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Singing and Drumming to Change the World
The Alternative Art Scene of the 1980s

Outside in the rain was a huge jostling crowd. Inside, Matik and The Spinshots were playing. W139 was open again, back in its old space behind the Bijenkorf department store after a three-year closure for renovations. The old audience of art students and artists again flocked in great numbers. This Friday evening, the 19th of January, 2007, was the perfect moment to test how closely the atmosphere matched that of 25 years ago. When ‘Warmoesstraat 139’, as it was then called, invited the public to attend their first exhibition in 1982, entitled Dertig Man Kunst, the event was about work in progress, performances and music. Art performances and musical performances: this is precisely what is indispensable for today’s contemporary art openings. Brand-new band names tumble in profusion and openings are crowded parties that go on deep into the night. ‘Yes, this really is the sound of the early 1980s,’ Ine Poppe calls out over the sound of the music of the neo-punk band, Krause, in P/////AKT. She should know. In 1983, together with Franz Feigl, she founded NL-Centrum on Amsterdam’s Rozengracht, bringing in such groups as Einstürzende Neubauten. She had become familiar with the German punk world during a stay at the Karolinen Viertel in Hamburg, in 1982 a famous hotbed of creative activity with considerable international allure, in the visual arts as well as music. On December 23, 2006, in Amsterdam’s P/////AKT, the members of several artists’ collectives were guests for PLUG-IN, nr.3 and ELITE/ELITIST. The sense of aha-erlebnis prevailed as Zoro Feigl, Ine Poppe and Franz Feigl’s son, did a performance at the invitation of the Horse Move Project Space. With a homemade sugar-candy spinning machine, Feigl and Oscar Peters blew out clouds of hoary white cocoons that floated down onto the audience, sticking to their hair and clothes. Meanwhile, Radio Rietveld was broadcasting a live interview with Chiel van Zelst. The question to Amsterdam’s ‘Night Mayor’ and founder of the Chiellerie was the same as the theme for the evening: Is a regular art opening interesting enough on its own? Should an initiative be aimed at a small group of interested individuals, the elite, or should it offer another kind of entertainment, so it will appeal to a larger public? In all of the spaces that he, alone or with others, has ever squatted and rebuilt, including Vrieshuis Amerika, Hangplek voor kunstenaars and De Chiellerie, he has always first built a bar and installed a turntable. He later commented, ‘Art alone is too boring.’ The old layout of W139, with space for the bar centrally located between two exhibition galleries, was always his example. ‘With a beer in your hand, sooner or later you are going to start talking about that pile of sand.’Just a short time ago, it seemed that all of Amsterdam’s artists’ initiatives and enterprises had been crushed. Once the big buildings had been demolished or annexed by someone else, the city’s broedplaats policy for creative initiatives was reduced to studio management – until students from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy again began opening up the cracks in the city’s smoothed-over surfaces in their search for vacant space. Now these are now no longer spaces of 36,000 square metres, such as Vrieshuis Amerika, but even small retail spaces have proved sufficient for headstrong projects. The young guard is happy to fuel the rejuvenated retro sensation. One of the first people to exhibit in De Lekkerste (since also closed) was Cor Jaring, the photographer whose reputation is associated with the mini-riots generated by the Provo happenings of the mid-1960s.

