The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

After a very quiet Christmas, I have had a few matters to attend to. As can be seen in the video in my last post, my hair has gotten pretty darn long recently, as well it will if you do not have it cut. I was quite happy with this state of affairs, but decided in any case that it would not be too bad an idea to do something about it. This was lent some urgency by the fact that I wanted to look a little smarter than usual, since I had planned to go looking for another bar job this week. Back to that later…

So, haircut. Everything was of course shut on the 25th and 26th, but on Thursday morning I had it done. I always feel extremely nervous when visiting the hairdresser, for some reason; more so even than the dentist. I suppose it’s something to do with the one-chance-to-get-it-right nature of the situation; once it’s off, it’s off.

It ended up being a bit shorter than I had really planned, but I was too paralysed with fear when in the chair to notice. By the time it became apparent that the hairdresser’s interpretation of ietsje korter (a wee bit shorter) was a bit more severe than my own, it was too late. This is why I so rarely get my hair cut! Dammit!

Back to the job hunting. I got a phone call last week from Dan at the Sláinte, the bar where I have worked for almost a year and a half. He told me that due to some monumental fuck-up with the licence, the bar will have to close for about 3-4 months while they apply for a new one. Hence no work for anybody in the meantime.

The money is not so much of a problem, since I have income from my other employment, but it does have the potential to cause me some big problems with my student finances; I need to work a certain minimum number of hours to qualify, and my other work for my employer in Scotland does not count; the idea is that if you pay tax in the Netherlands, you get the benefit of such public services, which sounds fair enough to me. The worst case scenario is that I would have to pay back quite a large amount of money.

I really would not mind another bar job, the biggest benefit of which is that it does not involve sitting behind a computer, and also almost no thinking or responsibility whatsoever. Since my studies and other job involve so much of both of these, I am quite enthusiastic about avoiding them if at all possible the rest of the time.

Having prepared an appropriate CV, I set off on my bike around town looking for nice-looking places to work; not too touristy, but also not these little quiet corner cafés empty except for two old Dutch guys leaning on the bar all night long. Not the best time of year for this sort of thing, but with luck I should get something. Fingers crossed.

I need to get a bit more imaginative about the title of my DAI-related posts – it ends up being “DAI October”, “DAI November”, etc…

The problem is that recent DAI weeks have not really been very noteworthy, if the truth be told. This week in particular was extremely passive, with rather a lot of listening, sitting, listening, a wee bit of thinking, doodling in my sketchpad, and more listening. Next time will be at least a bit more engaged, since I have an assessment!

We began rather unusually this week in Utrecht, where myself and the other 2nd year students had a meeting with Emily Pethick of Casco, who is moderating the production of our graduation publications; these small book(lets) along with a website form our graduation portfolio, in contrast to a final show, which is seen as rather old-fashioned.

This turned out not to be the most productive of meetings, since we were all supposed to have prepared some content to discuss, while in fact nobody really had. We had only met with Emily for the first time in Enschede last month, have been mostly quite busy in between, and in any case it still feels quite early to be getting into discussions about the details of the publication. Hopefully the next meeting will produce some more concrete progress.

That done, it was back onto the train and out east to Enschede. Tuesday turned out to be quite a strange day, since we were all supposed to have prepared a Pecha Kucha presentation on our future selves in 2014 (seven years time), but almost half of the students, mostly second years, had not done so. Pecha Kucha is a presentation format using 20 slides (either images or videos) of 20 seconds duration each, thus giving a total duration of 6min 40sec. The idea is that information can be presented quickly and consisely without the presenter or audience losing focus. This is much easier said than done.

I did have something prepared, but I can quite understand why others did not; it is a very distant and frankly quite frightening topic, and the amount of time needing to be invested for such a short presentation didn’t really seem like a top priority.

I was also not at all satisfied with what I had prepared, but here is at least one piece from it; a 20sec message from me in the future. In case it is not obvious, I am speaking very bad Spanish; many many thanks to my wee sister Catriona for helping me with this!

Finally, we had a little Christmas party on Thursday night, with lots of nice things to eat and plenty wine laid on by the DAI, followed by a few beers in the centre of Enschede. Despite this, I needed to be up earlyish on Friday, and this combined with a general lack of sleep meant that upon returning to Amsterdam that evening I slept almost right through until Saturday afternoon.

Next week I’m in Enschede, but in the meantime there has been some art-related activity elsewhere. Along with my fellow students Julien, Emily, and Nikos, I was selected to take part in a three-day workshop being held at Expodium, a platform for young art(ists) in Utrecht. This master class was to be run by the Irish artist Gerard Byrne, and would involve students from several masters programmes in the Netherlands. The intention was to develop some insights into the type of issues which a masters-level art education programme brings up, as a development from and at a higher level than bachelors-level education.

This was mainly related to the contextualisation of one’s work, which in non-art-speak concerns how art works are seen in relation to other work which has come before, in relation to how and where they are shown, and in relation to the general cultural climate in which they exist. Since I had received the grade “needs development” (ie not very good) for this aspect of my work at the end of the first year of the course, I was very keen to make some improvements.

