Michèle Thériault is a curator, writer and editor who is currently director of the Leonard & Bina Art Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal. She is interested in translational issues in art, reflexive frameworks, knowledge in art and in the site of exhibition. As director of the Ellen Art Gallery, she has developed a program that reflects critically upon contemporary artistic production and curatorial activity sometimes in relation to the recent history of contemporary art. She has curated many exhibitions with Canadian and international artists such as Timelength (2004); Claude Tousignant. 3 paintings, 1 sculpture, 3 spaces (2005); Walid Raad, The Atlas Group (2006); the first exhibition in North American of Harun Farocki’s installations (2007); Silvia Kolbowski. Nothing and Everything (2009), Kent Monkman: My Treaty is With the Crown (2011). She also co-curated Traffic, Conceptual Art in Canada, 1965-1980 (2010-2013). She is the editor of numerous publications and the author of many essays.

Between 1964 and 1998 Jef Cornelis [b. 1941, Antwerp] worked for the Flemish radio television network (BRT, later VRT). As a director Cornelis divided his interests between contemporary art and culture, the natural and built environment of Flanders, and television as a medium. Co-founding with Georges Adé, Geert Bekaert, Kaspar König (who was its director) and Isi Fiszman, the alternative art space A379089 in 1969 in Antwerp, Cornelis produced a series of films that focused on artists’ practices, at times facilitating artists’ access to broadcast technology, as in the case of James Lee Byars World Question Center. By way of the documentary format he offered critical examinations of large-scale exhibitions, notably Documenta 4 and 5, in 1968 and 1972 respectively. In the 1980s he rerouted his analysis of social and cultural issues through the talk show format (such as the series Icebreaker and Container), making use of satellite links and unconventional settings in order to facilitate a debate of ideas as well as to investigate the stakes of communication and television’s value within the public sphere.

1. Marcel Broodthaers °1924, 1972
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W, 5 min. 6 sec.
   Dutch and French; English subtitles

On September 27, 1968, the Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist Marcel Broodthaers opened his fictional Musée d’Art Moderne – Département des Aigles, Section XIX^ème Siècle (Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department, Section of the 19^th Century) in his house in Brussels on Rue de la Pépinière. The museum then appeared in various guises and at a variety of venues until 1972, when Broodthaers permanently closed it after opening his Galerie du XX^ème Siècle (Gallery of the 20^th Century) against the backdrop of Documenta 5 (September 1 – October 8, 1972) in Kassel.

At the press conference where he announced the closure of the museum, Broodthaers declared: “A fiction allows to grasp the truth and at the same time to understand what is hidden behind the truth.” Cornelis’s film opens with Broodthaers sitting at the entrance of his exhibition (Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures: Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute, May 15 – July 9, 1972) in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. At the exhibition, he presented more than 300 objects and images that related to “The eagle from the Oligocene to the Present.” Broodthaers made use of museographical aesthetics and methods to underline how these can convert everyday objects into ones that have a mythical dimension. But in many of these ensembles he also incorporated a notice stating: “This is not a work of art.”

Cornelis first introduces the artist’s practice and preoccupations, then Broodthaers guides us through his exhibition, discussing with the reporter Georges Adé what turns an object into art—or why it does not turn into art.

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2. Marcel Broodthaers: Musée d’art du XVII^e siècle, 1969
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W, 4 min. 58 sec.
   Dutch and French; English subtitles

Cornelis films the closing of Broodthaers’ Musée d’art du XIX^ème Siècle – Département des aigles du Musée d’Art Moderne in his residence in Brussels by the director of the Zeeuws Museum of Middleburg Piet van Daalen, the trip to Antwerp that followed and the opening by Piet van Daalen and guests (Johannes Cladders, Herman Daled) of Section du XVII^ème siècle – Département des Aigles at the exhibition space A379089 (co-founded among others by Cornelis and Kaspar Konig). Cornelis makes visible how Broodthaers integrated the vocabulary of museum display and conservation—crates, inscriptions, display vitrines, identification—in his practice and how collectors, curators and museums re-enacted their roles.

