The Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and ´Now-ties´
Concluding Ian Wallace’s exhibition A Literature of Images, Witte de With will host five presentations under the title The Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and ´Now-ties’.
Daily at 5 p.m.
4 Feb: Maarten van Rossem, Historian
5 Feb: Lex Heerma van Voss, Deputy director and researcher at the International Institute of Social History
6 Feb: Maaike Meijer, Professor at the University of Maastricht
7 Feb: Markus Müller, Writer and freelance curator
8 Feb: Ian Wallace, Artist
The program is a co-production with Studium Generale of the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Language: Dutch/English. No reservations necessary.
The talks are included in the cost of entry to the exhibition.
The Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and ‘Nowties’ will be documented in a magazine produced by ten young people from the Erasmus University and the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. The students will take Wallace’s work as point of departure for their personal reflections and creative processes. The magazine will include images and texts, and will be produced for a general public.
The production proces will be led by Renske Janssen and Belinda Hak, including collaborations with Niels van Poecke and Willem Scholten, programmers at Studium Generale of the Erasmus University and Vanessa Ohlraun, director of the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
Maarten van Rossem
Lecture 4 Feb
The Sixties
Maarten van Rossem will speak about the political climate of the Netherlands during the sixties, a time in which he was a student. The central question around which his talk revolves is: what were the structural causes of excitement during those years?
Maarten van Rossem is a historian and one of the most well known TV-celebrities in the Netherlands. During his academic career, he specialized in the history and politics of the United States of America. His publications include: De Verenigde Staten in de Twintigste Eeuw (2001),Amerika voor en tegen, Heeft geschiedenis nut? (2003) and De Wereld volgens Maarten van Rossem (2005).
Lex Heerma van Voss
Lecture 5 Feb
The early eighties: Working class and popular culture
Lex Heerma Van Voss will focus his attention on the constraints of poverty and the factory and the ‘civilizing offensive’ of the bourgeoisie, looking at the working classes of Britain and the Netherlands and how a distinct culture is developed and unravelled at the same time.
Lex Heerma Van Voss studied history in Utrecht and Paris. He holds a PhD from the University of Utrecht and worked at the University of Leiden and Amsterdam. He is deputy director at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Recent publications include: Petitions in Social History (Cambridge 2001), Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labor History (New York/Oxford 2002).
Maaike Meijer
Lecture 6 Feb
Powerful Melodies: Pop-reconstructions of gender in the seventies
In her lecture Powerful Melodies, Maaike Meijer will take focus on Dutch popular songs from the seventies including those by Corry Brokken, Conny van den Bosch and all the musical songs by the famous writer Annie MG Schmidt. Meijer will speak about the ways in which popular songs justify, affect and redefine the gender system.
Maaike Meijer is a Dutch specialist and theoretician of literature. She published extensively in the field of poetry theory and interpretation, gender studies and ethnographic studies. For over fourteen years Meijer worked at the Faculty of Gender studies in Utrecht and is currently professor and director of The Centre for Gender and Diversity at the University of Maastricht.
Markus Müller
Lecture 7 Feb
1991 The year punk broke / The Nineties – The years art broke
In reference to the well-known documentary focusing on the last happy days of Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) and the beginning of the émminence grise-ness of Sonic Youth, the lecture of Markus Müller will try to recapture the reintroduction of the art school credibility into Pop and how and why the rise of what was the called the “alternative nation” in a recent Sonic Youth biography was flanked by a multiplicity of crossovers, between the subsystems of music and visual art.
Markus Müller is Founder and Executive Director of BUREAU MUELLER, Communication and Consultancy. He studied History, Art History and American Studies at the Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, the Royal Holloway College in London and the American University in Washington DC. He has published extensively on music and contemporary art, for example Make it Funky, Strategies between Avantgarde and Pop in Visual Arts and Music, Cologne, 1999.
Ian Wallace
Lecture 8 Feb
The Nowties
Ian Wallace will give a presentation about his own work, speaking about the potentiality of being an artist in today’s society. Through personal anecdotes and his experiences in art practice, he will give his vision on contemporary society and the place that art holds within it.
Ian Wallace began to make art in 1965, and received his MA in Art History from the University of British Colombia (UBC) in 1968. Wallace taught at UBC from 1967 to 1970, and at the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design from 1972 to his retirement in 1998. His prestigious exhibition career includes Canadian group and solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and international group and solo exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Extra events:
5 Feb, 6 p.m.
Following Lex Heerma van Voss’ presentation, Witte de With and TENT. will present Shared Space II, a spatial project on the 1st floor by designer Sebastiaan Straatsma.
8 Feb, 4 p.m.
Prior to his talk, Witte de With will launch Ian Wallace’s monograph A Literature of Images.