Marga van Mechelen (b. 1953) is an art historian, researcher and art critic specialized in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on conceptual, performance and media art. She studied art history and philosophy of language at the Universities of Nijmegen and Groningen. During her studies she taught methodology and philosophy of art at the Radboud University.
She was a lecturer in art history at the teacher training programme of the Stichting Lerarenopleiding in Utrecht, after which she was appointed to the University van Amsterdam in 1980. She retired in 2019 and works freelance since then. Over the course of her career, she contributed to major research initiatives, curated exhibitions, made a film, served in jury’s, and on advisory boards for key cultural institutions, such as The Council for Culture, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the Dutch Research Council and the Mondrian Fund.
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Marga van Mechelen was – between 1994 and 1997 – a founding member and secretary of the Platform for Semiotic Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, that first merged into ISELK and then ASCA. She was a member of the International Scientific Board of the International Association for Visual Semiotics (IAVS/AISV) and is an active member of The International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS) and visiting lecturer internationally in this field of studies. In 1993 she obtained her PhD with a study of the approaches in art history, semiotics and psychosemiotics – in particular the semanalysis of Julia Kristeva -, to artistic form and the signifying process. Between 2004 and 2008 she was a member of the ArtEZ Expert Group Professorship Art and Reflection. She has played a vital role in organizing public programs for the University of Amsterdam, the so-called KEK lectures and symposia in cooperation with a.o. the Studium Generale of the University of Amsterdam (CREA), Maison Descartes, British Council, and Goethe Institute, and in cooperation with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam the Memmaker Symposium (1996) and Faces of Laughter. Female Strategies in Art (2001). From 1993 till 2001 she was a member of the committee of SMBA (Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam) inviting leading artists and scholars.
Beyond academia, she was a.o. vice-president of the Advisory Committee of Museum Arnhem (1981-1994), member of the board of Open Monumentendag Arnhem (2008-2014), the Sonsbeek 2008 committee and treasurer of AICA Nederland (2011-2014). For many years she lectured at the Curatorial Programme of De Appel. In 2015 she curated Zero Squared in the Textile Museum Tilburg. In 2022 followed The Dreamed Obviousness, a filmed interview with sound artists Jaap Drupsteen and Tarik Barri.
Biographical note
“I remember my youth as if I had lived multiple lives in one. Although I thrived well in both primary and secondary school, it was not enough for me. I had barely entered primary school when I found an outlet in theater outside of school, and until I left my hometown to study, acting and directing plays remained a significant part of my life. Highlights included directing Hair at my high school and writing two musical theater pieces together with Albert van der Weide, around which we formed a performing group.
In primary school, I had a teacher who gave me every opportunity, both in and outside of school, to gain extra knowledge. During our walks through the fields, he taught me how to recognize birds. Sports also played an important role in my life—horseback riding and tennis during the week, sailing on weekends, and, whenever there was ice, skating, preferably on the nearby lakes. It was a given that I would attend gymnasium and proceed to gymnasium bèta. For a long time, I had my sights set on studying medicine, but my passion for theater, and not long afterwards for modern and contemporary art—I earned some extra money as a theater and art critic —led me to decide to study art history instead.
I ended up in Nijmegen for the simple reason that Albert van der Weide was studying at the art academy in Arnhem, 15 miles from Nijmegen. We got married, and I moved in with him in the beautiful house that has now been ours for 46 years. My experience in shaping my own learning process proved useful in Nijmegen. To generate more attention for contemporary art and theory formation, a good friend and I proposed a curriculum, which was accepted. Nevertheless, after my bachelor’s degree—completed with a thesis on the function of language in conceptual art—I decided to continue my studies at the University of Groningen, where my interest in contemporary art was a better fit. There, I studied under Wim Beeren for a couple of years. At the same time, I remained active in Nijmegen by helping to develop a new subject, vakdidactiek (subject didactics), and through a temporary appointment as a lecturer in aesthetics and philosophy of art. I also stayed connected to Nijmegen, because of the lively climate of student activism and debates.
My master’s thesis, Language as Art – Art as Language. A Study on the Journals Art-Language and The Fox, was printed, distributed internationally, and well received, as little external research had been conducted on this topic at the time. Meanwhile, I had landed a fantastic job at the new teacher training program in Utrecht, where I worked in a close-knit team of four art historians—one of whom I still collaborate with until today. My interest in contemporary and new media art, which aligned with the interests of my husband, who had been working as a visual artist since 1975, led us to travel frequently abroad, visiting major biennials and meeting colleagues behind what was then still the Iron Curtain. We followed the program at De Appel in Amsterdam closely, where my husband created his first performance and installation, an art center about which I would later write a much appraised monograph (de Appel. Performances, Installations, Projects 1975-1983, Amsterdam 2006).
In 1980, I was approached about a vacancy in the Art History department at the University of Amsterdam. I applied and was accepted. With my knowledge of poststructuralism and semiotics—acquired in Nijmegen through the publishing house the SUN—I shaped my research and sought contact with like-minded scholars in Amsterdam. My French-language, highly theoretical research offered few opportunities for direct application in teaching, so I decided to start a second research project focused on the Viennese Fin de Siècle, which was gaining significant attention at the time. I was particularly drawn to the new interdisciplinary approaches emerging in this field, where I encountered psycho-semiotics in a different way—something that ultimately found a place in my dissertation.
Prior to that, I translated Oikos from Italian (authors Francesco Amendolagine and Massimo Cacciari), followed by the translation of Julia Kristeva’s La joie de Giotto; both were published by the SUN, as was a special issue on Kristeva in Te Elfder Ure, celebrated with a widely attended lecture by Kristeva in Amsterdam. After completing my PhD—enhanced by a beautifully published trade edition of my dissertation by the SUN—I became more internationally active in the field of semiotics while also exploring new research areas. One of these, introduced in my teaching and well known to generations of students, was ‘abjection and transgression.’
A decade later, I published two books on Dutch legendary art institutions: the Sonsbeek exhibition and De Appel. This led me to focus more on the recent history of art in the Netherlands—mainly because I had experienced it firsthand and because there was too little scholarly attention devoted to it. This resulted in a monograph on Henk Peeters, co-founder of the Hollandse Informele Groep and the Nul (Zero) group, followed by a comprehensive book on the history of media art in the Netherlands after 1985. Soon, a book on the art of the 1960s in the Netherlands will be published. For a complete list of book publications and a selection of other publications see elsewhere on this website.
Albert and I have two children and five adorable grandchildren; the eldest was born in December 2015, and the youngest in November 2023.”