3. Jacques Charlier, 1972
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W, 4 min. 56 sec.
   French; English subtitles

The Belgian artist Jacques Charlier’s artworks criticize, both conceptually and aesthetically, Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme. He looked at his own reality and showed it as it is. Charlier worked for several years at the Provincial Technical Service (STP) in Liège. This experience influenced his artistic practice as he started to decontextualize STP photographs and documents, namely images of the town, roads, drain pipes and water supply schemes, and present them in different exhibition projects. The exhibition Documents du STP (Documents of the STP) took place at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1972.

In Cornelis’s film, we first notice the exit of an office building and then Charlier explaining why this situation is important for him and what his position as an artist is. As he states: “I make myself a sort of intermediary between things that really happen and the world of art.” His mediation shows people what they can understand; Charlier considers this as an important document because in our contemporary society, leaving a factory or an office is a common and normal action.

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4. Daniel Buren, 1971
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W, 5 min. 40 sec.
   Dutch and French, English subtitles

An incisive and clearheaded analyst of the art scene, Daniel Buren participated in a number of Cornelis’s films on artistic events. Georges Adé interviews the French artist on the occasion of his solo exhibition—simply entitled Buren (11 May – 5 June, 1971)—in front of the Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp. Buren applied his motif, namely the alternation of white and coloured 8.7 cm wide stripes, inside and outside the gallery along the sidewalk on the front façade of the gallery.

In the film, fragments of the interview alternate with views of the exhibition. Adé assumes the part of the man or woman in the street and asks simple, but sharp questions that explore the foundation of Buren’s aesthetics and conceptual framework. Buren explains his practice, his position regarding the art market, the way his work relates to the environment—outside and inside the gallery—and how the public should experience his installation. Contrasting with these reflections and concerns, are Cornelis’s images of people walking on the sidewalk next to the Gallery. The passers-by ignore Buren’s site-specific installation.

5. Drie blinde muizen (Three Blind Mice), 1968
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W, 38 min. 57 sec.
   Dutch; English subtitles

The Three Blind Mice of the English nursery rhyme run free until the farmer’s wife cuts off their tails with a carving knife. Three Blind Mice was the title of an exhibition at the van Abbemuseum of three important collectors (Fritz Becht, Hubert Peeters and Martin Visser) of primarily American and European Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art at the time. Cornelis films them in their living room, eating with their family at the dinner table, in the company of their children and beside their silent wives talking about their reasons for collecting, how they started and constructed their collection, and their relationship to the artists. This film conveys to us today a different, understated fascination for art that seems oddly to leave behind (or hide) the logic of the market and the dynamic of wealth.

6. James Lee Byars, Antwerpen 18 April – 7 May 1969, 1969
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W, 32 min. 30 sec.
   English

Cornelis shows views of the American artist James Lee Byars’s exhibition at White Wide Space in Antwerp preceded by a procession of participants clothed in white fabric. Byars talks with Walter Van Dijck about his practice and the influence of Shintoism and poetry from a decade spent in Japan, and his youth and travels in the United States. Cornelis’s direction steadily and quietly reveals Byars’s obsessive quest for perfection and beauty through repetitive gestures and the ritual of joining together in elaborate and measured collective performances.

7. James Lee Byars, World Question Center, 1969
   Video, B&W, 1 hr. 3 min. 28 sec.
   English

In 1969, Byars conceived a work called The World Question Center, which consisted of an attempt to collect questions from some of the ‘100 most brilliant minds’ of the time. On November 28, 1968 this performance was broadcast live on BRT. The artist asked the same question—namely “Could you present us a question that you feel is pertinent with regard to the evolution of your own knowledge?”—to a number of intellectuals, artists and scientists. A circle of men and women wearing an outfit designed by the artist surrounded him on the set. His various interlocutors were either present in the room or contacted over the phone during the broadcast.

