Jennifer Steetskamp
“Working with time-based media invites collaboration.”
Madelon Hooykaas was born in 1942 in Maartensdijk, the Netherlands, and Elsa Stansfield in 1945 in Glasgow, Scotland. They collaborated since 1972 in Amsterdam and London, first under the name White Bird, later as Hooykaas/Stansfield. From the 1970s onwards, they produced video environments combining video with photography, objects and sound in what were, in fact, site-specific installations. Elsa Stansfield was appointed head of the video workshop in 1980 when it was founded that year at the Jan van Eyck Academie. She held this position until 1991. Elsa died in 2004. Madelon Hooykaas is still working as a media artist under the name Hooykaas/Stansfield.
JS: How did Elsa Stanfield get involved with the video workshop at the Jan van Eyck Academie?
MH: The story begins in 1970s. Elsa and I first met at art school in London and later came together to collaborate on a film project. Elsa had a studio in London. In those days, in Great Britain, there was far more of what you could call artists’ video – artists working with video. The Arts Council had portable video equipment we could borrow. Fantasy Factory in London had editing equipment. There was nothing like that then in the Netherlands. We were able to carry out a large number of projects in Great Britain. First in 1975, in Glasgow, and shortly after in Whitechapel Gallery, London, where De Appel discovered us. In 1977 we then created a work for De Appel in Amsterdam [the installation Memory Window, ed.]. De Appel gave us enormous support from then on. At the time, the Jan van Eyck Academie was making the transition from an ordinary art college to a postgraduate institute where artists who had completed an undergraduate programme could develop their work. At the time, the academy was looking for someone to head the new video workshop. In the Netherlands, there were few people with the requisite expertise – as an artist, I mean, not as a manager. Wies Smals of De Appel was appointed as adviser and, in the meantime, Elsa secured the first Arts Council video arts grants for the Art College in Maidstone, where David Hall was head of the video department. She was finally asked to set up and run the video studio. The Jan van Eyck Academie selected her because of her experience as an international video artist and, thanks to her experience in Maidstone, she knew how a video department worked. She was appointed on 1 December 1980, but in December 1980 De Appel has also invited us, and a number of other artists, to take part in an exchange with Franklin Furnace and The Kitchen in New York. So, during the first month, she was absent. When Elsa joined the Jan van Eyck Academie in early 1981, she immediately organised the event Video Maart. Luckily, we had international contacts and could invite important video artists, primarily Belgians, Germans and British artists. And, of course, Dutch ones. That was the start. Elsa’s original contract was for a year, to see if it suited her, and she moved from London to Maastricht. Because the job involved at least a three-day week.
JS: Besides this, didn’t Elsa also start to build a video collection for the Jan van Eyck Academie?
MH: Yes. There were many guest lecturers, of course, and sometimes we bought a tape from them for the library. Besides this, Elsa also acquired a number of pieces via London Video Arts so that the students could immerse themselves in contemporary video art. The works were shown within the college.
JS: To what extent were you involved in the video workshop?
MH: I was, of course, indirectly involved. Partly with helping to set up the video workshop and partly because I knew a vast number of artists and had considerable expertise in the field. There were five heads of the various departments, the rest were guest tutors; I was later invited as a guest tutor. Elsa invited a range of artists, also from abroad, with whom the students could share knowledge. Arranging for people to come from abroad is quite expensive. I could come more regularly; it was set up so that I could come and lecture several times a year.
JS: Did the connection with Maastricht exist before Elsa’s involvement with the Jan van Eyck, or do you remember activities in Maastricht before that time?
MH: In 1978 we made the video installation See Through Lines at Agora Studio in Maastricht. In 1979 Agora produced a catalogue to accompany the project 5 Video Environments, a series of environments we realised in the Netherlands and England between 1977 and 1978. So there was already a link with Maastricht. In those days, there were a number of activities, although relatively few. I remember the exhibition at Agora, when we needed a monitor. They didn’t have monitors then. We rented them from the Jan van Eyck. A big white monitor. That was it. Nowadays this is inconceivable, but in those days there was almost no equipment. Because many international artists were already active in Maastricht then, it had already gained a reputation; many of them stayed in the Netherlands. Michael Gibbs and Raul Marroquin, for instance. Agora Studio responded to this – it was often a venue for exhibitions of the artists studying at the Jan van Eyck. That gives some idea of how things developed.
JS: Was there much going on in the 1980s in Maastricht or did you feel it was happening somewhere else?
MH: Little was actually happening in Maastricht itself, but it was a good location. Easy for travelling to Cologne or Liege, where there was a lot going on. Or Düsseldorf. It was a good base. And there’s something else that springs to mind: Elsa had connections with the theatre [on the Vrijthof, ed.] in Maastricht. Each month, a special evening or afternoon was held there so video artists could show their work or give performances and set up installations. That was in the early 1980s.
