MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Having met in 1987 as disgruntled film/video students at the Sint-Lukas Brussels University College of Art and Design, De Gruyter and Thys began their collaboration with a 5-minute middle finger-wagger titled 'Mime in the Videostudio'. The video stars a young Thys – all gangly limbs in a white vest and underwear – imitating gymnastic exercises to hokey Europop songs in the school’s video studio. He marches, pretends to swim, and performs graceless acrobatics, anemic goose steps, and stiff-legged kicks that are as funny as they are sad sack, his movements reminiscent of the disarming flails of Taylor Mead, Warhol superstar cum court jester. Thys then parades around carrying unidentified objects that belong to the ex-priest who runs the school’s video studio, and who hides his pornography there. The young artist ends his show by enthusiastically mouthing the lyrics to one of the songs ("Big city!/Big, big city!") out of time with the recording. Bumbling and puckish, Thys performs a kind of failed fascism – of the body, of art education, of religion – as well as a playful, if pointed, interrogation of the space in which art is made.

(source: Jennifer Krasinski)