So, was this achieved? I would have to say that I did not find the class tremendously helpful in this regard. Three days is really pretty short, and I felt that we really didn’t get into the level of detail or extended discussion that I would have liked. Further to this, we were asked to video ourselves in small groups discussing the work and presentational skills of the others, the completion of which turned into the focus of the last day and a half. Naturally, we could not resist the urge to make this into something of a work in itself, and this emphasis on having a “product” tended to push everything else aside.

Another problem is that it was difficult to resist the temptation to be nice about each other, when what was really needed was some honest and incisive criticism. This definitely limited the usefulness of the feedback, which in any case ended up being more or less limited to the work itself, rather than its context and other wider issues as had been hoped.

All in all, something of a disappointment. Gerard Byrne himself is certainly a very agreeable man and an interesting artist, but I do feel like the format of the workshop could have been improved quite a lot. Still, it was nice to be able to discuss our work and get some feedback outside of the DAI, and they fed us very well too!

I have to say that making the videos was fun, though; since the video which our group recorded whilst talking was not so interesting, we mimed talking in a sort of goldfish-like way in front of a green-screen background, which we then replaced with a picture of a tropical island beach. Why? Because if you have nothing intelligent to say you can at least make people laugh.

Way back in the summer, we had planned to go sailing or something else outdoors and healthy. This though never happened due to Astrid being busy with her thesis and me with work and such like. Instead, we went away at the beginning of this week, for a few days walking in the south east of the Netherlands. It is indeed a strange time of year for such a holiday, but provided that you are well wrapped and keep moving it is possible to enjoy the experience without freezing.

Our base was Groesbeek, a small town accessible by bus from Nijmegen. We were staying in a small hotel which may or not have been busy in the summer, but was now but for us deserted. Cheap enough, and I am sure they were glad of our custom.

After arriving on Sunday afternoon, we immediately set out so as to take advantage of the weather; I was quite worried that it would start raining as it has been doing for much of the last week and not stop for several days. In the end we were quite lucky, although of course at this time of year it gets dark very early.

So it was that we found ourselves wandering about in the dark, in the middle of the Reichswald. This is a forest, and as the name suggests is in fact in Germany; we could walk to the border in about half an hour from our hotel.

This for me was a strange and fascinating experience; I come of course from an island, and have never seen a land border up close before. What interested be is the arbitrariness of it; one step and you’re in Germany, another one back and you are once again in the Netherlands. You don’t feel any different, I can assure you, and it is only the little differences that start to give it away: the houses look a little different, the cars have “D” instead of “NL” on the number plates, and of course this is also a language border; on one side you’re walking along a straat, and on the other a straße. It seems cliché to mention it, but not so very long ago countless people died because people couldn’t keep to their side of this invisible line. Thanks be that these days are now gone.

Back to the woods. Having found our way out, we took a walk to the nearest village and got something to eat. It was quite nice to be able to practice some German as we ordered food, until it turned out that the woman serving us was in fact Dutch; we were not quite so far away from home as it might have seemed.

We spent the following two days doing some more wandering about in the countryside, which to my surprise is actually quite hilly; at times I could almost believe that I was back in the Highlands: heather, fir trees, and farmland everywhere, and on the last day something quite unbelievable; Highland cows!

Aye, the great muckle horned beasts indeed, grazing contentedly just as if they were back in Perthshire. Most unexpected.

Finally, it came time to head back to Amsterdam; although I would have to say that I was pretty tired after so much walking and country air, I was certainly feeling the better for it. Next time in the summer, though!

This weekend has been open weekend at the Rijksacademie here in Amsterdam. It’s more or less the place that you want to be if you are a young and exciting artist in the Netherlands, and as such it seemed like it was worth a visit to see what is going on there.

I had been busy all day Saturday and working in the Sláinte until 5pm on Sunday, and so I only caught the last few hours before it closed on Sunday evening. This was however more than enough for me. I find these type of situations very difficult and stressful, what with all those crowds of trendy people with a glass of wine in one hand and the exhibition catalogue in the other expounding the virtues of this or the other promising new talent. I had to sit down somewhere dark for a few minutes upon arriving, and even after doing so I still felt totally disorientated and out of place. Maybe there was good work to be seen, maybe not, but in any case it was all the same to me. I left feeling lost and quite disappointed.

Thinking about this later, I believe that the problem came from the experience of balancing between two worlds very remote from each other. Throughout the day, I had been serving beer and all-day-breakfasts to the type of stereotypical British tourist who we see so much of in the Sláinte, the type of person whose interests and mentality lie a million miles away from the Rijksacademie. Within 20 minutes of leaving work I had arrived there, and found myself almost on another planet.

It is not only in this particular situation that I have felt this way, but also in a more general sense. I find it just as hard to identify with the art world as with the pub/drinking/partying world which I have always spent so much time in; neither really feels like home.