Rather torn between two attempts, two interests and two possible paths, the timeless question of individuality… and/or shizophrenia if you so will: Bureau Gruzemayer has various operations and considers itself multi-medial but at the same time has a penchant towards the down to earth material aspects of all manner of cultural manifestations, so that the virtual cloudy fuzzy type of expression sometimes gets short shrift… but don’t worry, this might blanace itself out in the future.
Main aspect recently are the archives that have accumulated physically on the shores of Gruzemayer…. aside from the jettison of it’s own making, there are various (partial) archival bits and pieces that need to be administered, hopefully in temporary terms until a decent home can be found… but experience does demand a certain realism and it is well possible that this all might take a while.
There is the ‘inexistent’ archive, which, along with activities in the AK-37 have been summarily described in an invalid publication “redactionele machinaties van een inexistent tijdschrift Fifty-fifty tot en met AK-37” – I say invalid because it underwent a major mishap at the printers, and because it’s unilingual dutch… thus one endeavour is to do a corrected and augmented english version somewhere along the way…
Then there are the fragments of a major wreck: the sudden deceleration of what was known as the ‘herman teirlick huis‘ literary alcove and contemporary art space on the southern edge of Brussels. Aside from the fact that the municipality which pulled the plug on it also deleted all the electronic information which was still on their site, even after having promised they would leave it there… so this has to be refurbished and added to a current blog following the new institution that took over the house, but also the specific archive of wessel di Wesseli during his sojourn there: a period in which he challenged scientists to test his perpetual machine, and from which he disemminated ecological propaganda… He has been agitating for cleaner air long before the current hysteria broke, and has been an anti-automobilist (combustion engine) for a long time. The correspondence and remnants of experimental machines from that period are well worth the while.
There is a tendency to separate out some of the bookish activities, even though these are more often than not related to specific projects, but on the other hand extensive enough to form a sub-section all of their own… given also the fact that recently unearthed graphic material from college days has also become an acute archival problem, these aspects will have to be amalgamated into a combined effort between “La Livrerie Pharmacie” and the outer dependency of B.G. “dep.interdep” in the small town of Péruwelz on the French border…
We have not even yet considered what to do with audio material, amassed during the emmissions of what was called “Ether Auer” on Antwerps local alternative free radio station “Centraal” from 1989 to 2005, and the endless streams of analog videotape shot during the memorable openings and ‘jours fixes’ at Factor 44, itself also a weighty archive in it’s own right… but that one is for later ( and perhaps a combined effort)
Weaving in and out of this is my (HO) engagement in the primary identification and ordering of the legacy left behing by friend and artist Jef Lambrecht in the form of his organisation “Samarkand” – this luckily is already under way and has the support of the new central flemish artist-arcive at the museum – but it is also a sort of test case, since the polymorphous nature of artistic production makes for some pretty specific challenges…
Bureau Gruzemayer2 