The programme was presumably recorded simultaneously on one 2” tape and on two 1” Philips tapes (VPL 8 in. IC 1800 ft.), an early use of video technology on television. In 2001, one of the original 1” tapes from the collection of Herman Daled was digitized and restored by Argos and Packed, Centre of Expertise in Digital Heritage (Brussels) in collaboration with AV Works (Haarlem).

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8. Richard Hamilton, 1971
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W, 36 min. 30 sec.
   Dutch and English, English subtitles

Cornelis films an artist talk by Richard Hamilton at his exhibition at the Palais des beaux-arts in Brussels in 1971. The talk is preceded by a five-minute montage with sound in which the camera meanders through works by Hamilton. The artist describes his relationship to representation and his use of photography and painting. He exposes his manner of working by describing the process of intervening on a polaroid series of himself taken by Francis Bacon that he tries to render in the manner of Bacon (who, at the request of Hamilton but on the advice of his dealer, refuses to transform “into” Bacons). Through various attempts and failures Hamilton explores all at once the question of art making at the intersection of skill, originality, the copy, appropriation, style, value and authorship. As Hamilton later discusses the distinction between Fine Arts and popular art by referring to Warhol, Cornelis integrates his own film from 1970 on a Warhol exhibition.

Cornelis captures Hamilton’s fidgeting as he stands awkwardly before his audience in the middle of the gallery. The camera moves around him to focus on the audience and the filming apparatus repeatedly appears in the frame. At the end the audience has left and Hamilton, complicit with the technical team, smiles and asks, “Is that enough?”.

9. 3 x Kunstonderwijs (3 X Teaching Art), 1983 (broadcast in 1987)
   Video, colour, 1 hr. 3 min. 46 sec
   Dutch; English subtitles

Jef Cornelis wanted to make a film about art education. Developed with Chris Dercon, a frequent collaborator during those years, and in conversations with Dan Graham, Daniel Buren and John Baldessari who were all art teachers, the film was realized under the condition that Cornelis could get the outdoor broadcasting vehicle used for sports events and three cameramen and sound technicians. Cornelis felt that only this set up would give him the freedom to accommodate a complex context of students, teachers, directors, guest artists and curators all interacting at once.

With Chris Dercon as a guide, Cornelis had three artists (Panamarenko, Guillaume Bijl and Willy van Sompel), three art critics (Lieven de Cauter, Adriaan van Raemdonck and Bart Verschaffel), three gallery owners (Joost Declercq, Benoit Angelet and Annie De Decker) and three museum directors (Jan Debbaut, Jan Hoet and Wilfried Huet) pass half a day in the offices and studios of three higher art education institutions (the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gent; the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp; the Sint Lucas Higher Art Institute in Brussels). Chris Dercon boldly poses uncomfortable questions and makes ironic comments. The conversations between the artists, curators, directors and teachers reveal, at times, an antiquated system, a lack of experimentation and confused or frustrated students.

10. Daniel Buren (Palais Royal), 1986
    16 mm transferred to video, colour, 18 min. 16 sec.
    Dutch and French; English subtitles

For the installation Les Deux Plateaux (The Two Levels, 1985 – 1986), Daniel Buren placed a grid of 260 black and white striped cylinders of different heights in the elegant courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris. The installation, commonly referred to as Buren’s Columns, turns the venue into a sort of chessboard. Moreover, it establishes a dialectic between the ground level of the courtyard and the level underneath, and changes in light permit the installation to be perceived differently through the day.

This film alternates between views of the installation Les Deux Plateaux and an interview with Daniel Buren: who is very precise about how he relates to his site-specific work. After analyzing the general constraints of the site, he formulates a response to it: the 260 cylinders provide a sort of visual echo to the columns surrounding the courtyard and create a three-dimensional space without obscuring the existing architecture. Or, as he puts it, “the location (outside or inside) where a work is seen is its frame (its boundary).”

