Jan Bucquoy illustrated 1968-2009
from the year of eroticism to the year of the rat,
100Titres/Yellow Now, 2009 Nederlands - Français

Only text is reproduced, with autorisation of Jan Bucquoy.
Command the book at 100titres@gmail.com / guy.jungblut@teledisnet.be

Contents

Trangression

There are three forms of transgression: sexuality, madness, politics.
If you can combine the three, you attack on the three fronts.

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is to art what crab lice is to love.
I prefer the electro-shock, the punch in the jaw that says wake up, you are sleeping.
For me, the message will always come before the massage.

Why this retrospective?

Becasuse today, Belgium,my companion for the last forty years, is abandoning me. Ah, all those sluts. Those "lit­tle" people, labelled Belgium, have split into sub-tribes. Belgium is no longer able to recognise the thing Bel­gium as belonging to its culture. The country is divided and I can't speak from a divided culture. I can't work specifically, separately, with Flemings, Francophones, Germanophones.
 

The retrospective puts the definitive full stop to the frittering away of the country over the last forty years. The mass is over. Salut en de kost. As I can't retrace my steps, I sentence myself to exile without the Kingdom⁽¹⁾. With the one and only hope, in­deed the certainty, that the Belgian spirit is exportable.

You can't get more Belgian than Bucquoy

Jan Bucquoy is Belgian to his very soul. He seems to be soaked in the national colours of his country. In the first place, he is fluent in the three national languages which he mixes to create his own language and then uses all the cultural references and symbols which he distorts and transforms with ease. All his work is Bel­gian to the very core - unless it is Belgium that seems to exist because of him.

He starts first with political Belgium whose icons and operation he ruthlessly calls into question. It is the King, entirely against his will, who is the target of his scorn: Baudouin and Fabiola are portrayed as ridiculous sub­jects in Bucquoy's paintings and collages (e.g. the portrait of Fabiola wearing a sanitary towel round her neck, Baudouin wearing a pair of underpants on his head). Our little troublemaker, goes as far as decapi­tating a statue of the King on the Brussels Grand-Place (1992).The authorities were not amused and the po­lice intervened to re-establish public order which of course gave a public dimension to this particular event. This is not a bride undressed during her hen party but the royal family undressed by the court jester.

The King is nude. Soon, he will only be the fragile sym­bol of a country torn apart from centripetal forces. Undoubtedly, with his constant attacks Bucquoy has contributed to weakening the monarchy. However, roy­alty is not the only target of his ire, he also targets pol­itics. In his film, la Vie politique des Belges (1998), the filmmaker transforms the improbable electoral cam­paign of two petty wrangling parties into a veritable "road movie". Through them, all the difficulties and ob­stacles of Belgian politics are highlighted - the fritter­ing away of vested interests, the identity crisis. What's the point of democracy, asks Bucquoy?

He has the answer: it serves to question its possibili­ties and to explore its limits. In his magazine entitled Belge (Dol in the Flemish version), which was launched at the start of the 1990s, Bucquoy attacks the compla­cency and the entrenched beliefs of the Belgian mid­dle-classes which he makes fun of. Power, politics and received ideas are all subjects of ridicule for him. "Worse than Hara-Kiri" (the French satirical magazine), this is the acidic comment given to him by the half-amused, half-shocked French-language press. The "Bel­gian" experience only lived as long as the roses, the colour of his paper — hardly one year. After hundreds of seizures and forced sales, it disappeared from the scene but without having first touched the imagination.

However, it is also Belgium as a geographic entity that Bucquoy targets. "To be Belgian is to be nothing", he writes in his autobiographical book La vie est belge (2007). And yet... He praises the beaches of Ostend in his comic strip le Bal du rat mort (1980).The beauty of the Belgian coast plays the main role in his film Camping Cosmos (1996). The Flemish dialect of his home town, Harelbeke, provides an identity to the main protagonist in Friday Fishday (2008). Many other examples could be given: with Bucquoy, Belgium is everywhere. It is everywhere and beyond itself. In tes Vacances de Noël (2005), Noël Godin⁽²⁾ and a gang of magnificent madmen get stranded (in both senses) at the Cannes film festival. It is this concentrated Bel-gianness that spreads out over the Croisette. Belgium as an intention and an extension, this is what Bucquoy is all about.

This is how Belgium gets smashed up in Bucquoy's kalei­doscope. However, Brussels is the natural environment of the artistThe paving stones of the city bear witness to his spectacular annual coups d'État (2005, 2006, 2007,2008). On 21 May of every year, the rebel tries to overpower the royal palace, accompanied by his faithful accomplices, Arne Baillière and Théophile de Giraud, and sometimes by a rather tipsy Noël Godin. "You have the power!", he screams to the crowd. But it is all in vain as they have other more pressing things to do such as working. Work? Not in Bucquoy's vo­cabulary - Vade retro, satanas. He has more important things to do like turning the world upside down. Brussels is his city. In his films, La Vie sexuelle des Belges I (1994), la Jouissance des hystériques (2000), or even in his book La vie est belge, the city is portrayed as at­tractive but also a bit weird. Trams, skies, a few streets, a café, a brick house, the decor is fixed, without ig­noring the university, the Law Courts, etc. The first often leads to the second but not always as expected. And factories, such as the Renault factory in Vilvoorde, in Fermeture de l'usine Renault à Vilvoorde (The closing of the Renault factory in Vilvoorde) (1998).That's all, yet everything is there. Every exterior is a place of refuge, a refuge with a typical feature of Jan Bucquoy as, pursued by bailiffs, he is continually moving. In real life, he has had dozens of addresses. A so-called real life which continuously changes, where it is difficult to separate legend from truth. But what difference does it make - aren't both just creations?

The identity of Brussels unfolds in the core of his work, discretely but almost without any effect. And it is never as well expressed as in the Dolle Mol,this Mecca near the Grand-Place, rue des Éperonniers. It is a bar where Bucquoy came to drink a beer in 1970 and one which he gradually claimed as his own. He was a customer there, a cultural ambassador, but also a squatter in 2006 and lastly the master of the house thanks to a subsidy from the Ministry of Flemish Culture (2007-2008).The Dolle Mol (the angry mole) is more than just a café. It is also a place of culture where all the intelligentsia of the seventies met up, the basis of the insurrection in the heart of the city (sic), but it is also a rather im­probable television station www.dollemol.be. The Dolle Mol is Bucquoy's jewel, possibly his real museum.

Bucquoy is Belgian, also and especially by reference to Magritte, whose canvas he burnt in 1991 ,true or false? No one will ever know the truth of the story and in any case, it is hardly of any importance. And then there was the surrealist, Marcel Marien, who dubbed him as his sole heir. Bucquoy always referred to him by doing the same jobs: in no particular order, bookseller, poet, filmmaker, photographer, counterfeiter and trouble maker of all trades. Lastly, Bucquoy chose Tyl Ulen-spiegel as his alter ego, the disrespectful literary hero who revealed the hypocrisy of society by defying its power.
 

Our artist uses the symbols of Belgianness. We see the colours of the Belgian flag on his pallet, which are re­deployed as landscapes (Paysages belges, 2007). Red, yellowand black,these colours are striking and suddenly Belgium appears. Bucquoy also makes use of Manneken Pis, the famous Brussels fountain which represents a little boy urinating.The little boys now appears in the form of a calendar (1998)wherehe is depicted com­pletely nude with his penis in the air. This requires courage. Manneken Pisand Manneken Bucquoy,thesamecombat, that of independence of the spirit and facing up to a challenge. Bucquoy's range includes,ofcourse,the frite (French fries), the very symbol of Bel-gianness. In the 1980s, he started a travelling frite mu­seum in collaboration with llegems.Jeff Meert and Jo Cauwenberg. Can the frite be considered as a work of art? Bucquoy proves that very thing by frying works of art during his happenings dedicated to Belgium. Isn't the frite the unexpected debris from a far-off and mys­terious planet? His photos of potatoes (2007) turn these starchy tubers into flying meteorites. Halluci­nating.

Bucquoy does not lack references. However, refer­ences are not reverence as this is not exactly his house style."Expose Everything" would be a better war cry for him. Tintin, Lucky Luke and the Smurfs, Belgian cre­ations, would be advised to tremble in their clearly de­fined boots. Bucquoy reinterprets and distorts their adventures in a series of comic strips entitled "Sexual life". Away with the beautifully drawn "story boards" suitable for the family. Here are asexual beings given over to debauchery and depravity under the mocking eye of their seducer. But in the name of what rage, what anger does he feel he has to reveal such hypocrisy? Why does he have to turn himself into a pornographic cartoonist? It is because debunking is the first step to­wards freedom. It is the libertarian way of confirming that no purity is really innocent. Lastly, isn't it the cre­ative artist's prerogative to turn the viewer's world up­side down to force him not to see but at least to look?

