Beeke thus aims for direct participation of attendees in the form of critique, which
is of course directly linked with Forum's unique notion of discussion and confron
tation, even between professional artists and amateurs.
Experimentation
'Experimentation' most notably returns in Forum en Scène in 1984. In that year
Maria-Rosa Boezem already stated in the manifestation's program booklets that
the display of art in the appropriate spaces, such as museums and galleries, was
broken with in several ways. Instead of exhibiting the works of art in conventional
exhibition spaces, more idiosyncratic places, like the city's Abbey or the Lange
Jan, the church-tower of the Abbey, were chosen as exhibition sites. In addition,
the invited artists of that year were all asked to fabricate their own video work
which would serve as an autonomous artwork, but which also came about from
cooperation with other artists and participants.36 This assignment, imposed on
the artists by the organisation, again shows that Forum was a place where pro
fessional artists could experiment with forms of art with which they had (almost)
never worked before.
Middelburg as central theme
Another idiosyncratic character of Forum is the involvement of the city. In com
parison with De Appel, where the city of Amsterdam only played a minor role
for the substantive presentations and manifestations, in Middelburg, the city
served as a prominent stage for the workshops and lectures. Noteworthy exam
ples are Roots by Lothar Baumgarten (1984) or Pensando Brancusi by Gilber-
to Zorio (1983). Roots consisted of twelve flags that were placed on the twelve
towers of the Abbey in Middelburg. The flags represented the national flags
of twelve countries from Africa and South America. They served as a symbol
for six African states, in which the people were enslaved and six in the New
World in which they bled for Europe. They symbolized the traffic between the
continents in relation to the triangle of the Middelburg Commerce Company
(MCC); a dark chapter in the history of Middelburg. Baumgarten's work di
rectly involves the history of the city as an important part of his work. In the
evaluation booklet we read that Baumgarten is more interested in placing his
work in a public context and investigating its usability outside the gallery. He is
Eva Langerak
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36 Maria-Rosa Boezem, foreword in program booklet of Forum en Scène 1984.