Ironically, the aesthetic analysis of Buren’s intervention at the site was overshadowed by a lawsuit and mounting public passion—from the announcement of Buren’s project in July 1985 until the conclusion of the trial in December 1992, there were endless discussions about the work. The installation became a battlefield between local and national authorities, occasioning hostile arguments between left- and right-wing politicians, leading to debates in the Council of State and the French Parliament, and a lawsuit in a Paris Court. In 1986 alone Les Deux Plateaux was the subject of 225 articles and forty-five different reviews.

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11. Little Sparta, et in Arcadia ego, 1988
    Video, colour, 41 min. 45 sec.
    English

This was Cornelis’s last film with Chris Dercon and one made because another film with James Coleman could not be made. Cornelis’s interest was in Finlay’s garden Little Sparta whereas Dercon was more interested in understanding his complex use of symbols and references in his work (Finlay was at the center of a controversy at that time concerning a commission in Paris for the Bicentenary of the French Revolution.)

How you enter a film is important for Cornelis, and this one opens with a call made to Finlay from a red telephone box on the side of a country road in Ireland. The visit was made in the late fall in the cold when the garden was covered with frost. The sound track that accompanies the visit is ominous creating a tense atmosphere as Finlay takes them around the garden.

The film ends with Finlay angry with Dercon for posing the questions of his relationship to the Third Reich in his work, which Finlay considered unfair and a form of professional abuse. Finlay never gave his permission to air the film and although it was never shown on television it was presented in an exhibition context in 1991.

1. De langste dag (The Longest Day), 1986
   Video, colour, 6 hrs. 15 min. 48 sec.
   Dutch, French, English, Italian; English subtitles

June 21, 1986. With over six hours of live television—hosted in the BRT studio in Brussels by the Belgian curator Chris Dercon, the Italian critic Germano Celant and the Greek theorist Denys Zacharopoulos—the programme De Langste Dag (The Longest Day) was one of the main elements of the art manifestation Initiatief ’86, an amalgam of exhibitions simultaneously unfolding at several venues in the city of Ghent. Initiatief ’86 came about when a dozen of Ghent art associations and galleries started a project for which three international curators—the French Jean-Hubert Martin, the Dutch Gosse Oosterhof and the German Kasper König—were invited to make their personal selection from contemporary visual arts in Belgium. This resulted in three exhibitions at the St. Peter’s Abbey. Jan Hoet, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, developed a second component to this project, namely Chambres d’amis, for which he invited fifty Belgian and international artists to create a work in as many private homes as possible. The participating organizations also seized the opportunity to develop their own activities. The Museum of Contemporary Art exhibited its collection for an international public and the Belgian artist Wilfried Huet set up an event of his own with a number of colleagues at the socio-cultural centre Vooruit, entitled Initiatief d’amis.

Amidst these activities, a network of satellite links was set up during the opening: this enabled artists, organizers, critics and the public to act and interact live through the medium of television. Remarkably, this circuit was based on one helicopter and two mobile camera teams that set up at several locations. The programme did not adopt a point of view on contemporary art as its starting point, but rather an idea about the way images work. Art can suggest, suppose and create assumptions, so how about television? Does art tolerate live television and vice versa? The programme refuses to catalogue art and it does not offer explanations or guidelines, creating instead an open communication model geared towards action and activity, reflection and discussion, intervention and reaction. It visualizes without being reproductive, without being an image or representation. It does display, however, its own activity as a visual medium, an activity that does not express itself in signs of cultural value, but in images of an audiovisual culture.

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In these documentaries on Documenta 4 and 5, Cornelis conceptualizes a way of appropriating the event, sidestepping and questioning the definitions of exhibition makers, but also of the medium of television as a subject. He undermines the authoritarian position offered to him by his medium and he impels the spectator to judge for him or herself. His stance is the one of the inquiring visitor. The commentary is spare; put into perspective and completed with accompanying interviews. In doing so Cornelis avoided a perspective clouded by mystifications and myth building.