JS: If you think back to the early years when Elsa was at the Jan van Eyck Academie, what kind of work was being produced? How would you describe it? It seems as if there was an emphasis on installation, including ‘performative’ installations, hybrids of installation and performance.
MH: Yes, there was a focus on installation because almost all the students there were interested in the fine arts and wanted to work with new media like video. There weren’t any filmmakers. Three-dimensional work was crucial. There were regular exchanges with other departments, particularly sculpture. Students from the sculpture department could experiment with video and vice versa.
JS: So few single-channel tapes were produced. Or so it seems.
MH: Exactly. I think this was also because of our background: we created a vast number of installations. In those days especially, work was created for a particular location – site-specific – and at the Jan van Eyck students had the option of making installations. There were a several monitors and U-Matic players, which was quite unusual. You could often play a tape, but there were no other options for setting up a large piece of equipment with a workshop, as you could in the Jan van Eyck studio. And students put this facility at the college to good use. If you look at Great Britain and America, far more installations were made and installations were related to the fine arts. During the first stage, there were numerous debates on the difference between video and film. If it was shown in the context of an installation, it was clearly art.
JS: So the use of space was a criterion for determining whether video was considered art?
MH: Yes, and we fervently argued that video should remain within the bounds of the fine arts. Elsa also sat on the advisory board in the Raad voor the Kunst, and dealt with this very theme. In other countries, film and video were often isolated from the fine arts because of the expense involved. But a completely different type of audience is interested in that kind of work. I’m not sure that was a good thing. But, of course, it meant that video did not become a separate category parallel to the fine arts. In the end, it became fully integrated here. Now, video is everywhere and it’s hard to imagine the discussion ever took place – and that video would ever appear in a museum! In 1981, we made the first work for the “video stairs” in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. That was quite something. It was just about acceptable. The other exhibitions that had been held there were of Nam June Paik and Nan Hoover and also entirely consisted of installation or performance. Installation played a pivotal role in the fine arts.
JS: If you look at the performances at De Appel in the 1970s, most seem to focus on physical performance – the image or image registration often seemed secondary. However, in many works I have seen in the Jan van Eyck Academie collection and in the productions screened during Video Maart there is a merging of the technology and the performer’s body or of the body and the image. What could have been the reason for taking such a different approach at the Jan van Eyck Academie?
MH: We always worked a lot with live video, because one of the most amazing qualities of video is that you can work with it live. You have an immediate image, to which you can react right away. This was further elaborated in the performances. There were no beamers then, that technology didn’t yet exist, but you could show certain aspects of a performance, specific details, that you couldn’t have shown without video technology. The entire idea that both video and performance is live gave the work an extra dimension.
JS: How do you see all this in the context of the Jan van Eyck Academie? What was the atmosphere then?
MH: It was always very international – there were many students from Iceland, where there were no postgraduate programmes. Fifty percent came from outside the Netherlands and, because Maastricht is so close to Belgium and Germany, there were of course many people from those regions. Most students stayed for two years, which allowed firm friendships to develop. People collaborated – it was very exciting. We always travelled so much for our work, and were invited to participate in the 1982 Sidney Biennial. While in Australia, we met people who then came to the Jan van Eyck. That’s how things developed. We passed on our contacts to the Jan van Eyck. And young artists had a chance to show there. It was what you’d now refer to as ‘networking’, which was quite unusual then. The Jan van Eyck Academie was a very vibrant place.
JS: Were there also collaborations with other institutions or initiatives in the Netherlands or abroad?
MH: As I mentioned, there were links with London Video Arts. That was very important because we were involved with it ourselves. And, of course, Time Based Arts. At the end of the seventies, De Appel wanted to change course and set up a separate organisation, the Association of Video Artists (Vereniging van Videokunstenaars) with the video artists who had been involved in De Appel. The vereniging initiative is often considered a rival to Montevideo, René Coelho’s video gallery. But it wasn’t about that at all. It was intended to bring artists together and exert pressure on the CRM through the artists themselves, not through a foundation or organisation. It was meant to be a sort of professional body. I was chair for four years. Elsa was also involved. In the end, our experiences with the video association led us to found Time Based Arts because we relied on subsidies to organise things. Many artists at the Jan van Eyck Academie showed their work at TBA: we did have an exhibition space, after all. In 1984 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam hosted the large-scale video exhibition Het lumineuze beeld. At the same time, Elsa and Dorine Mignot [conservator at the Stedelijk Museum, ed.], organised the first major video art symposium at the Jan van Eyck. All the exhibiting artists were there; it was very intensive. A large number of new works were produced for the exhibition. The Stedelijk provided a budget for the production of new pieces by the five artists working in the Netherlands, which included us. Nowadays, that’s relatively commonplace, but it was incredible at the time. There was an ordinary printed catalogue plus a video tape catalogue with documentation on the exhibition [available for perusal, among other things, in the documentation collection of the Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Montevideo/TBA, ed.].
