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The interior in the oeuvre of Jef Cornelis
19-22 March 2009
Lectures organised by Koen Brams and Dirk Pültau at NAi Maastricht, Wiebengahal, Avenue Ceramique 226, Maastricht
The interior plays a very diverse role and gets a vast range of meanings in the films that Jef Cornelis realised between 1964 and 1997 for the Belgian/Flemish public broadcasting corporation. It is a direct subject in the early films about architecture and urbanity, such as the three-part Waarover men niet spreekt (1968), and in the experimental live TV programme IJsbreker (1983), particularly in the eleventh episode, dedicated to ‘living’. In addition, the interior ‘appears’ almost as a matter of course when collectors discuss their collections in their own homes, as in Drie blinde muizen (1968), or when art lovers make their homes available for artists’ interventions. The programme De langste dag, about – among other things – the exhibition Chambres d’Amis, not only gives a commentary on this important art event, but also provides a view into the homes of forty Ghent citizens. Finally, The Music Box (1994) focuses on the topics of bourgeoisie and the unheimlich interior in the art of Henri De Braekeleer, James Ensor, René Magritte and Jan Vercruysse. The leitmotif of this film is the (bourgeois) desire to give room to the piano – as a symbol of art – in life-forms that really have no room to spare for anything that is useless or for waste. This three-day discursive project deals with all these shapes and appearances of the interior in the work of Jef Cornelis.
Thursday 19 March 2009 - 19.30 - 22.00 u.
Fredie Floré: Waarover men niet spreekt (1968)
Koen Brams: Drie blinde muizen (1968) (Hubert Peeters, Martin Visser, Frits Becht)
Friday 20 March 2009 - 17.00 - 20.00 u.
Nils van Beek: The Music Box (1994)
Sunday 22 March 2009 - 14.00 - 17.00 u.
Irene Cieraad: Ijsbreker, episode 11 (1983): Wonen + wonen = 2
Dirk Pültau: De langste dag (1986)
About the films
The three-part Waarover men niet spreekt was realised by Jef Cornelis in collaboration with Geert Bekaert and broadcast in 1968. Waarover men niet spreekt contrasts the flurry of late modernistic architectural plans and the modern housing market with alternative, more ‘humanistic’ forms of living. Which interiors – containing which products, furniture designs and design articles – did those who chased surplus value at the end of the sixties plump for? What is the relationship between the analysis and critique by Cornelis and Bekaert and the prevailing discourse about interiors at the end of the sixties?
Working again with Geert Bekaert, Jef Cornelis made the film Drie blinde muizen, in response to the exhibition Three blind mice held in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the Sint-Pietersabdij in Ghent in 1968, which showed art works from the collections of Hubert Peeters, Martijn Visser and Frits Becht. Both the exhibition catalogue and the film by Cornelis & Bekaert attempt to relate art to the domestic context of the interior. Both approaches are analysed and questioned.
In The Music Box the interior appears as the bourgeois location par excellence, turning up in the oeuvres of four Belgian artists: Henri De Braekeleer, James Ensor, René Magritte and Jan Vercruysse. Through the analysis of works of art in which the interior / the piano plays an important role, Jef Cornelis and Bart Verschaffel, makers of The Music Box, send out a message. In that sense, The Music Box can certainly be understood as an ideological demarche. How does this relate to the well-known discourse which undermined the familiar world of the interior and the domestic scene, such as Freud’s ideas about the (Un)heimliche or the Benjaminian analysis of the bourgeois interior?
In 1983 and 1984 Jef Cornelis and a team of directors realised the live discussion programme IJsbreker, featuring a wide range of artistic and cultural topics. The eleventh episode of IJsbreker was dedicated to bOb Van Reeth, architect, and Marcel Raymaekers, an interior designer constructing massive ‘living idylls’ with recovered antique furniture and architectural fragments. The programme discusses two very diverse attitudes towards the interior. How can these attitudes be described? In what way does the format of IJsbreker itself contribute to the discussion?
In 1986 Jef Cornelis made De Langste Dag, again supported by a very elaborate team of directors and journalists: this was a six-hour long live report of the opening of the Ghent art summer of 1986. Its most prestigious exhibition was Chambres d’Amis: 51 artists made works of art for 54 Ghent private homes. How is the art portrayed in this domestic context? How does Cornelis relate to the discourse of the collectors, or of the curator Jan Hoet?