Hugo Roelandt at M HKA
You won’t believe your eyes when you see it, but it really is true. In a huge shed at the Boel shipyards in Hoboken, Antwerp, a bus dangles from giant cables. Welders are creating fireworks and the sparks are flying. No, the bus is not empty. With the help of a bridge crane with a lifting capacity of 450 tons, twenty passengers are lifted from the ground. They turn out to be participants in Boel Project (1985), a post-performance piece by a little-known Antwerp artist who was active from the 1970s onwards: Hugo Roelandt (1950, Aalst–2015, Antwerp).
In all, no less than 18 buses would be filled with citizens from Hoboken. All of them, without exception, would be hoisted several metres above the ground and bombarded with flashes of light, water and sound. Despite the mediocre quality of the only existing video recordings of the performance, these images do not fade. They drip with imagination, swagger, guts; it’s impossible to escape their fascination. Who comes up with something like this? How is it that such an artist could stay under the radar for so long?
Hugo Roelandt’s work has everything it needs to win itself a place in the canon of art history. In terms of design, visual language and sheer originality, his oeuvre is equal to that of many a star in the international art circuit. How did it happen, then, that Roelandt — a photographer, installation artist, performance artist and video maker who, along with with Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Narcisse Tordoir, Ria Pacquée, Guillaume Bijl, Danny Devos and others, was one of the key figures of the Antwerp avant-garde in the ’70s and ’80s — missed his career? Or don’t we understand anything about it, and was precisely this the stake of his art?
What magnificent self-portraits Hugo Roelandt made from the 1970s onwards! The artist’s disproportionate zest for life and anarchic jumpiness are like a slap in the face. Usually manipulated and of varying formats, Roelandt’s images are expansive and ambiguous, brimming with life. They exude a naturalness that recalls the talent of a great chef who sings as he works his magic at the stove, without so much as a glance at a cookbook. They also have a tendency to push against the limits of their graphic medium. Make no mistake: beneath the appearance of informal work lies a great technical aptitude.
Hugo Roelandt made his debut in 1974 with rare impetuosity, showing a series of black-and-white photographs titled Self-Portrait in Drag. The sexually ambiguous images bubble with lust. They recall the traditional ‘Dirty Janets’ (Voil Jeanetten) of the carnival in Aalst, Roelandt’s hometown, involving a garish parade of cross-dressing men banging chamber pots and pushing prams through the streets. Untitled (late 70s) consists of a suite of nine large nudes (five photographs of a male model and four of a female model) and is one of the highlights of the exhibition at M HKA. Confronting these serious, playful, thoroughly honest and instantly iconic images, one is surprised to imagine oneself in the studio of an experimental sculptor rather than a photographer. The pictures seem to have come forth out of a search for new horizons of human experience rather than the portrayal of the human figure. It’s a mystery why they haven’t been hanging for decades in a major museum — they wouldn’t look out of place in the Centre Pompidou. The same goes for the three-metre-high, black-and-white nudes titled Research about the actual aesthetic ideal (1976), the sublime and monumental outcome of a performance originally conceived for the Zwarte Zaal in Ghent.
What makes Roelandt’s photographic and related work so appealing is its constant changeability. Roelandt plays with the appearance of things and people, including himself; he is simply incapable of being boring. Almost every portrait in the hall uses a different material support: cardboard, paper, paper between glass plates, aluminium sheets… Frames are hard to find. Paperclips will do. The artist, who refused to have anything to do with the ‘curse’ of representation, was after an ‘altered reality’ (Marc Holthof). But above all, Roelandt is a gifted colourist. In the passport-sized Self-Portraits (1973), the young artist appears as a gorgeous chameleonic Renaissance prince. It’s enough to make you want to wear the black-and-white photographs, with their dabs and rushes of emerald-green, cobalt blue, saffron or soft pink, around your neck like glowing miniature cameos.
Although he held a teaching position at the Photography Department of the Royal Academy of Antwerp from 1980 to 2010, the focus in Roelandt’s own work shifted early on from photography to performance. He says he refused to photograph what was in front of him. ‘What interested me was to change in a very conscious way certain situations and to record this. Photography was a suitable medium for that. In the long run changing things became more important than photography itself and thus it is a small step to turn to ‘live’ events.’ 1 Narcisse Tordoir, who worked with Roelandt on the 1977 performance The Four Seasons (together with Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven and Jan Janssen), described Roelandt’s performances as ‘rather theatrical’, saying that ‘he focused on performing a number of actions. In contrast to, for example, the work of Ulay and Marina Abramović which was more body-oriented, so called ‘body art’, Roelandt thought it necessary to work around a theme and to invite people for it. They could express the theme according to their own views.’ 2
Discontented with the growing institutionalisation of performance art and determined to do away with the implicit rules of the genre, such as the unity of time and place, the role of the performer’s body or the presence of the artist, Hugo Roelandt and his friend Paul Geladi developed Post Performance Project 1 (1980). The only thing the performer did was sit and listen to his own voice on a tape recorder, in dialogue with a second voice. Post Performance Project 3 (1980) consisted of varied documentation of a peaceful occupation of the Groendalstraat in the commercial heart of Antwerp. Roelandt described the project as ‘the interplay of three realities, all non-material: the performer (H.R.) on film, the preparations on a slideshow, and the performance on video tape, all run synchronically to present one post-performance which tells the public how it came about.’ 3
1985 is a miracle year for Roelandt’s career. It’s the year of Boel Project, but there is a lot more. Roelandt is invited to participate in the Middelheim Biennial ‘AutomoBiënnale 18’ (for which he works together with Greet Verlinden, Marc Holthof, Bob Van Aert and Jan Heremans). There, Roelandt and his collaborators create the formidable installation Auto mobile tergicristallo. It reads as a poetic evocation of the idea of auto-mobility (self-movement). 18 windscreen wipers are placed in a pond, like water plants. They seem to be activated solely by photosynthesis: the elements only function and move when the sun shows its face. The interval between the wipers’ movement varies according to the intensity of the sunlight, ranging from one to twenty seconds. The scarce photographic documentation of this project is simply mesmerising.