1. Documenta 4, 1968
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W, 53 min. 19 sec.
   Dutch, French, English, German; English subtitles

When Documenta 4 takes place in 1968 the international art world is entangled in an authority crisis. At the time, artistic director Arnold Bode saw things differently. Documenta 4 was overcome with controversy and debate. The politicization of society in the late 1960s made itself felt in Kassel—red flags and groups chanting slogans meant that the opening speeches could not be held. The place occupied by American artists was also criticized. Moreover, Documenta 4 was going through an internal generational conflict and a debate on the fragile relationship of aesthetic judgment and democratic forms of reaching a consensus. In interviews with Sol Lewitt, Joseph Beuys, Harald Szeemann, Allen Jones, Christo, Martial Raysse and Robert Rauschenberg, among others, Cornelis and interviewer Karel Geirlandt act the everyman and situate themselves on the side of the bewildered spectator.

2. Documenta 5, 1972
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W and colour, 53 min. 19 sec.
   Dutch, French, English, German; English subtitles

Documenta 5 in 1972 could have gone into history as the first instance of an exhibition as a spectacle. Directed by Harald Szeemann from Switzerland, art made its way back to the museum. The main issue at hand was the economic, political and media significance of the event for Kassel. It was as if the avant-garde was buried for good. The significance potential of art was individualized and proclaimed a matter of the artists on the one hand—envisioned as individual mythologists—and a responsibility of the curator on the other. Artist-curator on one side, artist-professional on the other: this constellation was to determine the Documentas in the decades to come. Although this film brings an outlook on trends of the moment, such as conceptual art and kitsch, it can’t be considered merely as a report of a historical event: it is also a possible approach to the phenomenon of ‘Documenta’ as a whole.

Texts by Yves Aupetitallot from the set of DVDs co-produced by bdv (bureau des vidéos) (Paris) with Argos, Centre for Art and Media (Brussels), JRP/Ringier (Zurich) and Le Magasin (Grenoble), with the support of the Centre national des Arts plastiques (Paris).

3. Beeldende kunst in België (Visual Arts in Belgium), 1986
   Video, colour, 58 min. 42 sec.
   Dutch, French, English; English subtitles

The programme Beeldende kunst in België, 1986 (Visual Art in Belgium, 1986) is a recording of a panel discussion that took place in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. To a certain extent, the programme is a prequel to De langste dag (1986). Chris Dercon, who at the time was a regular collaborator of Cornelis’s, leads an international panel in which renowned art curators and critics participate, namely Barry Barker, Bernard Blistène, Laurent Busine, Bice Curiger, Jan Debbaut, Frans Haks, Jan Hoet, Kasper König, Bernard Marcelis, Jean-Hubert Martin and Wim Van Mulders.

As all of them are involved to a different extent with Belgian art, they are asked to discuss and answer an apparently fundamental question: “What is the significance of the phenomenon of visual arts in Belgium in 1986?” But the story turns out to be more complicated. Dercon asks the panel members to put the new interest in Belgian art in a broader context and to evaluate the promotional tools that the regional governments have set up: Did curators and critics change their view of Belgian art? Or is it due to a new approach of the Belgian artistic scene? Or is it a matter of the quality of the works of art? In the end how can one define an artistic scene nationally?