Bucquoy deserves his 100% Belgian label, stamped in the three national colours of black,yellow and red. You can't get more Belgian than Bucquoy but for the mo­ment, it is Belgium that is under threat. Is it his fault? If, due to his actions as saboteur, he has contributed to shaking his country to its very foundation, it is to recreate Belgium by his artistic endeavours. If Belgium would no longer exist as a state, it would be famous as a work of art, based on the ideas of our troublemaker. This nation-creation will proudly be remem­bered as the lost country whose end was prophesised by the artist. Bye-bye Belgium, Hello Bucquoy.

Corinne Maier

Growing up

I grew up in Harelbeke, a working-class town, full of builders. You will find all the building trades and trades­men there: masons, plasterers, electricians, carpenters and the rest. In my family, we specialised in making wooden staircases, with many flights, intended for big (bourgeois) houses.

In my street, there were 150 cafés that served half-litres of dark beer, 25 brewers who made draught beer, before Pils arrived from Czechoslovakia. Opposite our house, there was my grandmother's café, with its Fellini air of people who got drunk and bel­lowed at the moon. The incredible energy of people who make others laugh and have no pretensions. A sort of humility vis-à-vis oneself. I was immersed in that at­mosphere, and soaked it up.

In Harelbeke, you didn't beat about the bush, you said what you thought. This direct, blunt side is with me today, especially in my (artistic) productions where nothing is side-stepped, nothing is repressed.

Flemish culture, French culture

I was brought up in Dutch, but with France close by, oasis of culture, of refinement, of political analysis, with an admiring glance at its philosophers and the writers. France is 20 kilometres away. For the people living there, France is especially the country of good wages and Picon.

For me, this meant a fight between what I saw and what I imagined. On the one hand, the coarse side of the Flemings, and on the other, France, the country of re­finement. I gave up the refinement bit very quickly, I realised I was more at ease with the excellent home­brewed beers than with art galleries! I'm comfortable when I visit exhibitions with lots of humour. When it's highbrow, I clear out. I flee what is rigid, abstract mas­turbation, that grandstands as a misplaced intellectual authority claiming to see and understand the origin

and purpose of the universe —to do that, you'd be bet­ter off reading Einstein rather then trusting hip art. I'm fed up with the dumbing down of philosophy and sci­ence reviewed by artists. What the art world really lacks is humility. Art invites people to cast off daily ma­nipulations, break away from alienation, while realizing that the road will belong and difficult, and the guide often inexperienced,"as Mao might have said".

Sound and image

Before the image, before the box, we had the radio. The radio, now that really opened up our world. At the time, it was a culture the authorities controlled very little, whereas the image definitely fell under their thumb. The oral arts are much less implicated in the sacrosanct, discourse is freer than the written word and the image.
 

The arrival of rock 'n roll acted like a liberator of the word and the body whereas before that, everything was too rigid. I moved on from the light operas of Jo-hann Straus to rock'n roll onto which I grafted Radio Luxembourg International, Europe I, and the English stations with Caroline, Veronica, Atlantic coming from the extra-territorial waters with music we didn't hear on the national airways.

Through the image, I discovered the Marcinelle school⁽³⁾; it was quite libertarian, Franquin (Spirou), the oppo­site of Hergé, the boy scout, catholic and collaborator with his ligne claire rigid style. Franquin's rounded line all movement contrasted with Hergé's rigid ligne claire. With a plain line, without hatching or perspective, like a child's drawing or maybe a naive drawing, you could clearly represent the world. I used it much later, in a series of portraits of the Belgian Royal Family. But you can't parody Gaston. The shock came with Tintin and his incredible life, without Mum or Dad, no wife, a sort of lightly tinted homosexual friendship, vir­ile, no more, where even the Castafiore looks like a transvestite. On one hand the world of Marcinelle, Gas-ton the anarchist, and on the other, Hergé the collab­orator.

The comics taught me to read. I began with the sto­ries of Viking (Erik le Normand) published in the Dutch-language paper Het Laatste Nieuws and I was able to read when I started primary school. I was quite self-taught. I began copying the comics when I was eight. I was also influenced by Picasso,so I copied Guernica. Pi­casso, another kind of three-dimensional ligne claire, by his cubism, his way of cutting angles and creating perspectives with flat surfaces.

Later, I discovered the cinema with a small 8 mm cam­era and I made short films, first comic strips, then films. But I had also started writing. I wrote poetry from around the age of eight or nine, love poems that I gave to the girls. It was my way of chatting them up but I quickly realised it wasn't working very well.

First happenings

We practised flower power before its time. The father of a pal of mine grew flowers in hot houses and when they became unsaleable, we used to offer them to the locals.That was when I realised that a gift can make people happy —something rare for the people in Harel-beke who weren't accustomed to receiving gifts. I re­alised that giving was receiving, and that it worked better than poems for chatting up the other sex. Then came the box and life changed. One of my mates and I used to drive a car up and down the streets and address people through a loud-speaker, shouting "Throw away your box". People started buying tellies in the 1960s and stopped going out, the cafés began to shut down. Our calls to rise up didn't work, flowers were better. The distribution of flowers, the calls for "Out with the telly", were happenings in advance of their time. As for the theatre, you had to perform in the street if you wanted to be heard. We tried other strategies like flying the flags of Com­munist countries that I tied to a mast at window of our house, but I always ended up making my own flags. Those I made myself were inspired by the pages de­voted to flags in the Petit Larousse dictionary; the same pages influenced me later when I came to reproduce my series of Belgian flags, in oils with mixtures of red, yellow and black. Remaking countries through colour imagery. I reinvented the Dutch flag with orange, the national colour (although the flag doesn't contain any orange), adding blue to represent a country snatched from the waters. I was reshaping territories, hence the idea of designing new flags for countries and their em­bassies. A way of looking on my home as an embassy of the world. It was intriguing, it roused me to action; I realised I had to go beyond the classic schema. Reject the dominant culture to reinvent the world. Not only was the map not the territory but by altering the map I could recreate the territory.

Father and mother

My father liked football, for the betting and for the competition. After the match, the café.That gave me the impression of being accepted, It was another way of belonging to a community instead of work and church. I knew that betting could bring people together and help them patch up their differences. The game of chance (and a dash of luck) would one day become the artistic core of my life.

My father didn't believe in anything. He was an anti-royalist and a communist. His plan for me was to play football and get a well-paid job with an electricity firm like himself. I even passed the entrance exam since the children of employees were invited to sit for it. They were really tests pro forma because we were given the answers in advance! When interviewed by the psy­chologist, I spoke of Sartre and existentialism. That was why I was turned down. My father was furious. He never said a word to me after that and never came to watch me play football either. I had transgressed his one and only Law - a steady job. For the rest, he was­n't authoritarian and I had no merit in not transgress­ing the other Laws.

My mother used to laugh at my antics but at the same time she'd say: "Be like everybody else, stay out of the limelight, you're neither avant-garde or arrière-garde, you'd just in the middle". And at the same time, she went around boasting about her tearaway son. That's what's called the "double bind",the contradictory must that can drives the kids crazy. For me that duality can be summed up as "being in the cafés and cursed".

Be notorious and impact on society

Hugo Claus was 15 years older than me and the first time I met him, he was handing out tracts in the Flan-dria factory in Zedelgem. I thought of him as a well-known writer who also dabbled in painting (he had been a member of the Cobra group⁽⁴⁾, someone who was bitterly contested in Catholic Flanders and who

used his notoriety to make political happenings. An­other Hugo Claus happening was a Holy Trinity in the nude, for which he was almost sent to prison. But as he became accepted and his notoriety grew, he calmed down. In a broadcast on FR3, he said he was sorry he had n'tbeen more of an anarchist and that he had reined himself in on account of his status. Use your notoriety to impact on society because speaking out is then more effective than if you are a nobody. But the case of Rudi Dutschke⁽⁵⁾ say "When we're tops in society, we'll blow up everything" : that's not true because you are gradually trapped by the sys­tem. Claus was an example for me that I only found again in Sartre who refused the Nobel prize, stood on a barrel to harangue the Renault workers and sold la Cause du peuple in the street.

When you look back on the history of the great pro­testers of the 1970s, you find that most of them be­came ministers or cabinet members, or slowly go insane because they are powerless to cross the bound­aries, to go through the curtain, to make choices with­out becoming part of the system, or being overrun by it. As Besancenot⁽⁶⁾ said, the minute you sit down, you are taken over by the system and its operational mode. Perhaps that explains my own fear of success, the urge to smash everything as soon as anything seems to be working, make sure the system has no choice but to reject you. Subversion as one of the Fine Arts.

Collages

The origin of collage has anal connections for me be­cause in those days the privy was in the garden.There were always pieces of newspapers and magazines cut up and hanging from a nail to wipe your backside. And I used to read them to while away the time. At the time, people used to keep lots of newspapers and magazines. Apart from the texture and colour of the paper, they contained much the same kind of stories, current events didn't change very much I'd take the old magazines in the genre Ons land (sort of Flemish version of the Patriote illustré) and used them to make collages. I could detect no progression as I read, the future was the past. The conflicts remained the same, only the names changed. Everything kept coming back, all the time. The cars changed but there as always a bird beside the car. Time came to a halt. I realised that, thanks to the collage and the bog. Im­agery frozen; it freezes time and freezes our lives. To me life was a perpetual whirlwind. As for my col­lages, I drew them under the umbrella name of 'Fu­ture', whereas they were past, present and future.The feeling that everything passes and goes away, a kind of huge fun fair where the players take themselves very seriously and the next day, they appear among the obit­uaries. My collages were ripped off, all the events were on the same level,you could almost speak of automatic graphics.
 

