The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

The summer has flown by, and once again I am back at the DAI. Difference is, this time I am in the second and therefore last year, and so things will be a bit more, well, interesting. Nae mare arsing around.

Thankfully, our first week was quite easy. It didn’t begin that way, with a gruelling day of listening to various people inform us about all sorts of “essential” information (much of it irrelevant), but with that out of the way we were off to Münster to see some of the works in Skulptur Projekte Münster 07 (one of which I was of course part of in the summer).

I was quite pleased about this trip, since I had not had time to see very much when I was here earlier in the summer. Highlights (aside from Maria’s project) for me would be Bruce Naumann’s Square Depression and The Lost Reflection by Susan Philipsz; of course, there wasn’t the time to see everything.

After some dinner we were all herded back onto the bus and onward to Kassel, where we would spend two days visiting the documenta festival – the largest visual arts festival in the world, held every five years in this otherwise unremarkable and frankly quite ugly city. Like many towns in this part of Germany, it was indescriminately flattened in WWII; as a British person, one can’t help but have a lingering feeling of guilt when hearing this.

It was very late when we arrived at our hotel, the frankly unbelievable Grand Hotel moderne La Strada. Its tastelessness is beyond explanation, so much so that it perhaps transcends kitsch and enters some new category of its own. The pièce de résistance is surely the bar, with neon lighting which would have been too much even in the ’80s, shiny bronze mirrors on the ceiling, and best of all a resident band playing the same songs every night of the week, among which of course “Copacabana” – no joke!

On Thursday morning we began our visit to the festival itself. It’s an enormous undertaking, and it would be kind of futile to attempt to see it all in a few days. Even after a few hours my head was dizzy and I could no longer take any more art in; I find visiting museums sometimes overwhelming, and this was ten times as big as the Rijks or the Stedelijk. I decided to take a break, read the catalogue (itself over 400 pages), and take a more focussed look on Friday.

Gabriëlle had announced that there would be a competition for ideas for a group picture of the DAI in Kassel, to form the content of an advertisement in Metropolis M (an important Dutch art magazine). Tao came up with the winning suggestion, which involved us all standing in the field of rice which had been planted in front of the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe (as part of an artwork by Sakarin Krue-On). We were then to “be” rice, shooting up like the new artistic talents that we are…

Of course, there was some concern that we would get chased away for doing this, so it had to be done quickly and unobtrusively. This was the plan, but of course getting thirty or so people to get their socks off, stand in a rice field, and be photographed is not the sort of thing that can be done without getting noticed. We managed to pull it off, just about.

After that, some more staring at art; I’m not going to say too much about this aside from the fact that there were a few works I liked, and a great deal that didn’t do much for me at all. I get very worried sometimes that I am missing the point of a lot of art, which in turn makes me nervous that I am stupid or just don’t have an eye for the subtle. What helps the most here is when I can remind myself to look for what affects me on a personal level, to trust my own instinct and remember why I became interested in art in the first place; if I can do this, it all becomes a lot more meaningful and enjoyable. This is unfortunately much easier said than done. I find that one can easily become trapped between two worlds, on one side the professional art criticism scene who understand this kind of thing, and on the other the general public with the “my two-year-old could paint that” type of attitude. They are, of course, both wrong and both right at the same time. This ambiguity makes it all the more interesting.

Finally, dinner with the group and a fruitless search round Kassel for some nightlife before heading back to the hotel and a few drinks to, yes, more “Copacabana”. And on Saturday, a very long journey back to Amsterdam.

As can be seen from my last post, I was quite upset when told that my Dutch was not understandable enough for the good folks of Amsterdam. Well, rather that sulking, I decided to do something about it. The volksuniversiteit (“people’s university”, a national group of adult education institutions) are starting their autumn programme next week, and so I decided to enrol myself in a course in Dutch for foreigners.

Just as well then that I phoned yesterday, since today was the last day for the intake test – this decides which class you would be in (there are no less than 10 or so different levels). I was due to be working in the Sláinte, but managed to get a few hours off in the middle of the day for the exam.

It’s a bit strange being nervous about an exam that you can’t really “pass” or “fail” in the normal sense, but I was. The hospital-like layout of the place didn’t help very much either.

The test went OK, though – 20 out of 20 for reading, 19 out of 20 for writing; not bad although I say so myself, and certainly helpful in restoring my lost confidence after last week’s events. This means that I will be in the Halfgevorderen III (semi-advanced level III) class.

Including textbooks, the total cost is nearly €300. I do hope that it will be worth it; we shall see when lessons start next week.

I’ve been learning the Dutch language now for well over two years, and as far as I could tell I have been getting on pretty OK. I speak it every day, possibly more than English, and I seem to be able to communicate without too much difficulty. Of course I come across words now and then which I don’t know, but that is to be expected. However, I had a big disappointment today.

Maria Pask, the artist responsible for the Beautiful City project in Münster which I was involved with in June, had emailed me last week to ask if I would like to be on a radio programme being broadcast this week. “Of course!” I said; Maria said that she would pass on my details and they would be in touch.

A woman from the station called me then today to talk about the project and the programme. She had spend about five minutes asking me various questions, before suddenly dropping a bombshell; she found it very difficult to understand my Dutch, and didn’t think that her listeners would be able to either. The implication was “you are too foreign for our show”.

I felt a mixture of disappointment in myself, and also annoyance with her attitude. If I was Moroccan or Turkish I don’t think she could have said as much for fear of being accused of racism; this is surely not the way to integrate people.

For my own part, it would appear that I need to do something about my Scottish accent – a most unfortunate and unpleasant characteristic, and clearly a barrier to social participation…

Summer is coming to an end, but today was still nice enough for a trip to the beach. Myself and Astrid left for IJmuiden about lunchtime and after a small diversion to find a second hand shop which I had been wanting to visit for a while (something of an obsession for me), we set off down the coast for some lekker uitwaaien (untranslatable, something like “getting a lovely bit of fresh air”).

On the way we passed the beach resort at Bloemendaal. It’s a sort of little Ibiza on the North Sea coast which to my eye looks a bit pathetic, with fake palm trees and huge disco balls swinging in the September winds.

Between Bloemendaal and Zandvoort we walked through the dunes of the Nationaal Park Zuid Kennemerland, a very strange landscape and not what I am used to at all in the Netherlands. The scenery consists of rolling hills (actually dunes) covered with rough grass, bushes, and even forests. Occasional rain showers and herds of grazing cows completed the picture, which it must be said could easily be somewhere in the north of Scotland. Hard to imagine that it’s less than an hour out of Amsterdam.