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4. Spaziergaenger mit Hund (Walker with dog) – Sonsbeek 86, 1986
   Video, colour and B&W, 30 min. 18 sec.
   Dutch, English; English subtitles

Sonsbeek 1986 begins with Sonsbeek 1971, also filmed by Cornelis, and it shows very poor black and white images of the opening ceremony shot directly off television. Cornelis confused temporalities by seamlessly joining Sonsbeek 1971 with another edition of Sonsbeek, fifteen years later scripted by Chris Dercon. In 1971, Cornelis films conversation and protest over the elitism and costs of the event, along with artists explaining their work (Oldenburg, Buren, Smithson). In 1986, he films in full colour and with only ambient sound a succession of objects isolated in the landscape and identified by running texts at the bottom of the frame, only Dercon in a single instance enters the frame and presents a glass sculpture by Dan Graham. The reportage ends with an interview by Dercon with Sonsbeek curator Saskia Bos. The subjects are fiction and the transparency of glass, an element of many projects at Sonsbeek.

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5. Een Openbar bad voor Munster (A Public Pool for Munster) 1987
   Video, colour, 40 min.
   Dutch, German, English; English subtitles

Cornelis films another large-scale artistic event with Chris Dercon as scriptwriter, and focuses on the artwork but through the mediation of the artist and flâneur Christian-Philipp Müller who walks from one work to another contextualizing each one and its site within local German history. Each work is a narrative overlaid with a sometimes more troubled history. At intervals, a dancer interacts with some of the sculptures. The film ends on an interview by Dercon with Klaus Bussman and Kaspar König, the director of Skulptur Project in his office discussing publicness, the fragmented condition of the artist, the unpopularity of such a project and the dialogue with the museum. All the while in the background Müller seated at a desk, seems to be doing his accounts.

6. Biënnale van Parijs (Biennale of Paris) 1985
   Video, colour, 1 hr. 7 min. 40 sec.
   Dutch, English, German, French, Italian and Spanish; English subtitles

For the first time the Paris Bienniale was held in 1985 at the recently opened Grande Halle in the new Parc de la Villette—the thirteenth edition since its creation in 1959. Organized by an international team of curators and art critics including Georges Boudaille and Gérald Gassiot-Talabot (French), Kasper König (German), Alanna Heiss (American) and Achille Bonito Oliva (Italian), the Biennale was a platform for both established and up-and-coming artists active in the mid-1980s such as Georg Baselitz, Daniel Buren, Richard Deacon, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Bertrand Lavier and Lawrence Weiner—most of them filmed installing their work. Cornelis is both interested in the location of the Biennale at the newly designed open park on the site of the old Abattoirs and by the politics of an event such as this. He lets the curators and the artists speak freely thus revealing strategic maneuvering, differences and tensions. He documents the conversations held during the preparatory phases of the event about the revival of figurative art, the role of museums and television, the individual nature of artistic experience, and reveals more specifically the strategies employed by the organizers to address the stakes and debates at the moment of this event.

Text by Yves Aupetitallot from the set of DVDs co-produced by bdv (bureau des vidéos) (Paris) with Argos, Centre for Art and Media (Brussels), JRP/Ringier (Zurich) and Le Magasin (Grenoble), with the support of the Centre national des Arts plastiques (Paris).

In the series Ijsbreker (Icebreaker, 1983-1984 – 22 programmes broadcasted), Jef Cornelis used satellite links—an advanced technology at that time—as a way to render the play between various ideas and discussions and to experiment with unconventional televisual frameworks. Three locations and as many participants were confronted to one another in a discussion on a contemporary topic. Cornelis wanted to achieve simultaneity in time and image. This resulted in a creative confusion. Because conversations were taking place in different locations, control was quickly lost and digressions rife thus leaving the spectator confused and lost.

1. Ijsbreker 01: Panamarenko (Icebreaker 01: Panamarenko), 1983
   Video, colour, 48 min. 48 sec.
   Dutch; English subtitles

This first broadcast in the series Ijsbreker was devoted to the artist Panamarenko. Cornelis featured Panamarenko frequently in his programs on art. The artist who built flying machines that were widely exhibited at the time, was fascinated by aeronautics and magnetic fields. Panamarenko and his mother were filmed at the artist’s workspace in Antwerp, the author Georges Adé at his home in Michelen with Herman Roelants, philosopher of science, and Charles Hirschfield, professor of thermodynamics in the studio in Brussels interfacing with the two live feeds. Panamarenko presented his research on magnetism while Hirschfield, Adé and Roelants, somewhat perplexed and hesitant, offered comments and questions. The program reveals Panamarenko’s elusive, child-like single-mindedness as he selectively answers or redirects questions or comments. The program format puts forth an early attempt at opening up art making to other disciplines and registers of thought.