Life is a collage. It consists of layer after layer, super­imposed like Nougé's onion. Nothing really changes. No matter how many layers you tear off, another ap­pears. Later on, I used collages as a provocation but that was in the 1970s.

Drama studies and the Situationist International

Studies? I attended the Higher School of Dramatic Art (École supérieure d'art dramatique du Théâtre national de Strasbourg-ESADTNS) in Strasbourg and enrolled at the University for its restaurant. This was the time when the situationists published la Misère en milieu étudiant (On the Poverty of Student Life). There was quite a movement whose questions matched mine on be­longing to a capitalist society, via the theatre and the arts, a Hegelian and young Marx analysis of what De-bord⁽⁷⁾ discovered in the translation of Georg Lukâcs's book Histoire et Conscience de classe (History and Class Consciousness), that touched on the subject of  La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle), In the end, Debord's analysis also became a form of dominant dis­course (think of surrealism) and was party to capital­ist society. By criticising, you became what you criticised, you accepted and assumed your role in cap­italist society. How can you be in society without being part of it? How can you keep to the straight and nar­row? In the long run, I studied politics through the trun­cheon beatings I received, not during the lectures. Situationism is an interesting intellectual exercise but it has its faults. There is its extremely hip-hop/rock side but at the same time it oozes boredom, the liturgy, the chapel, the search for purity, always intent on pro­claiming the Great Truths with a missing but essential element: Doubt.

Questioning, that was what the situationist movement lacked most and everything ended up à la stalinienne. The Viet Cong, Mao's China, Trotski: I was highly sus­picious of that crowd and was quickly sidelined by their small groups of supporters. As in Hergé's world, there were no birds, except in Godard's la Chinoise. But then these splinter groups didn't make the girls laugh. I thor­oughly enjoyed May 1968, people spoke to one another just as in Harelbeke. Sexual liberation. All that for that!

Film studies

After Strasbourg, I went to Brussels (October 1968) and enrolled at lnsas-Institut national supérieur des arts du spectacle.

Film making at Insas was the Nouvelle Vague, a critique of traditional films and of Italian neorealism. I didn't fin­ish anything. (At the same time, I was doing moral phi­losophy in Ghent.) Insas then meant André Delvaux, Frans Buyens. It consisted of film workshops but with the idea of being a higher institute that proposed mak­ing a short film after four years! Alas, the university and ex-cathedra lectures replaced experience. In a word, I learnt film making in the (Belgian) Royal Film Archives (Cinémathèque royale).

Comic strips hijacked

Collages induced me to hijack comic strips. Those of Asterix, Bob and Bobette, Lucky Luke and Tintin, some of which had been published and others not. We copied and added bites, often several of us together. We were following the situationists, many of whom by changing the bubbles without touching the drawing, could pro­duce a Buck Dany with a Marxist discourse! We took popular objects and changed their destination by al­tering the bubbles or hijacking the spirit of a comic strip by adding gender roles. That was what Marcel Marien⁽⁸⁾ did when he changed the slogan of an adver­tisement or pasted an advertisement beside a war pic­ture, just like Hara-Kiri in the 1960s.

 

Comic scripts

After that, I fathered three kids, which calmed me down for a good while. So I had to earn money and I settled into the very lucrative profession of comic script writer. I wrote stories for the general public and worked with an artist who illustrated my text as clas­sically as possible with hyper-realistic drawings. The artist produced photo stories that he projected onto the page and then drew them. They were short stories published by Michel Deligne in magazines and comic strips. Very soon, publishers such as Glénat became in­terested in our work that was out of the ordinary, in­spired by the fantasy tradition, the great Belgian magic realism, but with a more realistic approach enlivened by political aspects, often taken from Belgian current events. The first album was le Bal du rat mort, published 1976-1977 and it was an immediate success.

First publications, first plays

My first literary publication was a book of poetry writ­ten early in 1970, edited by Oswald in 1976. It is quite graphic poetry, influenced by Apollinaire, consisting of letters on the theme of protest and revolt, on what lies behind words. I was deconstructing the written word, under the influence of Dadaism and automatic writing. I wanted to express unconsciousness. In the theatre I was influenced by Artaud⁽⁹⁾, by the artists of delirium. I worked a lot on relaxation that induced hypnosis in actors while developing the actor's aware­ness of his own truth.
 

It was experimental theatre, artistic and popular. I thought it was possible to create a new, deconditioned man. I started out with texts such as le Petit Prince, mak­ing him into a hooligan, a hell's angel, what we'd call a delinquent today

I liked to combine the popular and the experimental. I did the same thing with Michel de Ghelderode's Christoph Colomb.The subject became the sailors' re­volt on the ship, a frenzy on the illusion of earthly par­adise and existential failure.

First critics, first clashes with censorship

I attacked Hergé, the collaborator. By criticising Hergé I raised the nation's hackles.Through him and while I was at it, I launched into the Royal Family, all guns blaz­ing: their collaboration with the Nazi enemy before and during the war. I was undermining the very foun­dations of Belgium and, unwittingly, I was sabotaging the very essence of my concept of Belgian identity. In addition, in the fictitious stories, I put in real politi­cal figureheads such as the Prime Minister, Paul Vanden Boeynants; l invented bastard royal children, I forecast the Brabant killers in a series of comic strips called Jaunes.

A strange, premonitory atmosphere When I attacked the Royal Family, the magazine Circus in which the stories appeared was seized throughout the country. And there I was, on the index, just as a successful career as a comic script writer was within my reach.

In 1982 another character "Carette" appeared and de­stroyed the Royal Palace, forecasting, as it were, the Cel­lules communistes combattantes (CCC) of 1986 (Belgian Communist Fighting Cells). From some of these ele­ments, I imagined events that would really take place. From then onward, the Special Gendarmerie Brigade (BSR) began to keep an eye on me. I was being watched. I went on sinning, the readers wrote to the editors, I fought with my own editors. When Hergé died, I added insult to injury. I brought out a Tintin porno, called la Vie sexuelle de Tintin. That was the start of lawsuits brought by Hergé's widow but she lost in the end and withdrew the case against me when I produced the anti-Semitic drawings Hergé made during the war; they scared even her counsel, lawyers Berenboom for Bel­gium and Weil for France. I used the Tintin model to portray Léon Degrelle, aged 16, as a young reporter of the fictitious newspaper le Vingtième Siècle in which Hergé illustrates the adventures of Tintin-Degrelle. Later, Degrelle becomes the fascist leader for whom "my" Hergé draws many of his book covers, going so far as to design the rexiste flag. My aim was to remove the national lid, to say that its idols were rexistes, using all possible means to discredit them. At the same time, I took out my old collages on King Baudouin and organised the first exhibition at Dolle Mol on those Belgian icons, Tintin and Baudouin.That tolled the bell once and for all on my career as a comic strip writer, an illustrator and designer of artistic collages. I went from confiscation to confiscation, from lawsuit to lawsuit (la Vie sexuelle de Fabiola, de Khomeini... du pape... de Le Pen... de Maurice Béjart and so on.).

Landscape Period

In the 1980s, I decided to represent Belgium through its landscapes and I chose the Belgian seaside. I worked with rolls of acrylic on jute in bulk, 120 by 100 cm, in green, white, blue, sand. There is a false Turner look, quite luminous, something very restful for a sitting room!

Later, I worked on the Belgian colours and in the 1990s I reunified the country. I did oil paintings, spurts of oil that mixed together under the impulsion of the mo­ment.

Then I picked up pictures for a song at flea markets, often landscapes by amateur painters. I'd cross out the artist's name, ostensibly putting my own instead. Another approach: I'd take a painting I'd found and sign Bucquoy on the wall. No more "ready made", only "ready" remains. You escape market logic. With the sig­nature on the wall nobody can walk off with the paint­ing. You remove the object's commercial value. You make art into a non-object and show that you are look­ing for something other than Trade in Art. Today I'd like to paint one landscape for each country that would be all you needed to visit it and stop the pointless, tiring and polluting flow of tourists. You'd make do with the poster of the country you wanted to visit, and during the holidays you'd hang it in your sitting room.You'd look at it from time to time to tackle the essential goal of finding strategies to change the world.

Dol and Belge

Take an everyday object, make its content vulgar, in­conceivably so for the authorities. That was the idea behind the magazine I launched in March 1990 — the sexual life of the Royal Family. I also attacked Mobutu, I gave ways to commit suicide, it was a heap of bric-a-brac, of head-on collisions with power. The Belgian press headlined "Worse than Hara-Kiri" There was the political whore of the week: Herman Van Rompuy, then a young Catholic member of parliament. I inserted col­lages, one in particular of Queen Fabiola fucking with a pig. The issue was banned in the Netherlands, not for insulting the Belgian Royal Family but because zoophilia is forbidden there.

