By Brigitte Grauman in THE BULLETIN
July 1990
TRANSFORMING THE UNIVERSE
Lunar sculptures, ghost houses, buried beaches they're the work of surrealists or visionaries or madmen, depending which way you look at it. Brigid Grauman describes a group that follows a time honoured Belgian tradition
With the other members of he group Tout (the French word for "all"), Donald Ream could be described as a dreamer of dreams and a thinker up of weird things. In that capacity he's got a lot to keep him busy these days.
Brought up in Africa, once a mining engineer and geologist, D. Ream has worked in Japan, Canada and Angola in the past. For the last 10 years, almost uninterruptedly, he has devoted his time and imagination to cooking up wild ideas..
Take the project for a lunar sculpture in the Rond-Point Schuman. "We always try to transform the whole environment into a work of art” explains D. Ream. "A dream… and the other in the Moon," as the work is called, looks, when open, like a large shuttlecock, nose up, eight metres high with an 18 metre diameter. The criss crossing narrow aluminium slates move permanently, if imperceptibly, until, at their vertical narrowest, they stand in stripes like a bird cage.
The purple neons dim and brighten with the phases of the moon, and the height of the moon on the horizon affects the light, too. In 18 years, says D. Ream, the position will never be the same at a given time of day. He explains all this excitedly by means of a large scale model.
The moon project has the conditional sponsorship of 20 companies. It is not a favourite with the Minister of Public Works, who prefers a more conventional sculpture by Félix Roulin, but Tout, a non profit organisation, have other dreams up their sleeve.
There's the transparent town in the Place du Marché aux Poissons. That one was commissioned by the Secretary of State to the Brussels Region, as part of a campaign to draw the attention of the public to their subsidies for renovation scheme. Tout drew the blueprints of the 3.000 square metre town which will cover the entire square.
D. Ream explained the past of a group who are the rightful heirs to the French situationists, a subversive movement itself descended from surrealism and Dada.
There's an architect in the group, a psychiatrist, and a painter, all of whom have full time jobs elsewhere. They want remain nameless, they're even evasive about their actual number and don't believe in signing their actions, either. They consider it's enough that each event should be minutely recorded with colour slides, rough detailed notes and the correspondence involved in preparing them.
Some people may remember the Mass Moving, a group of enthusiastic anarchists who trapped cars inside concrete and built a machine for printing flowers on the pavements, among other concepts, projects, experiments and actions. Before they broke up, they journeyed to Hiroshima on the Trans Siberian Express and painted the shadows of nine people picked at random on the presumed spot where the atom bomb exploded.
After that, the 20 member group disbanded, somewhat acrimoniously. They had a ceremonial burning ceremony of all the documents they'd gathered over the years, and dismantled the flower-printing machine. All that remained was a book, "Treatise on Cultural Methodology for the Use of the Young Generation," and 30 bamboo reeds planted by the sea in Holland, a wind harp which the local authorities put lovingly up again very time vandals tear them down.
Several splinter groups came up with new ideas. There were the Mass and Individual Moving, with their solar powered printing press for printing poetry on recycled paper; Nomad Now, with their home cars; Ose, a small company that dealt with experiments in solar and wind energy. Then came Tout, founded in 1978.
Why Tout? "Because it's all or nothing," D. Ream explains. "And because everything is so fragmented these days that we want to try to recreate an almost mystical feeling of wholeness."
The group's first action was to publish their statutes in Le Moniteur, the official gazette. Statements such as "our object is to discover phenomena that will alter the relationship of man to his environment," and repeated surrealistic references to dreams, "sleeping members" and Utopia, led the then Minister of Justice to smell what he thought were hashish fumes. The members were summoned for questioning at the police station. Later, according to Ream, a law professor at Mons University referred to the statutes as the "perversion of legal language."
Other law professors at the Sart-Tilman University in Liege were in for a shock when one summer day in 1982, what looked like a huge paper plane went lunging past their faculty windows carried by a crane, and nose dived into the lawn, "narrowly missing its objective the professors' rostrum,11 as the accompanying statement ironically read.
Engraved on the folded sheets of brass was an amended Charter of Human Rights, written with the help of lawyer friends, only to be revealed in full when "1001 members of the university will each have paid 1,000 BF to Amnesty International." They still haven't.
The "Propitiatory Dream" took place in Liege after the earthquake three years ago . A group armed with hammers and chisels opened a fault in the concrete under the famous Perron statue, the stone of freedom which is the symbol of the city. Red neon lights and broken crystal from the closed down Val St Lambert factory were then poured into the crack, releasing a strong warm glow. The following day, Gonze and friends painted a thin line of (washable) red paint through the streets of the city, on façades, market stalls and parked cars.
Evoking unfathomable depths, unemployment, random destruction, social instability, the Liege actions were only a first step. On the night of the full moon, two ambulances took off from opposite sides of the city, each carrying a half moon in golden lead, engraved with a plan of the city. Driven to the market square, they were carried to a roaring furnace set alight by a retired old miner, then smelted. In a symbolic act of cauterisation, they were then poured into the gaping wound under the statue.
There was the time they framed parts of Brussels, or the beach with bathers and parasols they created "in memory of May 68" in the suburb of Jette, then buried again under the paving stones. And the corner house rashly torn down, leaving a gaping hole, which they rebuilt with great billowing sheets of plastic and mirror windows, like the ghost of house, in memory of building wantonly destroyed.
There was the project for an enormous spider's web in the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and an upcoming one for next year's bicentennial of the French Revolution involving the Bastille and hot air balloons. And the plan to invite 12 European artists to celebrate the next winter solstice with luminous sculptures all over Brussels.
They are inspired by the writings of Rimbaud and Jorge Luis Borges, and the idea of aeternal return expressed in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and they like to describe themselves as the people who 'Simply filter dreams," a kind of literal vision with a political statement.
"Art is about questioning the finality of man and society," says D. Ream. "We want to try to affect, however imperceptibly, the direction in which society is moving. It may sound a bit megalomaniacal, but that’s the only way to get things done. You have to believe in it."