Media Exposure & Man at Play

Back in the early days the regular band at Warmoesstraat 139 was Gulf Pressure Ais. The group played impulsively, combining uninhibited bravura with ostentatious naïveté. In their own recalcitrant fashion, they – Ad de Jong, Thomas Feddema, Bas Oudt and Walter Carpay – were ambitious. That ambition was rewarded by invitations to perform in other artists’ collectives. Rob Scholte and Peter Mertens’ Young Lions were popular with a broad audience. ‘On a certain day, you were a musician, or a painter,’ as Franz Feigl told me in 2000, a couple of years before he died. ‘You could do anything. You didn’t spend too much time on it. It was not about contemplative observation. The key thing was that it had to have effect. You wanted to create another perspective, aesthetically and socially.’ Feigl grew up in a mountain village in Austria, but the baggage that he brought to Amsterdam was from the aggressive scene in Hamburg, where pimps and police regularly used brute force against the punks of the Neue Welle. He found the artists in Amsterdam apolitical little darlings, playful and childlike. The international NoFuture movement generated virtually no response in Amsterdam. Everyone was primarily involved in building cultural structures. They were ironic, and they were rebels, but they were also seriously in the grip of the illusion that their immaterial contributions would change the city. Even within the forbidding squatters’ world, the new art centres stood out as independent spaces for imagination and boyhood dreams. Disco Bizar really did exist. As short-lived as Cabaret Voltaire, in 1981, Disco Bizar was a quasi-professional podium for young bands. Maarten van der Ploeg ran the disco in a squatted building at Rozengracht 49, together with his brother Rogier, who was studying at the Film Academy, and fellow Rietveld student Peter Klashorst. They had already made a name for themselves with their band, Soviet Sex. ‘We were not hampered by two much knowledge, but we were also not inhibited by how things were supposed to be,’ Maarten van der Ploeg later explained. In a seriously cranked up register, he sang Dutch lyrics he wrote himself, accompanied by two guitars, a bass, a small organ and an electronic rhythm section. Meanwhile, as artists, Klashorst and Van der Ploeg were devoting themselves to their painting. Even before Van der Ploeg’s final exams in 1982, they were exhibiting in Amsterdam’s Jurka Gallery (May-June, 1981), with painted works on paper, which to the astonishment of the visitors were stuck on the walls with pushpins. In 1981, Van der Ploeg and Klashorst were also producing programmes for television, and at night, taking advantage of the gap that Germany’s Channel 3 left empty after their evening programming. It was illegal. P.K.P. TV (Ploeg, Klashorst, Ploeg) may have taken advantage of a hiatus in the regulations, but the police could still have stormed in and confiscated all their equipment. The camera they used belonged to the academy, but by picking it up at the end of the school day and returning it before nine o’clock the next morning, the threesome could record rock concerts at Paradiso and performances of their own, conduct interviews and produce satires of contemporary television culture, including its wooden sign-offs at evening’s end. ‘The idea prevailed that anybody could do anything,’ according to Maarten van der Ploeg. ‘Everybody can play a guitar and have their picture taken with a guitar in their hand.’ It was not such a wonder that he made the media his own. Together with his friends, he was constantly in the newspapers, complete with photographs and quotes, beginning with his very first exhibition, Nieuwe Golff (1977), in a squatted building in Haarlem. For the next decade, the media attention (including television) would not diminish. During the first half of the 1980s, the boom in artistic initiatives provided the media with plenty of material. There was always something new to report. Never before had television viewers seen artists walk into museums with cans of paint in their hands, in order to touch up their own paintings. Klashorst and Van der Ploeg did just that in 1981, during the exhibition, Ik schilder dus ik ben (I paint, therefore I am) at the Kruithuis in Den Bosch.

