CLUB MORAL

Enlightenment as a perverted kind of mysticism in Sade's case and a mathematical approach to connection and the divine in Wittgenstein's case.

Simultaneously as well I had a subscription on the New Scientist. Investigation in itself and everything that had to do with exploration and the future always was of big interest to me. When I was a kid I was fascinated with brain-washing, manipulation, self-hypnosis. Mid seventies several germanist/linguists were amongst my closest friends. They were involved in avant garde performance and experimental music, some of them became important scientists later. I heard very early on about knowledge representation what helped me in a way to look as an observer to the drawings popping up from my subconscious. My core as an artist is drawing. From the beginning when i started to expose you are asked for explanations, good to force you into alienation from what came to me as very natural. NO language attached, I had no titles either. My friends linguists encouraged me because of too much abstraction. In Sade's writings I was drawn to his juxtaposition between sexual obsession and philosophical treatise, sex and mind divided. Reading dropwise Wittgenstein's Tractatus offered me the right brain architecture to start a good day with. His mathematical approach of thinking matched my way of experiencing and supporting reality.

My interest in the psychology of serial killers has mainly surfaced in my visual work. Some of the lyrics are inspired by serial killers, and some, like 'Lies', are poetry written by criminals. Especially in 'Lies', that track in particular highlights the creative similarities between both the artist and the criminal, as they share exactly the same psychological profile. Jack Henry Abbott wrote poems in prison, was released following appeals from various literary greats, but went on to commit another murder. It's the same repetitive pattern and the same uncontrollable urge. We will play 'Lies' at VOD-fest.

Club Moral as a space was first of all intended to show work of other people that we liked and had little chance to show or play. At the time there were several artist run spaces all over Europe, a reaction against commercial art galleries and traditional museums and institutions. We took care to not exhibit our own work or play ourselves too often. At the same time we were part of a network that allowed artists and bands to tour on an exchange basis.

Force Mental RVSTD is an exact facsimile of all the issues we published. Some researchers at the Antwerp Royal Academy specialised in artist magazines and publications. First they were just scanned for research opportunities, then the facsimile was a logical step. Now it's a historic document of an alternative underground in Antwerp, Belgium and beyond. Mainly because it wasn't just a noise fanzine, but it also had many contributions about various subjects, ranging from music over art, journalism, literature, science and more. In the meantime 500 copies were sold, same edition as the original magazines. And recently we donated the original layout designs to contemporary art museum KANAL in Brussels, where they are again scanned and archived for researchers as well as published online.

The title refers to a suicide note in an auto-erotic fatality, also the lyrics of the first track. At that time, with no internet, there was a more limited audience for the things we did, showed and published. In a way it was also worldwide but nothing compared to today. While now you have search engines that will find anything you are interested in, at the time you had to rely on hearsay, xeroxed fanzines and personal contacts. But maybe in a way the number of people 'who are interested' remains the same. It also becomes less personal, in the 1980s you knew exactly who bought tapes or magazines or enquired about what we were doing. Now with all the information online you have no idea who is interested.

I go with the flow, but stayed on the edge for a long while. I was very cautious and suspicious when they exploded into what mass media are now, because I had particular view on it. During the 1980s I had the opportunity to attend several symposia on Artificial Intelligence where for the first time the big ego's of future Silicon Valley expressed their ambitions for future mankind. Intelligence there revealed itself as a sickness to me. This awareness lives in what i present as art in installations and individual works as animations and other things. The evolution you describe took over counter-culture. I followed this evolution closely, but was for a long while more interested in the reactions on it by the regular massamedia and how they let themselves be changed by the social media overtake. I hesitated a long while before sharing my work and personality on a mass cultural base.

Creating beauty with its own logic but without any sense than being there and unavoidable by itself? Taboos depend heavily on the culture or context in which you live. I have no feeling of being part of any context whatsoever. At this moment I feel alienated, not being part of anything anymore.

By living in our own worlds under the same roof, laughing with the same things, and trust the power of art.

My work to secure a social status for artists probably stems from the same revolutionary urge to bring about change. "You're either part of the problem or part of the solution, and if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem" (Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and others). And our music performances may seem chaotic, but they are actually very structured.

A few years back we often played in exclusive art spaces, as some sort of bonus for big AMVK retrospective exhibitions. There we found out that the high brow art audience was not the right audience for what we do. We were basically an eccentric attraction. On the other hand there's plenty of experimental bands we see here and there, but very few are convincing. So we basically stopped playing live, apart from a rare occasion like VOD-fest where we know we will be in the right place, both regarding the audience as the other bands playing.

In the 1980s we projected Super8 movies during concerts. That changed when AMVK had possibilities to do video animation at home. In recent years the visuals are specifically made for each individual concert only. We use historical images from people that were either born or died on the day of the concert. That makes each concert unique.

We're scheduled to play inside, because of the visuals.

Do I have to say the audience what to think? Are you serious? I don't want to look at others as an audience, I want to let them think by themselves. When you play you convey a conviction, it is a sharing moment without hierarchy. You make or do things to challenge yourself and the rest, you want other people to become as critical as you are.

Basically it was all together equally important. We both have our individual work as artists, separate from one another. Everything we do together resorts under Club Moral and we had both specific tasks that we did but in general we have an equal part in everything we do together.

I never worked with AI but a lot in my art is inspired by the inventions surrounding the field of knowledge representation that lead to what we call now AI. Let's say that their method of investigating the human brain became part of my method of being an artist. I heard about Artificial Intelligence before 1977 and regarded the phenomenon back then as a kind of anti-culture, against the mainstream. What I learned from the industrial underground is that dystopia is as plausible as utopia and that the dark side can besides of being negative be as much the beginning of a new kind of optimism and useful revolution.

Rather simple, it's not because you study something that you want to be your subject. An ornithologist has zero ambition to become a bird. As mentioned before I did a lot of reading and research about the common psychological profile of artists and serial offenders (and scientists and religious thinkers), some of the things along the way made it into artworks, a lot didn't. I'm fascinated by strange people in our society, serial killers and artists fit that description very well. My correspondence with serial killers was partly to find out why I was (also) doing things that served nothing and that most people disliked.

No this is more possible than it ever has been.

I have the impression that society has become skinned, everything is raw flesh.

We were a totally self-supporting organisation and Force Mental was a something were we could put it all together. As far as we can tell it was a pioneer project in many ways, and it keeps influencing people to this day.

We were the only ones to decide what appeared in Club Moral or Force Mental, so we don't regret anything.

(we never hosted Whitehouse, though)

We only published a Whitehouse text in Force Mental and distributed their music through Paul Hurst of ProduKtion, who did film shows and a hairdressing salon in Club Moral.

By now our individual art practise is more important and Club Moral activities shriveled up. That means we have separate studios and rarely discuss our work.

I don't recall any conversation about that matter. Several appreciated my art and supported me in silence. There were others that loathed me being part of the underground and the official art world at the same time. The dogmatics tolerated me and nothing more. It mostly was a misogynistic scene, which caused some sadness now and than. Nevertheless I felt in place because I didn't appreciate the life-norms you had to follow as a regular woman. There was also some distance towards me because I was in my early thirties and most of them were much younger. I was a bit questionable.

See answer 9.

I see no problem. In fact, nothing has ever changed in the general approach towards my work, it still has the same attitude and is regarded as such. And appreciated as such, by younger generations of curators and art lovers. A lot in the world has changed.