I displayed the dummy of the book titled la Vie sexuelle de Tintin at the Angoulême Festival, where it created an incredible uproar. The entire comic strip world turned against me because I had presented the book in the heartland of Hergé idolatry, Hergé being its main icon that particular year.

The review was seized at regular intervals, it got to the point where the newsagents themselves called the po­lice to remover the unsold copies. In the beginning, well-known writers such as Johan An-thierens, Herman Brusselmans and the illustrator Reiser were associated with the magazine (that also published a text by Bukowski), but these authors grad­ually abandoned ship.

The magazine ceased to exist, it went broke because the distributors systematically returned their allegedly unsold consignments.

At first, we had a print-run of 30 000 copies circulated by the press distribution services. Most of the book­shops didn't display it on the racks although their shelves were full of porno material. There was a lot of self-censorship. The money inherited from my parents got swallowed up in the venture, my last form of re­bellion towards them.

Live on TV

Despite my past, I was invited to appear on TV where I caused bloody hell. Some programmes didn't survive my arrival. When I showed Baudouin's prick and the Queen of Morocco's tampax, I put an end to my live appearances in Belgium. I came to be hated by all and to be considered Public Enemy Number I. I was joined by Noël Godin, the entarteur who, at the time, was be­coming notorious for flinging cream pies at famous people

In these programmes I was the only one who had noth­ing to sell. Not a book, not a magazine, I was in the non-sales space, whereas TV broadcasts are in princi­ple there for promotion purposes. Financially, it was my Crash. In the early 1990s, I was alone, broke, with bailiffs on my heels, and there was more to come.

Musée du slip -The Slip or Briefs⁽¹⁰⁾ Museum

The idea of the Slip Museum arose during a discussion in Antwerp in the Mechelseplein where there are about 10 cafés with terraces, and nearby, a drama school, the Herman Teirlinck Studio. A real artists' city in perpet­ual movement, where you meet people easily. You find writers like Luc Tuymans,Tom Barman, Wannes Van-develde, Jan Decleire, Fred Bervoets, Hugo Claus; mu­sicians, the theatre crowd and the colony of Dutch writers who prefer Antwerp to the Hague or Ams­terdam. I was with Paul llegems, founder of the Frit'Kot Museum; Jeff Meert, an editor who re-edited some Dadaists and popular comics (Urbanus); and people who were working for my magazine Dol. We were talk­ing about the Comic Strip Museum, scheduled to open in the rue des Sables, Brussels. I made a slip of the tongue and said "Slip Museum" instead of Strip. Every­one thought it was a brilliant idea and instead of let­ting the matter lie, I pursued it. I have always thought that the idea of briefs and what they represent in peo­ple's collective unconsciousness is a strong idea - un­derwear and G-strings, animal cache, death cache. What a pleasure to expose all that, in the nude. Be­sides, a slip is quite graphic. And apart from what slips represent in the first place, they have always interested me. If you limit yourself to representation, it's bour­geois art, you're in a mould. I rejected bourgeois cul­ture and its representation. I have no fetishist relationship with slips. I reassured the visitors by invit­ing them to enter an institute, a «museum», the mu­seum of cast-off slips, old but laundered and with certificate of ownership.

I felt that if I got in touch with well-known people, I was going to create (a means of) identification and peo­ple would visit the museum. I panicked like a student before his teacher until someone says: "Think of him in his slip and you'll be fine". I realised very quickly that slips are a huge taboo to which people cling.  I had artists' slips, sportsmen's slips. In contrast, a person like Ver-wilghen, then Minister for Justice, always sent the same reply: "I don't wear a slip".

The Slip Museum taught me about the state of the world. The museum had a clear message. By repre­senting a real object, recognisable by all and known worldwide, I was questioning the major symbol of male hierarchy: the boss's penis. The slip was the barrier and an enormous unconscious force. Men in slips are all equal; take off the slip and the disparity disappears. As I had a big workshop at my disposal in a big house (that was when rents in Brussels were reasonable), I opened the Slip Museum there. When property prices collapsed, the owner sold the premises and homeless people moved in.

The Woman's Museum

I set up the Slip Museum as a joke and all the papers featured it. I could have done that forever. Entrance free, coffee and biscuits included. As I had this idea of representation in mind, I knew that what interested me above all else in the world was not art, philosophy or football, but women, and the women had to be preserved at all cost. Since they were disappearing by becoming like men. I wanted to show women à l'ancienne.The project was much crit­icised because the categories were clearly divided:"na-tive woman", "nymphet", "stupid woman", "virgin", "pregnant woman", "woman menstruating" and so on. All these women were wearing clothes, except one, the "naked woman". There was obviously room for me: "man with women". In all, thirteen women and one man!

I had one goal in mind, week in week out: find women willing to appear naked in the museum. The task of the museum's director was precisely that. It was nothing more than man's real objective: to look for his partner. Beyond that, there is no real project. All the rest are just peacock's feathers to seduce women, merely pomp and ceremony. I believed that the clear-sightedness needed had been lost and that perversion was merely diverting the very basis of the strategy for life: vanquish the other person, vanquish sex. Since then, women in Europe have taken their freedom and the museum's raison d'être no longer exists. They exhibit themselves day and night wherever they like. In other lands, everything has still to be done. The fight continues and is not yet won.

Films

One of my last comic strips, published in the maga­zine Dol, was called la Vie sexuelle avec mes femmes (Sex Life with My Women) and I thought it would be a good base for a film consisting of sketches that wouldn't have cost much.  I'd make it into la Vie sexuelle des Belges (The Sex Life of the Belgians). All my requests for funding were turned down —after all, I was Public Enemy Num­ber One. The film would have cost about 100 000 euros today. I met a slightly autistic fellow called Francis Desmet at Dolle Mol. He told me he had won some money on the stock exchange and had an account in a small bank. Lo and behold,he transferred 2 500 euros to my account. Finally, an agent got interested in the project and the film was shown worldwide. Result: the money started coming in again thanks to a rather lin­ear story but people liked it. I spoke about Harelbeke, writing in a classical narrative way. Success bothers me and I rebel. I discovered Lolo Fer­rari and the biggest boobs in the world. Instead of be­coming the Dardenne brothers all on my own, I designed a film like a Dadaist painting, a political film where I sneered at feelings and cast doubt on tradi­tional narrative. I made Camping Cosmos, a collage film on how do we change the world, by cultural animation or by being a terrorist? There is only death at the end of the day: the actor Claude Semal, dressed Tintin-style, animated the question that remained unsolved. The film was considered a big boob story; I had managed to cover up the essential. I received few public grants. The film was a disaster in Cannes.The conformists among the cinema critics were shocked; they only saw Lolo's boobs. Today, it's a cult film. So, we don't count for much, neither does the cinema.

For my third long feature film on the closure of the Renault plant (1997),I pulled no punches, adding some fiction with the kidnapping and murder of the CEO Schweitzer.The feature film was on the history of the political film and tried to show how and why the strikes only succeeded in reining in the working class. The films that followed backed up my divorce with the film making class. La Vie politique des 8e/ges followed the tart-flinging period (started by Noël Godin) and the "Vivant" party during the electoral campaign in 1997 and highlights the contradictions of the non-con­formist parties.As soon as you take part in elections, you want to connect with as many people as possible, with the result that radical talk freezes over and tries to become the one and only discourse. The revealing moment comes when the lists of party candidates are drawn up.

After that, I worked on the idea of distributing films on request via Internet; it's a way of image distribution that avoids all the heavy expenses of reproduction and circulation. But the idea was premature in 1997, with problems arising from the protection of bank cards and computer memory capacity at that time. The proj­ect folded up in 2000.
 

Then came la Vie sexuelle des Belges Part 4: la Jouissance des hystériques (1999).The trouble is you don't man­age to realise you own wishes; you always follow those of other people: requests from parents, the authori­ties, teachers, and your own partner. You must always try to pin down your goal. Lacan believes that if you follow your goal, you won't be afraid of dying since liv­ing is merely following your goal. I can demonstrate this belief through my desire to bring about a revolu­tion and my wish to understand other people's desires, for instance, those of the actors lined up for the shoots, whose desire is to act rather than start a revolution! The film won the Grand Prix of South Korea, where I am a god, not for my talent but because I look like Bud­dha. In the film the women seize power, which, even today, would be inconceivable in Korea. Then I made la Société du spectacle and comments based on De-bord's texts. The actors come on stage in scenes of everyday life: preparing meals, washing up, entertain-ing. The dialogue was not conventional but taken from la Société du spectacle.

Friday Fishday, a farce written in dialect, takes place in Harelbeke and Ostend.A bloke can only make love with a woman who smells of fish, so he opens a fish shop (2001 ). It's slapstick comedy about desire; the protagonist wants a mermaid and realises that, al­though she can tell dirty stories, she is lacking some­thing - she has no vagina. This film shows I was coming around to the idea there will be no paradise and that everything will always be run-of-the-mill. Lost illusions have started to sap me. The film is sort of Swedish cin­ema, series C, Wild Strawberries frozen, Bergman zoophiliac.