2. Ijsbreker 16: Lichamen – Toonbeelden (Icebreaker 16: The Body – Model Images), 1984
   Video, colour, 71 min. 34 sec.
   Dutch; English subtitles

Icebreaker 16: The Body – Model Images explores the topic of “body culture”. During the live broadcast three different sites are connected with satellite links: a center for bodybuilding, a photo shoot for a fashion magazine, and the studio in Brussels, where the Belgian philosopher Rit Van den Bergh questions a culture which she feels is lapsing into narcissism and imitational behaviour. The programme is conceived as a comparative study of a number of aspects of contemporary body culture, and focuses in particular on the opposition between the “decorative” world of fashion models and the “muscular and healthy” world of bodybuilders. It all quickly turns into an unreal clash between various subjective positions and mind frames.

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3. Ijsbreker 19: Verzamelen van kunstvoorwerpen, (Icebreaker 19: Collecting Art Objects) 1984
   Video, colour, 1 hr. 8 min. 50 sec.
   Dutch; English subtitles

In this episode two collectors are brought together—one a painter who is a collector of Japanese swords in Antwerp, the other an art photographer who collects vernacular objects in Eindhoven—with an art historian and restorer from the Royal Institute of Artistic Heritage and an art dealer specializing in Japanese Netsuke both located in Studio 3 of the BRT in Brussels. Each collector tells the story of why and how he collects revealing very different attitudes. Awkwardly the collector of vernacular art barely addresses the subject in his single-minded determination to discuss his own photographic practice. This results in the other guests calling him to order and embarrassing interruptions. The disjunctive exchanges address questions of fetishism, pleasure, expertise, knowledge, authenticity, forgeries, and market value.

The series Container (1989) became a legendary television programme because of its format, the openness of the debate and its intellectualism. The subject of sustained criticism it was removed from the air after 10 episodes. Cornelis created a self-contained structure namely a container, with one side thrown open, which he had designed by the architect Stéphane Beel and set up in a studio. It was a lab for ideas and debate on the most wide ranging of cultural and philosophical topics led by the philosophers Lieven de Cauter and Bart Verschaffel that usually ended in an inconclusive manner. Cornelis had it broadcast late at night, “at a time no one wanted, the non-time of television.”

4. Container 10: Exotismen (Container 10: Exoticism), 1989
   Video, colour, 57 min. 36 sec.
   Dutch; English subtitles

The last episode of the series is about exoticism. In the panel discussion the philosopher Lieven De Cauter, the historian Eddy Stols, the anthropologist Paul Vandenbroeck and the philosopher Bart Verschaffel discuss the predominantly Western fascination with exotic cultures communicating very different attitudes and viewpoints on the subject.

Exoticism often gets in the way of an objective understanding of other cultures and is also considered an intellectually incorrect term. It confirms and reproduces deep-rooted stereotypes and representations, it creates dream worlds that influence our perspective, making us see things the way we want to see them. Accordingly, we can consider exoticism as intercultural counterfeiting. Is exoticism a projection mechanism for repressed fears and longings? Might exotic objects be perceived both as documents of barbarism and documents of culture? Are exoticism and racism branches that grow on the same tree? Is exoticism at the root of its own caricature? Is it fundamentally possible to move beyond exoticism?