Auto Mobile Tergicristallo is Roelandt’s best-known project from the ’80s. That same year, a much smaller version of the installation travels to Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, where Roelandt complements it with Aigua Bellugada / The Shape of Water (1985), a landscape made of transparent plastic bags filled with water that reflect the sunlight. In later versions of the work in Aalst and Tilburg, the project morphs into a water pyramid. Another key work from 1985 is the installation Circulation, 4 in which eight living room fans are mounted vertically in a semicircle on a wall, their sound recorded and amplified.
Hugo Roelandt’s most sculptural installation is Pavimenti (1987), conceived for ‘Monumenta — Sculpture in the City, Middelheim Biennial Antwerp 1987’. Relying on the use of concrete paving stones, the intervention extends a footpath into the third dimension. The row of stones is continued upwards along the front of a house. The city thus becomes its own monument.
During the ’90s and into the 2000s, Roelandt becomes increasingly interested in elements that define our living space — air, water, light and colour. The ninety-second, mono-channel video work Nuances of White (1993) displays fluorescent neon tubes with different colour temperatures on four television monitors, resulting in a blurred image. The Light Sculptures (Pink) / (Citrus Yellow) / (Blue) (1996) are nearly immaterial, curly and wormlike objects made of neon. As always, Roelandt is curious to find out whether he can manipulate these elements and in doing so alter our experience of them. The idea of an ‘altered reality’ never leaves him.
Hugo Roelandt had a lifelong hatred of the art market and of the museum as an institution; he was horrified at the idea of marketing his art or performances. All his life, he swam like a salmon against the current. He left us in 2015 without ever having committed to a commercial gallery. In his decades-long career, the artist sold only a single work, nota bene to what he considered an intrusive collector at Documenta in Kassel. It was a plaster-filled cardboard box containing a pair of shoes, the remnants of Roelandt’s performance at the Stadtarchiv. In the leaflet accompanying his first museum exhibition, Roelandt’s close friend and collaborator Marc Holthof says that ‘selling a performance — as is commonplace today — would have disgusted him, even selling conceptual art did not fit with his vision. For Hugo, art was a radical gift from the artist to (and often against) society. For him, art was a form of visual thinking.’
It is questionable whether Roelandt would have wanted the survey at M HKA, which opened ten years after his passing. If ‘The End is a New Beginning’ succeeds as an exhibition, it is to the credit of people like Marc Holthof, Nav Haq and Antony Hudek, assisted by Roelandt’s widow Lydia Van Loock, who have been working on his legacy together for the past decade. In 2016, their research resulted in the book Hugo Roelandt. Let’s Expand the Sky (2016). The current museum exhibition is curated by Nav Haq, Marc Holthof, Lydia Van Loock and Joanna Zielińska. Moreover, M HKA has also launched a comprehensive online platform serving as a public resource for Hugo Roelandt’s practice (hugoroelandt.ensembles.org).
Hugo Roelandt is remembered by some for his unrestrained behaviour. Certainly, he was a very particular human being and a tormented soul. He is described by his friends as ‘an artist 24/7, a likeable man with a contagious smile and a strange fellow’ (Jo Bogaert) and ‘a charismatic man who pushed the boundaries of photography, performance and installation art’ (Johan Pas). Antony Hudek, who was the director of Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp at the time of the publication of Hugo Roelandt. Let’s Expand the Sky, wrote that ‘Hugo Roelandt seems to have been propelled by a desire to fly.’ 5 Bart De Baere is especially eloquent when it comes to evoking the importance of Roelandt’s legacy:
‘His work is concerned with the changeability which these days has turned into an inevitability. It consists of a fluidity of media of which the photographic point of departure is sucked in by what we now identify as ‘performances’, but whose intentions go even beyond that and are actually a search for different kinds of presence in time and space. The image Roelandt evokes of a fluid and emotional identity is more topical than ever. It has in the meantime become easy to label his work as interactive, for that is what is now expected of art. But in actual fact it is more than that: an ecological ambition, a focus on the surroundings: to use in an artistic way the relation of humankind with what it experiences as an environment in movement.’ 6
- 1 Interview with Hugo Roelandt by Luc Mishalle, CET-Bulletin, no. 5, 1980, pp. 4-6.
- 2 Hugo Roelandt. Let’s Expand the Sky, edited and translated by Marc Holthof, Occasional Papers, 2016, p. 51.
- 3 Marc Holthof, The End is a New Beginning, 2024, M HKA (leaflet/audience guide)
- 4 The work is signed by Hugo Roelandt, Marc Holthof, Greet Verlinden, Jan Herremans and Rudi De Bleser
- 5 Hugo Roelandt. Let’s Expand the Sky, 2016, p. 6: ‘He lifted buses, musicians and furniture; realized a hovering helicopter piece; and created a solar-powered Busby Berkely-like windscreen wiper sculpture that waved, until exhaustion, to the clouds. His pavement-clad façade could have served as a runway for a yet-unknown vehicle aiming for the ether. And his late experiments with light hinted at a wholehearted embrace of what defied gravity, in all senses of the word.’
- 6 Hugo Roelandt. Let’s Expand the Sky, 2016, p. 8.