This time I filmed live sequences in Berlin, Mons, Paris, I was back to the idea of cinema and happening. When the audience wanted to see a scene again, I'd ask the projectionist to rewind the film; I was going back to the early days of the cinema as a phenomenon of pop­ular fairs.

Come 2006, I made les Vacances de Noël. Two oldies Jan Bucquoy and Noël Godin, go to Cannes to see if they can still chat up the birds. Two characters: One who refers to the reality principle (that's me) and the other, Noël Godin, a sort of Peter Pan, the radical optimist who chats up the birds all the time. An exercise in di­alectics between two old men. There is an air of nos­talgia about it all: time is passing by, we're wearing out, the party will soon be over.

In l'Art du couple (2008), I look from all angles at the couple and the relationships I'd had recently (about ten in two or three years). What kind of relationships can you have? Live together or separately — I've tried but it is too expensive, as my mother used to say. And the lesson of the film: love is something magical, even if it is condemned in the long term. The couple can only be that magic moment, in the same way as art. Those moments you remember: Manhattan, les Demoiselles d'Avignon,the Monty Python films, Coluche, Woodstock, Une saison en enfer. Magic moment where you are in anti-matter. If it is not that, there is worse than being alone: being two. The film belongs to the grail that is the daily search for happiness.

Jan Bucquoy - Art as if it was life / Life as if it was art

Since the end of the sixties, Jan Bucquoy has been in­volved in a type of art whose main feature, what springs to mind immediately, is the diversity of the media that he uses. He successively was or rather is performer, theatre director, plastic artist (collage, painting and cre­ator of installations), comic strip author and filmmaker, with an itinerary that is far from straightforward. It is more of a spiral shape as Lenin used to describe the dialectic, with endless repetition which is never used twice but rather new figures and new mixtures, remixes as it were. In addition, if you would examine one of these media separately, the first feature and only con­sistent factor would be constant change (revolution). This ranges, for example, from a rather traditional film (la Vie sexuelle des Belges),to a film designed like a Dadaist collage (Camping Cosmos), from a documentary in which the documentary itself is already subverted, to a film that plays with the confusion between fiction and reality (and which in essence is the subject for discus­sion), or even a film in West Flemish dialect, Friday Fish-day, without subtitles, in which the performance consists of the direct translation and even direct edit­ing, depending on the reaction of the cinema audience at that particular moment. A work whose main feature is not only diversity of the media or of the film genre but also, and even better, a mixture of both-the remix. There are always surprises. Jan Bucquoy never does what you would expect. One minute he is a performer and the next, a filmmaker. You expect one or the other but suddenly he mixes the two. Do not mistake this, however, with confusion or absent-mindedness. It should also not be confused with the desire to always be in the foreground or fashionable or even the in­tention to launch a new fashion, novelty for novelty's sake, in order to be the centre of attention. On the contrary, he wants to escape from all this, the performance society and the means used to fan his vanity. AII this wandering around and change of course by Jan Bucquoy is, if closely examined, an arsenal of tac­tical movements or, even, strategic movements which he has put in place since the end of the sixties. This is a continuation of the same struggle under the guise of diversity. What appears to be chaos is actually well thought out, voluntary chaos, in the sense of a resolute protest against the established order.lt is the start, the blueprint for a revolution.
 

While speaking about the performance society, I mean one as described by Guy Debord who has theorised and agitated against it. In the meaning of the materi­alised and incarnate ideology, this pseudo life which has replaced real life, this mask which has been placed over reality, and which is our first contact in the everyday world which even penetrates our private life. A life con­sisting entirely of work and alienated desires due to the demands of the consumer society, a life where even leisure is organised and has become a sort of obliga­tion.

Jan Bucquoy's work is an attempt to create a hole in this uninterrupted spectacle.To live the 'real' life which, basically, needs to be invented.

It is for this reason that Bucquoy has chosen and holds on to his position of agitator as revolt has to break out in a complacent, predictable and arranged world. To act as agitator, scandal has to be created and crisis must have the upper hand, in the etymological sense of these two terms.

Often, people have dismissed the work of Jan Bucquoy as that of a buffoon and troublemaker. No artistic con­tent whatsoever.This is done while he himself has al­ways repudiated the label of artist. There are those who insist that in exchange for recognition, he should penetrate the miniscule world of modern art and sub­mit to the rules which it uses to justify its existence. He is hardly attracted to this world and cares even less about its recognition of him. What interests him is not the world of art but the world itself. It is perhaps this point of view that places him on the margins, which al­lows the artistic nature of his work to shine through. Isn't real art a reflection about what art is, an explo­ration to its very depths?

A means to create a scandal, to cause a crisis, a means of resistance to the performance society, in any case, art as practised and understood by Jan Bucquoy, links up with the situationist project which came to light in the second half of the 20th century, from a clearly de­clared affiliation with art in the first half of the century, i.e. the avant-garde movement. This affiliation may well be sufficient as proof for his real artistry. It was the same as the great avant-garde streams to which he claimed to belong and which inspired him (situationism, surrealism, dadaism). Jan Bucquoy shakes up the neatly demarcated categories of art. Just like the great avant-garde streams, he sows confusion and questions the relationship between art and politics, be­tween art and life.
 

The whole project of the avant-garde and that of Jan Bucquoy may be summed up with a parody or a rein-terpretation of the famous formula of Marx, the I I th premise of Feuerbach ( 1845): artists have only repre­sented and commented on the world, now they must transform it.

Jan Bucquoy is an avant-garde artist after the death of the avant-garde. He is an artist of the counter-culture in the sense that it is the offspring of the avant-garde artists in the second half of the 20th century after the counter-culture recuperated. He is actually an heroic figure due to his being able to straddle time and real­ity. And who says that this death was not necessary and that there were in fact no fatalities? Are we dealing here with a rare dinosaur? I don't think so as Jan Bucquoy does not limit himself to recreating, copying or imitating his great predecessors, these su­perb models which often end up as caricatures or which are recuperated the moment they are used as examples. Rather this is more a continuation, as em­phasised above, or a recreation or even reinvention which take account of the errors of the past and the changed context. The struggle undertaken in Belgium, far from being anecdotal, gains from serving as an ex­ample and as an expression of universality.

François Coadou

 
Occupations

2005, my first coup d'État. Since then, it takes place on 21 May every year for the simple reason that the weather is usually good, no rain! I used the terror theme, removing the anguish linked to terror while proposing counter-terror: The State is the Terror. I re­claimed the terror theme by showing that it was some­where else.
 

Remember that for the last twenty years, I have been announcing the occupation of the Royal Palace because what I'd like to do is carry out a coup d'état, change the world, develop my theory on choosing leaders by drawing lots, ensure that rents never exceed a fifth of one's earnings, renationalise energy. From then on­wards, I have launched the (annual) coup d'état against the Royal Palace.

The idea of occupation became a theme. I had to leave Talk behind and occupy my life,a principle that stopped me from entering the system and becoming subject to its masters. Occupation, prison, trial. The threats of 1980s and 1990s are back again. In 2006 I occupied the Dolle Mol. I snatched it from the centre-city investors to make it into a libertarian café. Expulsion, court case, jail in solitary, but in the end the owner gave up. I made the place into reconquered territory with free televi­sion, Dutch language classes, courses in Marxism, meetings of subversive groups including former CCC members (after their meeting in June 2008, they found themselves back in prison). Not only was history re­peating itself but the forces of repression were back. I too was back, attacking the foundations of power, in­cluding tose of the Royal Family, power that is never queried, that doesn't question itself. Art and happenings serve to change the world, not to become a discourse of domination, even if I don't un­derestimate the force of a work of art when it comes to opening up people's minds, inciting them to become independent, to think for themselves. It seems to me you need to give people that extra nudge to make them enter real life.

The obsessed hatchet murderer of the State

An apt description of a blockhead is the person who, with regard to the existential and artistic route taken by Jan Bucquoy, forgets to determine what the new tradition in subversive and burlesque global folklore is likely to be, the annual coup d'etat against the Brus­sels-based Palace of the Belgian Royal Family, fixed for ever on 21 May at 2 pm, except in the case of adverse weather conditions, in which case the opportunity to turn over the system is postponed until the next sunny day so that the new capitalist phobic libertarian era can start in complete joyfulness. 

Dyed-in-the-wool anti-royalist and inveterate fighter for justicejan Bucquoy had already come to public no­tice in 1992 with an attempt, which was unfortunately prevented, to decapitate the bust of King Baudouin, which he regarded as an anti-abortionist and the great friend of that sadistic dictator, Mobutu. Guillotine, oh guillotine, where are the guillotines of the past? How­ever, whoever thinks that the most refreshing Belgian filmmaker since Marcel Marien will give up after a mishap or two would be sorely mistaken. 

