2020 Theses Doctoral

Port of Flanders: Jef Geys and Belgium in the ’70s

Cohen, Lucas

This dissertation considers Jef Geys as an archivist of the cultural shifts of the ’60s and ’70s in Europe amidst the reception of American Pop in Belgium. Between these decades, Geys archived and played back the social and cultural effects of Pop to engage with the newly defined middle class that was constructed to account for and implement changes in both professional and social settings. Geys’s archive was instrumental in his roles as an artist and educator and he used it to reinterpret the implications of Pop. Geys’s consideration of Pop expanded its implications to test Pop’s institutional and social alignments in relation to the question of geography and population.