In spring 2015, Vleeshal honoured visual artist Marinus Boezem with the manifestation Boezem & Co. The City as Stage. It marked the transition from the programming of Lorenzo Benedetti, who was director from 2008 to 2014, to that of Roos Gortzak, director since October 2014. Preparations for the manifestation were done by Benedetti. Gortzak added some other touches to the program. For example, Marinus Boezem's Porsche Academy, an idea from 1976, was realized for the first time, and the work Space Sculpture was shown in the Vleeshal. Two metronomes ticking at different paces on either side of a sheet of glass, which in this case could also be seen as representing the two different directors.

Back to the manifestation Boezem & Co. The City as Stage. During his 60-year career, artist Marinus Boezem has created a multifaceted and graceful oeuvre. In the early 1960s he discovered how to employ intangible elements such as the weather and air as expressions of his artistic ideas. He is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art, an art movement in which ideas are more important than their material manifestation. This radical approach gained widespread recognition in 1969 with two high-profile exhibitions: Op Losse Schroeven (Square Pegs in Round Holes: Situations and Cryptostructures) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern. Boezem’s work had a prominent place in these exhibitions and remains highly relevant today.

Collaboration has always been important to Marinus Boezem’s artistic practice and is central in this manifestation, which comprises exhibitions, contemporary music concerts, symposiums and other events in the historical heart of Middelburg. The centre point was a new installation at De Vleeshal entitled The Stendhal Syndrome – In Search of an Archetypal Image of Beauty (2002–2015).

Boezem developed this work together with his daughter Natasja Boezem, who also presented two sound works:

In addition De Vleeshal hosted two performances: an improvisation on the day’s weather report by cellist Frances-Marie Uitti and the first performance of Windtables (1984), in which dancers improvised to music by Morton Feldman.

De Vleeshal also exhibited the installation Space Sculpture (1980), which previously was never presented in the Netherlands.

From 1977 to 1987 Marinus Boezem and his wife Maria-Rosa Boezem organised the legendary Forum, which brought internationally renowned artists and theorists to Middelburg. This was the subject of the documentary exhibition 10 Years of Forum: Art From Beyond the Fringe in De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal.

Marinus Boezem has had a longstanding interest in training young artists. During the manifestation Boezem presented the Porsche Academie (1976), a previously unrealised project conceived in response to the artist’s dissatisfaction with existing models of art education. The concept consists of an art school without a director and without a building, comprising only seven ‘professors’ with Porsches who can be called upon by students for advice. On 26 April there was a symposium about the importance of art education on the Podio del Mondo per l’Arte, established in 1975.

Additional works

Weather Drawings

Marinus Boezem, Frances-Marie Uitti

2015

Performance

The Weather

Frances-Marie Uitti

10 May 2015, 9 am – 2 pm

Workshop

The Vanishing of the Artist

Marinus Boezem

1983/2015

Installation

The Vanishing of the Artist

Marinus Boezem

2015

Video/Film