Guest curator’s exhibition Brno Biennial 2012 A small and personal archive of the Provotarian movement in Amsterdam (1965-1967), as installed by Experimental Jetset.
"Walls and words, silk-screen posters and
hand-printed flyers, were the true revolutionary media in May 1968.
The streets where speech started and was exchanged: everything that
is an immediate inscription, given and exchanged. Speech and
response, moving in the same time and in the same place, reciprocal
and antagonistic."
Baudrillard (Utopia Deferred)
Provo was an Amsterdam anarchist movement that existed for just two
years (1965-1967), although its existence resonated for years to
come, in the Netherlands and abroad. Through conceptual activism
and speculative political proposals (the 'white plans'), the Provo
movement captured the imagination of a generation, and forever
shaped the Dutch political and cultural landscape. Part art
movement and part political party, Provo was a loose collective,
consisting of individuals with very different ambitions: subversive
agendas, artistic motives, utopian ideas, concrete plans. Between
1965 and 1967, these motives and agendas briefly overlapped, and
created a unique movement. A movement that liquidated itself
in 1967, in a self-declared act of ʻauto-provocationʼ.
In December 2010, Tim Voss, the director of Amsterdam art space
W139, approached Marieke Stolk in an attempt to learn more about
Provo as her father Rob Stolk was one of its founding members.
Marieke Stolk also happens to be one of the three members of
Experimental Jetset, an independent graphic design studio from
Amsterdam. Plans were being made to present an installation in W139
revolving around the theme of Provo. A small, personal (and
ultimately incomplete) archive, displaying graphic documentation
related to the Provotarian movement. Through the impromptu
installation, Experimental Jetset attempted to interpret (in a
subjective way) the history of Provo and its post-Provo
incarnations, with a special focus on the role of Rob Stolk herein,
while reflecting on the notion of the printer as ʻauteurʼ, as well
as the notion of the activist as an archivist (and
vice versa).
When asked to curate one of the exhibitions for the 25th
International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno, Experimental Jetset
gladly accepted, and after some deliberation, decided to
reinterpret their original W139 installation - transforming the
exhibition to fit within a more international context, adding
original material and new texts and translations.
Two Or Three Things I Know About Provo follows the figure of Rob
Stolk (1946-2001), one of the main founders of Provo. Coming from a
socialist working class background, Stolk was involved in activism
from a very young age. His involvement in Provo forced him to
become a printer; since mainstream printing offices refused to
handle the subversive and sometimes illegal Provo material, he had
no other option than to print these publications himself. Reflecting
on this situation, Stolk often quoted American journalist A. J.
Liebling: "Freedom of the press is for those who own one."
After the liquidation of Provo, Rob Stolk remained an important
figure in various post-Provo movements, most notably in the early
squattersʼ scene and Aktiegroepen Nieuwmarkt (1967-1976). In 1969,
he was involved in the occupation of Het Maagdenhuis, operating a
printing press from within the occupied building. Throughout the
1970s, he published the historical magazine ʻDe Tand des Tijdsʼ
(Ravages of Time). In the 1980s and 1990s, he became one of the
most prolific cultural printers in Amsterdam, which he remained
until his untimely passing in 2001.
As an addition to the installation, freelance curator Femke Dekker
has undertaken a research project on Provo activity in
Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. The results of this project will be
included in the exhibition.
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More information on the first edition of the exhibition, as it took
place in Amsterdam, can be found here:
http://www.experimentaljetset.nl/provo
http://www.flickr.com/photos/maaikelauwaert/sets/72157626274766262/