There were also contacts with other art colleges. In 1983 and 1984, we visited Japan; there were always exchanges with other places, other universities and art schools. We initially went as artists, but while we were there, the Jan van Eyck Academie was always mentioned. We made contact with young artists during the Sydney Biennial so, of course, artists from Australia came to Maastricht. And so it went. Because our work involved extensive travel and participation in international projects. It became a part of it. When art schools were presented, Elsa often took students’ work along. And when we gave lectures on our own work, we presented students’ work, too. At the end of the 1980s, Elsa began an exchange with Montreal, with the UQAM [Université du Québec à Montréal, ed.]. In 1988 there was a retrospective in Montreal, and we established links with the university. From roughly 1989 onwards, there was a three-year exchange with students of the Jan van Eyck, who could work there for a set amount of time. And Canadian students came to the Netherlands. In 1991, I was there as guest professor and there was also an exchange with the art college in Dusseldorf, via Ursula Wevers.
J.S.: To return to the Jan van Eyck Academie, what was its position compared to other art schools when it came to video production in the 1980s?
MH: Today there are a variety of postgraduate programmes for media art, including the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, but that wasn’t the case then. There was the AKI in Enschede, where René Coelho [the founder of Montevideo, ed.] taught, but it wasn’t a postgraduate programme. At that time, the Jan van Eyck was the only place in the Netherlands where artists could work, under supervision, with video and sound equipment at postgraduate level. So there was no course and no degree. The programme wasn’t subsidised by the Dutch Ministry for Education, but by the arts department. There was a totally different atmosphere.
JS: In the Video Maart catalogue, Elsa stressed the importance of the introduction of video production for opening up traditional disciplines like painting and sculpture. In the Netherlands, these distinctions continued to be observed for quite some time. What was the approach at the Jan van Eyck Academie?
MH: Elsa introduced the term ‘time-based arts’ with regard to time-related media, because video was not the only new medium and other kinds of media art forms existed, including sound work and installations. At first she called the video workshop ‘video studio’– that’s in the Video Maart catalogue – but we later started calling it a ‘time-based art studio’. A mixed media department was set up at one point, only to be dismantled because there were no heads of department. The organisation was, of course, always being reorganised. Now, it has a totally different structure, set up around the three departments: fine art, theory and design. Elsa left when these last restructurings took place.
JS: Besides the things you have already mentioned, do you remember artists or events that have perhaps received too little attention up to now?
MH: In 1988, Elsa organised an exhibition entitled Het Magnetische Beeld, in collaboration with Stadsgalerij Heerlen, with installations, tapes and performances. It was an important exhibition. Many of the international artists at the Jan van Eyck went back home. But I’m still in touch with some. Paul Landon, for instance, is Professor of Media Art at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques [UQAM, ed.] in Montreal. He is sharing what he learnt from Elsa. Which is wonderful.
JS: You said that, in the 1970s, Agora was crucial in Maastricht when it came to media art. Did Elsa still have links with Agora in the 1980s? The International Media Meeting organised in 1982 with Agora, in collaboration with the Universiteit van Maastricht, would suggest this. During the event, the situation surrounding video and audio art was discussed. Some twenty international artists were there to present their work; some of whom were from the Jan van Eyck Academie. Elsa also appears to have been involved.
MH: That was indeed a key event. Elsa and I were both on the advisory committee. We asked a number of people we considered important to take part. Agora decreased its activities from then on, mainly for personal reasons.
JS: Are there other aspects of Dutch video art history that, according to you, have been overshadowed? We’ve already mentioned the fact that the Jan van Eyck Academie perhaps received too little recognition in this context.
MH: With the history of Dutch video art, one can certainly assert that the Jan van Eyck Academie did not receive the recognition it deserved. This is a great shame, particularly when you see how many artists benefited from what the school offered. Video art as a whole ultimately changed, but the early developments, also in regard to the CRM, were instrumental. It is so often said that the Netherlands was a pioneer in this regard, but that is not entirely true. In the early days, there were few opportunities for working with video, certainly if you compare the situation to Germany and Great Britain. In the Kölnische Kunstverein, for instance, video was used from the outset, or think of the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow, where we presented video installations very early on. People were really interested. In the Netherlands, there was only De Appel, and of course Time Based Arts, which we founded ourselves. Then there was René Coelho’s gallery [Montevideo, ed.]. But the major difference was that, in Great Britain, video art wasn’t pushed into a separate video or media arts pigeonhole. Video art was shown in a broader context. It doesn’t always have to be specifically video; if you use ‘time-based materials’ you have a range of options for keeping up with technological developments. Which was fascinating, of course. Firstly, working with time-based media invites collaboration – something the Jan van Eyck encouraged. And it was emancipating – few women were accepted as independent artists in those days. Working in a new medium that had no history meant being able to create new options.
JS: Thank you.
Related texts on the history of the video workshop at the Jan van Eyck Academie