The first coup d'etat,announced via all possible media and with the fraternal support of the hilarious tart-thrower Noël Godin, unleashed his jolly and anarchis­tic fanfare in the spring of 2005. Of the four attempts up until now, it was undoubtedly the most popular and the most publicised⁽¹¹⁾, even if it was the most concise, because our troublemaker just managed, after a heroic Polish cavalry charge, to gain a foot in the notorious neutral zone⁽¹²⁾ around the Palace of our dishonourable majestic corpses.Jan passed the rest of the day in prison and the police even removed the right of us, his sup­porters, oh terrifying state terrorism, to provide him with invigorating glasses of beer in his prison cell.The night became even more lively when we celebrated his release. Second attempt. With even more determina­tion, ourfavourite revolutionary managed to penetrate 100 metres in the neutral zone before he was brutally thrown to the ground by uniformed bulldogs and under strict guard, was led away to his now familiar dungeon. Third attempt.To his great surprise, accompanied by two supporters, including yours truly, the protest went ahead without the sinister presence of the police, so that the trio managed to cross the gardens of the Palace and raise the flag of the "Banana party⁽¹³⁾, right under the nose of the guards of the temple of the Monarch. The afternoon ended in provisional custody by the commissariat of the Palace. When the authorities un­believingly refused to serve us with a trappist beer,this gave rise to a great deal of laughter. Fourth attempt. Accompanied this time by a renowned sociologist and as always the trustyArne Baillière,also an angry rebel, Jan and Arne raised the communist and anarchist flag in the main flowerbed of the Royal yet incredibly ugly palace. Hidden from view, the handcuff carriers sud­denly appeared from nowhere like a premature ejac­ulation, and once again placed the conspirators behind bars. Released a short time after and quietly seated with a glass of his favourite brew in the Dolle Mol, Jan was inexplicably rearrested a few hours later, which only goes to show how much the dangerous state po­lice feared that this charismatic agitator would cause an insurrection which would spread like an oil slick. They had good reason to fear such an event.The think­ing behind the coup d'etat was to anger the support­ers of paternalism as much as possible.True to his love of revolutionary surrealism, revolted by the growing cancer of social inequality, Jan Bucquoy wants the re­distribution of houses, jobs and wealth, based on a con­tinuous lottery, which treats everyone as equal, because the only justice comes from fate which treats everyone on an equal footing, while the fact that some­one was born into the upper classes, into money and the screwed up privileged classes ensuring comfort and success despite,or due to, one's inherited uselessness. With Jan's stochastic nature, on the contrary, draw a number and you stand a chance to sit in a sedan, with a stiff-necked driver. Draw another number and next year you can pedal ecologically along the public high­way. This is an enormous wild whirlwind of possibili­ties, the certainty that you can live 20 lives in one,after you have lived in turn in a villa with a swimming pool and then in a miner's cottage with a chicken coop. In this way, anyone can become a senator and every sen­ator can get the chance to become a bricklayer. In this respect, Jan does not hide his disdain for the blatant incompetence of our politicians. 'Nearly all ministers are unsuccessful lawyers' who understand nothing about the terrible problems of ordinary people and even less about the joys of real life that, in his view, can only be based on permanent euphoria, a refusal to take on a paid job and the right to laziness as propagated by Paul Lafargue.The other points on the Bucquoy agenda, apart from free transport and energy, is the abolition of private property and bureaucracy, and cre­ating societies like that of the bonobos, i.e. nude, non-violent and constantly copulating. Another praise­worthy point is his plea to do away with all cages with a poisonous potential such as schools, the army, mar­riage, the church and other zoos.As for his idea of con­verting the ground floor of the royal palace into a bistro and the other floors into social housing, these should be praised, even though the sudden transformation of this coffin fitted with slimy windows would no doubt have a temporarily destabilising effect. 

Before concluding, let us repeat the words, even more erotic than those of the Belgian national anthem, of the hymn of the dissident hedonist: "Amusons-nous, faisons les fous, la vie est si courte après tout !" (Let's enjoy life, play the fool, after all, life is short!). In short, if instead of passively wearing T-shirts with the image of Che Guevara on them, the discontented masses would ac­tively join Jan Bucquoy on 21 May 2009, we would fi­nally be able to attack the machine that turns men into machines and create a world as beautiful as the vagina of a randy woman, in the name of all exploding tarts! If you are unhappy, stop moaning and let the revolu­tion begin, damn you all!

Théophile de Giraud

  
Art, explanation of a principle

The concept is Belgium, something we already know; I took the usual elements of Belgian culture, following Marcel Marien, and to a lesser extent Broodthaers⁽¹⁴⁾, adding a subversive, political note, of which there was no trace in the latter, and just a little in the former. Brutal subversion. That would be my contri­bution. Concentrate on direct action rather than aes­thetics. I reclaimed everything. As soon as it's signed Bucquoy, it's Belgian.

There is art as soon as we have an everyday object that is recognisable in a culture, by a group.An object taken out of context, so that it appreciates in knowledge value of all kinds, silences the routine of one-track thought, in a word it puts our conditioned reflexes out of action.

Demonstration: I take an everyday object, for exam­ple, a tea towel. The matter is cloth, it is representa­tive, graphically it is fine,attractive, aesthetic. I associate it with chips because it is used in chip shops. As for chips, they are recognisable by a group, by a culture, by Belgium. The name "oil on cloth" refers to what clas­sical painting stands for: Manet, Monet, Matisse for the impressionists, Garouste.Yan Pei Ming, for contempo­rary art. I am updating my statement of what painting really is, first and foremost "oil on cloth". It's a way of reducing painting to ashes. By naming, you hijack.Yet, at the same time: I open up the perspective of being surrounded by objets d'art in the kitchen. It's true for chips, for s//ps (but here we reach beyond Belgium and go global). It's the same process for the Woman's Museum (the real woman), passing there from the object to the subject, showing off what is im­portant, not art in itself, but art for oneself. There remains the picture picked up for nothing, by chance. A real bargain, left as it is. You cross out the artist's name and sign your own,give it another hanging space, which immediately changes the reaction of the spectator who rediscovers the van­ity of things, his own vanity. This series could be called Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.

Into nothingness

At a deeper level, there is the search for nothingness in art. When I paint a territory, the painting looks like a big bang. Call it the encounter of the ovule and the sperm. It reminds me of satellite images. The search for the abyss in art. Like many artists, I tried white mono­chromes, some people made a fortune from them. We come from nothing, we return to nothing, that's one of art's messages, a message that should allow us to act with greater freedom in our daily lives., but we still have to be able to laugh.

After the white monochromes, I was obliged to have no image at all, merely hang a picture-frame on an empty wall.To get across the message, I needed to sign in a vacuum since the wall didn't belong to me. And since the final object is an empty space with a signa­ture on a wall, it also evades sale and trade. Conclu­sion: I had invented a totally useless object.

 

 

Back to the procedure

The procedure is the same as for the happenings. For the beheading of the King of the Belgians, I took a bust of the king (popular object). I placed it in the context of the French Revolution by holding the beheading in the Grand-Place, Brussels, turning the scenario into pure theatre given that the cops, the court case offi­cials, the judges, the lawyers were the walk-ons at the royal beheading.

Same thing for the coups d'état: they are announced, the police are there to prevent them. During the early years,the attack was reduced to hoisting a flag as close as possible to the Royal Palace. Since then, the 21 May is awaited as the official day when Jan Bucquoy attacks the Royal Palace, with a flag and tries to occupy it. When I founded a political party called 'Banane' and really took part in the elections with posters, and can­didates, I was competing with the establishment in a direct, visual way. Political posters are an art form when they take part in elections.This is not so for political posters when they are not taking part directly in the polls. The language of election posters is quite differ­ent from that of political party programmes. Since it is pointless to vote because voting doesn't achieve any fundamental change, I suggest a coup d'é­tat with a programme completely different from that of revolutionaries, elections by drawing lots as in a lot­tery, a matter of redistribution.Yes,politics can become an art in itself. I have proved it.

Anarchy

By its essence, I consider anarchy the fairest way of living together, but there are conditions; education must assume its mission fully so that everyone is a re­sponsible and free being. Anarchy isn't a shambles as claimed by the powers-that-be in order to manipulate public opinion; rather it is the highest form of com­munal living. It is a Utopia because people are not given the right tools. Anarchy is the self-management of the means of production, the optimisation of nature. An­archy has its success stories: communitarian practices where tasks are distributed and every individual as­sumes his share. Politically speaking, when anarchy shared power as in Spain, it worked because it was ac­companied by very advanced political education, but it was completely destroyed by Franco and the Com­munist Party. The lottery is the end-goal of the anarchist idea, of art too.

Anarchy and Art

The function of art is to lift the lid, to let us breathe; it broadens the playing field. Reacting to society through art opens horizons.A few years ago,the small­est satyric sketch of King Baudouin was seized. Now you can laugh at Prince Philippe, the heir to the throne. People are querying the royal endowment. My work has borne fruit. Art has a social function, that of con­tinually questioning the captains by raising fundamen­tal issues: How can we live better? Where can we find happiness? Have we still got the right to think? Are we still going to enjoy ourselves?

