3Radicals

Paul Sharits (1943 -1993) made films about film: his themes are the image frame, the emulsion, the perforation, and the filmstrip. Epileptics should avoid his oeuvre, because Sharits enjoys bombarding the viewer’s nervous system with a barrage of images. He began in the mid sixties as a Fluxus artist and died in 1993, and yet he can still serve as a model for an entire generation of digital radicals, who combine mathematical precision with an aggressive directness. Sharits’ aim was to make radicalising art, whether in the form of films, installations, objects or drawings.

The multifaceted work of Cameron Jamie (1969) consists of drawings, sculptures, videos, and even a self-created urban legend regarding his own person. Cultural excesses that occur on the edge of society are an unmistakable source of inspiration, such as eating marathons, extremist hero-worship and Halloween parades. This led, among other things, to the highly diverse film trilogy ‘Kranky Klaus’, ‘Spook House’ and ‘BB’. The soundtracks of these films were performed live during the exhibition. The themes in Jamie’s work are wide-ranging, but societal aggression, folkloric traditions and social conventions are a leitmotiv in his projects.

Although he began as a painter in the Mondriaan tradition, Robert Breer (1926-2011) steadily worked for year on extending his oeuvre, which alternates between hyper-kinetic short films and sculptures that move at a snail’s pace. From abstract experimental short films, to animations for children’s television or a music video for New Order (Blue Monday, 1988) – Breer made no distinction between the serious and playful, the monumental and miniscule. The latest phase in his oeuvre is the panoramas: meters-long viewing cabinets. Breer showed a large number of kinetic sculptures and related works in TENT.

As an introduction to 3Radicals, the visitor came face to face with a waxwork figure of Joseph Plateau (1801-1883). The scientist Plateau can be regarded as a distant precursor of the animated film, Op Art and especially of experimentation as a way of life. In 1829 he stared directly into the sun, radically and consistently, for minutes at a time. This experiment resulted in Plateau, compristing a series of colour discs. With the discs, he created moving figures and drawings.

Free Radicals film programme
Parallel to the exhibition, the film oeuvres of Cameron Jamie and Robert Breer were screened at the film festival. Filmmaker Yann Beauvais compiled a film programme around the work of Paul Sharits. Five related ‘3Free Radical’ film compilations were also screened, with work by Tony Conrad, Guy Debord, Herman Asselberghs and Luke Fowler among others.