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1. De straat (The Street), 1972
   16 mm transferred to video, B&W, 39 min. 30 sec.
   English

With sound and image, Jef Cornelis and screenwriter Geert Bekaert, with whom he made a number of architectural and “landscape” films, evoke the deterioration of the street, once public, into a fragment of an unnatural, ruthless production system. This film is related to the exhibition De Straat. Vorm van samenleven (The street. A way of living together) that took place at the van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven from June 2 to September 24, 1972. The exhibition assigned a central role to ‘the user’. It was hoped that raising issues concerning the environment and the way it was planned and designed, would activate public awareness and participation in cultural and social processes. The street was an expression and manifestation of society itself, and it is probably for this reason that Cornelis refused to take part to the exhibition and instead proposed to broadcast (precisely on September 14, 1972) his film on Flemish television. As a result, the exhibition was not confined to the walls of the museum, reaching out over the airwaves in order to involve television in an actual social process.

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2. Rijkweg N1 (Highway N1), 1978
   16 mm transferred to video, colour and B&W, 42 min. 45 sec.
   Dutch; English subtitles

One in a series of films in which Cornelis used helicopter shots to enhance the camera’s exploration of context and the relationships between places and views. Highway N1 links Antwerp to Brussels, a road well-traveled, which has undergone profound changes over time. Cornelis and Geert Bekaert, muse on the social, cultural and political effects of the highway focusing on the stretch between Kontich and Mechelen. Cornelis and Bekaert divided the film in seven parts each addressing in a commentary its distinctive ecology (doors and windows, its non-motor related activities) or its relationship to the environment (boundary, what lies beyond, its edges). The resulting filmic essay is both philosophical and political in its montage of images and words. The highway embeds itself in the landscape, shaping lives and social practices while it appears to deplete the social and cultural fabric of communities.

3. Pau Brasil: Je vindt niet, wat je zoekt (Brazilwood: ‘You don’t find what you are looking for’), 1992
   Video, colour, 57 min. 14 sec.
   Portuguese; English subtitles

“You don’t find what you’re looking for” is a phrase that is found on an artwork by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles. It captures the difficulty of defining Brazilian culture, its particular hybridity in its long relationship with European and Portuguese cultures. Conceived at the time of the exhibition American Bride of the Sun at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp this project was realized by Cornelis with Chris Dercon, who wrote the script. Developed around a series of Europeans and Brazilian texts attempting to define Brazil read by Brazilian artists, writers or critics, the film is interspersed and overlayed with music, still images of early representations of Brazilian natives and landscapes, film clips of contemporary cinema (among which an early Levi-Strauss ethnographic film shot on location), contemporary art works, views of Sao Paulo and its biennial. The film, in its subtle juxtapositions and camera work, gives expression to the formal and social tensions in which Brazilian culture finds itself and communicates the contingent nature of a hybrid identity.

4. De Lauren van de geest (The Colours of the Mind), 1997
   Video, colour and B&W, 42 min. 39 sec. (format 16:9)
   Dutch; English subtitles

De kleuren van de geest (The colours of the mind) was broadcast on October 28, 1997, and was Cornelis’s final programme for the BRT. A visual essay about trance in music, iconography and disembodiment in history, Cornelis meanders through epochs and regions, cultures and artistic practices. He refers to old prints with horrifying spiders and melodies as antidote to their bites, as well as to the European paintings of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries that depict Moorish dances, the Southern Italian Tarantella and the Northern African Gnawa music.

Is there a link between contemporary electronic dance music and the various kinds of healing rituals that are inherent to traditional folk dances? In the 1990s, Trance music—“trance” referring in this instance to a state of hypnotism and heightened consciousness—was a genre of electronic music that became an international phenomenon. It seems that attempts are made to breathe new life into the ancient art of healing making use of innovative technological equipment. All in all, the ancient European dances, the still active North-African esoteric systems and the recent techno rituals are expressions of a single desire: to be possessed. In some way, today dancing becomes again a way to abandon one’s body and to link the mind to a ‘Greater Unity.’

ARGOS