Voyage au centre du cerveau d'un belgitateur - Théophile de Giraud (not translated)

The phenomenon that is Jan Bucquoy

Jan Bucquoy appears on Belgian television a few times a year, on both sides of the language border. Publica­tions such as De Morgen, le Soir, Libération and Humo al­ways know where he can be found for a not too serious discussion about the future of civilisation, state reform, the economic crisis or the royal family, even though they know that he is no moral philosopher or politi­cal scientist, nor a stock exchange analyst or someone close to Princess Mathilde. Nevertheless, Bucquoy al­ways gives value for money. He is always ready to sup­ply a witty commentary and his famous capriciousness nearly always provides entertaining television. Due to his crazy and reckless reputation,only reputed and ex­perienced media types dare to invite him. He will never appear in brainless programmes and not because he would be too difficult, theoretical or in­tellectual for the average viewer but, on the contrary, because he is much too obvious. The Belgian media world will never forget how in a live programme on the Flemish channel in Felice Damiano's popular pro­gramme "Incredibile", he took two figs out of his trouser pocket and quickly shaped them into a like­ness of Queen Fabiola's genitals. Bucquoy is in­domitable. You have to be an experienced TV programme maker if you want to keep him under control and stop him from dragging you through the stu­dio in a wild dance.
 

His appearances in the media awaken the curiosity with regard to his personality. From what type of heaven did Jan Bucquoy descend on earth, which hole in the earth did he crawl out of? How can we understand his very existence?

In his strip cartoons with illustrators Vidon and Hernu, he appears as a dejected idiot, desperately seeking love and sex, and constantly disappointed by the world's materialism and loveless indifference, so that he finally can see no other means of escape than to rely on him­self and his poor living conditions, hoping for a better dawn.

Much of Bucquoy's ideas and background is also echoed in his films, even though the emphasis is somewhat dif­ferent. He usually appears to be somewhat happier, more motivated, more enterprising and more rebel­lious, as if making a film in itself inspires him to take a more positive view of life.

As a filmmaker, he is constantly undervalued, which no doubt is linked to his many unsubtle attacks on the Belgian royal family and the political and economic es­tablishment. At the end of 1989, he declared in the Nova news magazine of the Dutch broadcaster NOS that he wanted to shake hands with King Boudewijn with a hand grenade hidden in his palm so that they would be blown up together. A suicidal and symbolic parricide which would challenge even the likes of Freud. Three years later, the infamous decapitation of a plaster bust of the current King took place. Despite these provocative challenges, Jan Bucquoy was given a subsidy of € 162,500 by the Flemish film com­mission to make the film Camping Cosmos. However, Minister of Media Eric Van Rompuy intervened and pre­vented payment, which was seen as trampling on all the rules of correct management. Protests on the floor of the Flemish parliament led nowhere. For Van Rompuy, the film was "shameful" and he insisted on using his veto. However, this did not stop Bucquoy from finishing the film and putting it on general release.

The films that followed, despite their obvious low budget character, are worth a second look. Filmed on a shoestring, we see friends and acquaintances of Bucquoy unconcernedly playing out their own lives and in such a natural way that they seem to be more con­vincing than professional actors. Dialogues and acting are strikingly realistic and spontaneous without the "learnt it by heart" school of acting typical of so many Belgian films (at least this is the case with Flemish films). Bucquoy was never a student of Roland Verhavert, Fons Rademakers or Robbe De Hert but more like the French cinema vérité of figures such as William Klein, Jean Eustache and especially Jean-Luc Godard. Even more than Godard, Bucquoy is a filmmaker with a mes­sage who promulgates his articles of faith with Mes­sianic rigour based on an almost non-existent script.

Apart from his films, these articles of faith can be found in his literary texts and his most recent publication La vie est belge (2007) where these ideas are explored fur­ther. The first and most important point is that there has to be, and as soon as possible, a revolution which will immediately implement Bucquoy's whole pro­gramme.

This revolution, which absolutely has to begin on 21 May, does not have to be a worldwide revolution, but can be limited to Belgium. That country finds itself in a permanently unfinished and chaotic state and has many inhabitants with anarchistic tendencies. These circumstances make the country extremely suited to function as an experimental psychological and socio­political laboratory.

As soon as on that particular day, the next 21 May, the Royal Palace has been taken over by the people and the government has fallen, the church and the army, private possessions and elections, marriage and inher­itance rights will all be abolished.A gigantic lottery will then take place which will take over all the basic ele­ments of life and regulate it.This lottery will be per­manent and will distribute houses, cars and all other goods among the people. What is striking is that this distribution will not be done according to need but com­pletely at random, as fate dictates.

The total disorder that would be the result of this is seen as an advantage rather than as a catastrophe, as it would provide an opening to new, improvised and therefore more authentic styles of life. Poor people would end up living in villas and rich people would have to make do with council housing. The lottocracy would even determine professional life as long as these weren't too specialised professions. Accordingto Buc­quoy's vision, most jobs are nothing more than acci­dental sham jobs which could be done by anyone. The lottocracy is not an original thought put forward by Bucquoy alone.The concept had already appeared at the time of Aristotle and is therefore nearly as old as democracy itself. However, this concept has never been applied at government level and therefore remains a rather Utopian political ideal. The new world created by Jan Bucquoy is also an erotic paradise where every­one belongs to everyone else in a world of unlimited free love. For those who do not agree with this vision, there is always a free B pill which first will make you euphoric, then sleepy and will finally kill you painlessly.

Another way of looking at the life and thoughts of Jan Bucquoy can be found in his artistry which, without any exaggeration, can be qualified as unique. There is no other artist inside or outside Belgium who is even a bit like him.Yet he has not come up with a unique way of expressing himself- he just paints pictures like everyone else.And yet with the one striking exception that he practices his art not out of love but out of dis­dain. In La vie est belge we can read on page 21 :"Art is a load of bullshit, the lazy swine who call themselves artists are trying to avoid working everyday of their lives. This is their only quality. For me, art can only serve to erase the empty moments of life, to turn the world upside down." In a conversation with the Flemish weekly Humo he declared in August 1994:"l don't know what art is. I don't think that I am occupied with art. I am occupied with life. Life is more important than art. As I just said: if life would create more happiness, then art would no longer exist. Do you know what art is? King Boudewijn decapitated on the Grand-Place by a simple working class lad from Harelbeke. That is inno­vative. That is pioneering. [...] King Boudewijn was a myth. When I hacked off his head, I wanted to make clear that you have to call power into question at all times. But no one understood the irony in all this. Everyone thought that I had decapitated the actual king."

The work of art itself has no importance for Bucquoy and this also applies to the values linked to it, such as technical mastery and superior aesthetics, philosophical or contemplative depth, financial power and social prestige. Instead of respect and adoration, these con­cepts only awaken disdain in him. His deep disdain is aimed at the whole art world, museum directors, cu­rators, art collectors, art critics and the artists them­selves. Every work that Bucquoy creates is a statement in which he declares this elementary message and which should not be misunderstood, i.e. that he is dis­gusted with anything that is called art and that it can be qualified under one denominator - that of vanity, flashiness and snobbism.

Every canvas created by Bucquoy is the work of an en­ragé, and is realised in this way, as an attack of rage. At the end of the nineties, he moved into an appropriate old cinema in Harelbeke and called it "Bucquoy's Palace". There was plenty of work space in this build­ing. He took a roll of canvas 15 metres long into his house, rolled it out on the floor and went to work with a mop and three large pots of paint, light blue for the sky, dark blue for the sea and ochre for the sand. After having covered the whole roll with these layers of paint, he cut it into eight large rectangles and hung them up. Never in the whole history of art had seascapes been brought about quicker. The loosely joined canvasses represented the Belgian coast and were given the names of the coastal municipalities, from De Panne to Knokke.

And as Bucquoy envisaged these seascapes, he did the same with his royal portraits, his obscene interpreta­tions of Tin Tin and his series Olie op doek I Huile sur toile I Oil on Canvas which he made for an exhibition in the Antwerp Chip Stand museum consisting of framed tea towels impregnated with chip oil stains. Perhaps the ultimate truth about Bucquoy can be found in the many candid police reports and statements he has made before the courts. Policemen and judges seem to regard him as rather innocent, as if it were only a matter of chance that he happened to end up in their claws and actually didn't belong there. Jan Buc­quoy knows how to adjust his image rather quickly"! threw a custard pie at the Minister of Culture. So what?" In La vie est belge, he gives an amusing glimpse of his shameless attempt, true to his credo "You don't stand a chance, so grab it anyway" of trying to seduce a female judge. Unfortunately, police files and court re­ports are not available for this type of research.

The relative tolerance of the Belgian authorities vis-à-vis Bucquoy undoubtedly comes from the rather favourable opinion that the public has of him. On the nomination list for the Greatest Belgian he came 492nd.SoJan Bucquoy still does reasonably well in Bel­gium. He is not presented as a rarity, a media clown of whom everyone has a set opinion, but as an individual who is invited on television to speak about an intimate thing such as the suicide of his daughter.