Urban Guerrilla Art

Getting themselves into the newspapers was also a major goal for another group of young artists active during the same period, which from 1976 included Erik Hobijn, Ivar Vics (Dr. Rat), and a few years later, Peter Giele and David Veldhoen. At the end of the 1970s they worked together under the name, S.K.G., an abbreviation for Stads Kunst Guerilla (Urban Art Guerrilla), inspired by the media mystique of the German Rote Armee Fraktion. Hobijn was in touch with Robert Jasper Grootveld, the antismoking wizard whose anti-consumerist happenings also inspired the Provos. SKG carried out mildly subversive projects, for which they occasionally even dug up the sidewalks, notably in front of the newly squatted Algemeen Handelsblad building on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. It was less about style or content, claims Hobijn, than about the power to communicate. ‘Wednesday was “fame day”, so you had to get yourself into the papers.’ They almost always succeeded. The SKG members disagreed about No-Future theories. Peter Giele was a romantic who rode around the city on his scooter, dressed up as Zorro. After taking part in the Dertig Man Kunst exhibition, he yearned for a space of his own and a short time later, together with Harald Vlugt and Aldert Mantje, he rebuilt the printing space of the Handelsblad into Aorta, the bespoke art centre that opened in May of 1982 and which existed until 1988. Giele was all fantasy and enthusiasm. His greatest contribution to the cultural history of Amsterdam was Club RoXY, a discotheque where the mix of visual art, fashion, music, poetry and body culture reached a magisterial apex. Erik Hobijn had high regard for the aesthetics of violence. He had been sent to the Gerrit Rietveld Academy early because his experiments were considered intolerable elsewhere. To this day, his performances risk life and limb. When, as a part of the SKG contribution to the 1980 Festival of Fools, he accidentally ended up in a fire – literally – he melted his sports shoes. Intervention from his friends prevented more serious calamities. Hobijn was friends with the mythical Dr. Rat, the Netherlands’ first graffiti artist, who died young. Both felt the pain of World War II in their bones and punk was a way of releasing the violence they had inside them. Nonetheless, in Paradiso, they carried punk, a movement that had begun five years before in England, to the grave. There, on December 20, 1980, they held the SKG Congress, and for that occasion the temple of pop was turned into a temple of punk, with the help of, among others, the international performance group, Minus Delta T.It speaks for itself that the performances had a strong do-it-yourself character and owed nothing at all to the international performance guild brought in by De Appel (contemporary art centre) in the latter half of the 1970s. What stood out was the tendency towards a primitive, primordial symbolism, expressed in occasional performances by such artists as Titia Smit, Ad de Jong and Walter Carpay, and which formed the cornerstone of the programmed Wirra-performances (they themselves referred to them as temporary explorations) by Peter Baren and Koos Dalstra. Their first performance, Pari Mutuel, was during Dertig Man Kunst at W139, and comprised a stylized fight between two bodies, one painted white and the other black, whose movements were further exaggerated by spotlights, sound and the wirra (boomerang). It was as if the ‘man at play’ had truly been resurrected. After Constant’s presentations for Nieuw-Babylon and Guy Debord’s situational social criticism had proved themselves in the symbolic and theoretical sense with an appeal to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, the young guard distinguished themselves by ‘doing’. This self- organization and self-management was all intentionally without theoretical baggage, but it had a not-to-be-underestimated power of contagious enthusiasm that eventually crystallized in the direction of professionalism. In 1982, when Maarten van der Ploeg, Ryu Tajiri and others founded Blue Murder, they led an undisguised existence as pop musicians. In 1986, they played at Pinkpop. It seems incomprehensible that Van der Ploeg had meanwhile also succeeded in producing subdued paintings in the solitude of his studio. But it was precisely their artistic reflection that protected the members of the band from running themselves ragged on the pop music stage. With the tangible result of five albums to their credit, the band rigorously dismantled itself, to start out again six months later under a new name: Astral Bodies.

Pluriform Art Spectrum

The mentality that Van der Ploeg appealingly exemplifies and which has characterized countless members of his generation, is again making itself be counted. In this day of material well-being, the need for shared experience in art does not form a reaction to a lack of perspective, as in the case of punk, but to its nauseating overabundance. In 1980, the bile was up to the eyeballs: there was literally no place for young artists, not to live in and not to exhibit. Society expressed no social expectations whatsoever. People found themselves forced to conquer spaces for themselves in order to exist and they did so with unparalleled flair. The answer to a dour, rigid society, at once both self-conscious and extreme, was nothing less than an alternative, autonomous concept of life and art which has persisted through to today. For Bonno van Doorn, a student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the organizational strength behind S.A.C. (Schijnheilige Artistieke Coöperatie/Sanctimonious Artistic Cooperative), dissatisfaction with society is what drives him on. ‘I cannot accept that I have to live and consume the way the big companies with all the economic power dictate.’ He creates his own free space where he can meet people with the same attitude to life. That space has to be without barriers, with an open podium so that everybody who wants to can create something. On the evening that I am there, we are on Mars. We can write down our associations – formulas to fill in, pens provided. There is a photographer taking our portraits and we have already been embraced by someone from the ‘hug project’. The framed portraits on the wall generate nothing unsettling. This time the music comes from a laptop. Tonight, the rebellion is as soft as silk. In a couple of days, the military police are expected to clear out the building. Although this generation is worldly-wise and knows how to express its artistic obsession in a profusion of lectures, debate and revived performances that are now routine in these institutes, it gives free rein to the biological urge to share and experience the taste of a sound of its own. ‘Bringing people together’ does not sound like a very lofty ambition, as if George Bataille’s low materiality were the basic principle; but the French philosopher posed the violence of material facts against an ethereal spiritualism. The higher world of the dream, albeit interspersed with irony and swagger, was an important driving force for the 80s generation. Nonetheless, every culture, however disciplined, has its own forms of transgression: drunkenness, trance, dance, music, eroticism, conflict and crime. The literal space for manoeuvre may be limited in our day, but space for transgression is being explored in countless variations. According to a more recent thinker, Alain Badiou, one can no longer speak of revolt, at best only new ‘precepts against the state’. But the fact that you can give the world more warmth by singing, playing the guitar and drumming can be seen at all these festive openings. W139 is ready. The walls have been soundproofed. It’s time the ‘outside world’ is let in.

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