remember not just a large number of people, but the Jan van Eyck as an institute itself … A real treasure in this country.

JS: