EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT - ANNE QUIRYNEN, AN-MARIE LAMBRECHTS & PETER MISSOTTEN
VIDEO INSTALLATION - World Wide Video Festival - Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 1997
Humans are afloat in narrow containers, weightless and most of the time motionless. There are two rows of containers, seamlessly attached. As in a Museum of Natural History, the visitor can walk between the two rows or between the screens and the projectors. Every now and then a wave of motion goes through the containers, as if something disturbs the hibernating creatures - but this passes and everything goes on in the same soothing way.
With: Thomas McManus, Tamas Moritz, Regina Van Berkel, Antony Rizzi, Ana Catalina Roman, Demond Hart, Jone San Martin, Jacopo Godani
The video installation makes use of the ‘aquarium images‘ from ‘THE WAY OF THE WEED‘. And although these look fundamentally different from the images in ‘THE MIND MACHINE OF DR. FORSYTHE‘ the human species was clenched between two glass plates, squirming about like tadpoles, or amoebae. In ‘EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT‘ humans are afloat in narrow containers, weightless and most of the time motionless. There are two rows of containers, seamlessly attached. As in a Museum of Natural History, the visitor can walk between the two rows, looking at the naked bodies as wird specimen of the human species. Every now and then a wave of motion goes through the containers, as if something disturbs the hybernating creatures – but this passes and everything goes on in the same soothing way. I a corner hangs the custodian – the negative image of Bill' s head, projected vertically. And this head repeats over and over again, but very slowly: ‘Everything will be alright‘
(World Wide Video Festival ‘97)
If you call EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT by Quirynen, Missotten & Lambrechts (QM&L) the most important work of art from the nineties, you will not get much reaction.
Especially if you add that the high rating is the result of not much more than a half-hour's viewing time, and that, without checking afterwards to see how much of that time was taken by the installation Iooping. But I just can't get away from it: to me, EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT expresses exactly what I regard as the essence of nineties' art. Not by belfowing out straight in your face, but in a lovely detached manner. At least that is what I found when I saw this work in September 1997 in the new wing of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
I saw right there in front of me the definitive artistic programme that I had so nicely formulated in my mind with such difficulty. And my standards aren't paltry: it had to be the masterpiece from that period and have similar Iasting value as the great images from the canon of art history. While the names Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman and their clones who for so long held video art hostage were buzzing round me, here was an ideal work that suddenly made much of theirs quite superfluous. And not just so-called video art itself, for I didn't actually believe in that at all, but all art from that period.
Here I saw how the new art from the nineties had taken shape, in ideal proportions...
Paul Groot on 'Everything will be alright‘ 1997