In the Netherlands, he would have been written off long ago as a relic from the Provo era without any newsworthiness. In France, he would have been read­ily pigeon-holed in some political subgroup or other and labelled as such, inescapably and forever. In Ger­many, he would have been languishing in Spandau prison for years, in the lonely cell of Rudolf Hess. In England, he would have been giving a speech every week from a soap box at Hyde Park corner, even though two subjects close to his heart are taboo there - the royal family and overthrowing the state system.

Even so, our neighbours are crazy about the Belgian Jan Bucquoy, so long as he remains in Belgium. He is regularly presented as the perfect example of true Bel-gitude, the ideal study object for those who wish to study Belgitude from close by.And this is not entirely unjustified —in his personage, all Belgian contradictions and paradoxes find their apotheosis as well as their reconciliation. Even though he has been announcing the same messages for decennia, he still manages to find a willing audience in the most important media in the country. Conclusion: Belgium loves Bucquoy. It couldn't do without him. One day, he will put on an ex­hibition together with Delphine Boël.Then he will be given a knighthood in the Order of Leopold. The next day they will invite him to attend the funeral of Queen Fabiola. And finally he'll become an advisor to King Philippe I. And this would not surprise a single Belgian.

Paul Ilegems
januar 2009

Prospects?

I am convinced my work here has been a success. I am no longer needed in Belgium. Make way for youth. Now the rest of the world is waiting, there is work elsewhere and everything remains to be done. Instead of giving up when everything seems impossible, we must attack before dawn, even if, like me, we are not all early risers. That's the artist's position.

(1) Belgians often refer to their country as the Kingdom.
(2) Does he need to be presented? Noël Godin (born September 13, 1945), as everyone knows, is a Belgian writer, critic, actor and notorious cream pie flinger or 'entarteur'.
(3) The Marcinelle school refers to a group of Belgian cartoonists formed by Joseph Gillain (Jijé) following World War II. The Marcinelle school cartoonists were all associated with the weekly magazine, Spirou, whose offices in the 1940s were located in the town of Marcinelle, near Charleroi in Belgium.
(4) COBRA was a European avant-garde artistic movement active from 1949 to 1952.
(5) Rudi Dutschke was a Protestant dissident who refused military service in East Germany and moved to West Berlin in 1961, just before the wall went up.
(6)Olivier Besancenot (born on 18 April 1974) is a French far-left-wing political figure and was a candidate for the 2007 French pres­idential election.
(7) Guy Ernest Debord (December 28, 193 I - November 30, 1994) was a Marxist theorist, French writer, filmmaker,hypergraphistand founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist international (SI).
(8) Marcel Marien (April 29, l920,Antwerp - September 19, 1993, Brussels) was a Belgian surrealist, (later Situationist), poet, essayist, photographer, filmmaker.
(9) Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (September 4, 1894, in Marseille - March 4, 1948 in Paris) was a French playwright, poet, actor and director.
(10) Slip in French designates men's briefs or underpants,and women's pants or panties.
(11) A glowing report on this historic day can be found on the DVD, made by a Luxembourg television channel, entitled la Jouissance des hystériques.
(12) Not as neutral as it seems as it is prohibited to the healing blessings of insubordination.
(13) Acronym for: Rien Allumés, Nous Allons Nous Evader ! (All excited, we will escape!).
(14) Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976), Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist.

Discographie

1992. Love me too, Bucquoy and the rainy days (J. Bucquoy et L Bortolami), Sing Mary publishing.
2005. Hymne national belge, CD, 2005 Sudden fever.

Expositions

1969. Année erotique, exposition collective, Gand, Blandeinberg.

1970. Collages, Centre dramatique de l'Est, Strasbourg.

1978. Collages, Grüssen aux Belgiën, De Welkom, Harelbeke.

1988.  50 portraits de la famille royale, Dolle Mol, Bruxelles.

1989.  Kings, Queens andTintin, St Paulusplein, Oostende.

1990-1995. Le Musée du slip, Bruxelles /// Le Musée de la Femme, Bruxelles.
1991.  Kings, Queensjintin, Underwear,Women and the Belgian Cost, Cirque Divers, Liège.
1992.  Facsimiles des œuvres saisies par le Parquet de Liège, galerie Simbaddad, Bruxelles /// Photos des
œuvres saisies, Centre Guernica, Bruxelles /// Les Belges arrivent, Cavaillon, France.
1994. Belge, Cercle estudiantin du Centre, Louvain-la-Neuve.
1996. Naaktfoto's, Keldertheater.Antwerpen.
1998.  Retrospectives, Centre culturel de Hasselt, Hasselt.

1999.  Back in Town, Centre culturel De Geus, Harelbeke.
2000-2002. Buocquoy's Palace, Harelbeke.
2002.  La Vie sexuelle de Tintin, galerie Amfora, Bruxelles.
2003.  La vie est belge, Centre culturel des Riches Claires, Bruxelles /// La vie est belge, Centre culturel
Noroit.Arras, France.
2004.  Olie op doek, Frit'Kot Museum, « Chez Max », Anvers.
2005.  Subversion, Maison du peuple, Carnières.
2006.  La Côte beige, galerie Bortier, Bruxelles /// La Vie sexuelle de Tintin, galerie Bortier, Bruxelles /// La
vie est belge, Ateliers Mommen, Bruxelles /// Berlinale Off, Retrospective, Hendrickx Bar, Berlin.
2007.  Paysages belges, galerie Mayer, Bruxelles /// Rebel Whit a Cause, Dolle Mol, Bruxelles /// La vie est
belge, Le Groland, Quent, France /// Huile sur toile, galerie Amfora, Bruxelles /// Le Musée de la frite,
Beauvais /// Père et Fille, avec Marie Buquoy, Bruxelles.
2008-2009. Collages. Mana art, Bruxelles.
2008-2009. Art rebelle (exposition collective : Stas, Mariën, Boël, Charlier, Kamagurka...), Aeroplastics,
2009. Bucquoy Illustrated, 100Titres, Bruxelles.

Filmographie

1965. Vert, 35 mm, 5 min.
1969. La Côte belge, 4 min, 16 mm.
1976. Déterrement du cadavre du général de Gaulle à Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, 50 min, 16 mm.
1980. Réponse à une petite annonce, 5 min, 16 mm.
1981. Mort d'un poulet, 10 min, 16 mm.
1989. Jan Bucquoy and the Rainy Days, 50 min, 16 mm (Vidéo-clip).
1993. LaVie sexuelle des Belges I950-I978.8S min, 35 mm,Transatlantic Films (jusqu'au bout).
1995.  Camping Cosmos (La Vie sexuelle des Belges II), 90 min, 35 mm.
1996.  Crème et Châtiment (l'entartement de Daniel Toscan du Plantier au 49° Festival de Cannes), 70 min, digital.
2003. Sunday, Chicken day, 7 min, digital.
2005.  Coup d'État 05,30 min, /// Les Vacances de Noël, 80 min, digital.
2006.  Coup d'État 06, 30 min, digital /// Coup d'État 07,20 min, digital.
2008.  Coup d'État 08, 15 min, digital.
2009.  L'Art du couple, Part I, 95 min, digital /// L'Art du couple, Part II, 360 min, digital.

Happenings

1965. Jetez votre télé dans la rue, Harelbeke.

1966. Remplacement des drapeaux belges par des drapeaux d'Union soviétique, Harelbeke.

1967. Flower Power, etc. (distribution de fleurs à la population), Harelbeke, Zwevegem.

  With the support of the Flemish authorities  

                 Remerciements à la RTBF, la Deux, magazine Hep Taxi !              

Editeurs / Editors / Editors 100Titres/Yellow Now
Conception et coordination / Conceptie en coördinatie / Design & coordination Alain deWasseige
Documentaliste / Documentalist / Documentalist Sophia Wanet
Textes/ Texten /Texts Jan Bucquoy en collaboration avec Alain deWasseige ; François Coadou, philosophe ; Théophile de Giraud, écrivain et performeur ; Paul Ilegems, auteur ; Corinne Maier, écrivain
Traduction /Vertaling /Translation Ann Englander, Danny Frijlink, Kris Lambert, Bridget O'Meara
Photogravure / Fotogravure / Photoengraving Guillaume Dendeau.Anaël Desablin
Photographie / Fotografie / Photography Philippe Gielen : p. 47 (bas), 60, Richard Olivier : p. 124, Nathalie Sartiaux: p. 92,93, Luc Schrobiltgen : reproductions des oeuvres, Carinne Timmermans :46,47 (haut), 99
Lay-out Guillaume Dendeau
Mise en pages / Opmaak / Page lay-out Guy Jungblut
Impression / Drukken / Printing Atelier Raymond Vervinckt et fils, Liège

II n'a pas toujours été possible de retrouver les références précises de certains articles de presse repris dans ce livre. Nous prions les auteurs et le lecteur de bien vouloir nous en excuser.

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D/2009/2310/4 Yellow Now
ISBN 978-2-87340-241-9 Yellow Now