The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

We had been asked last week at the DAI for volunteers to take part as extras in a film shoot for an art piece being made by the artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh. I thought this might be quite interesting, so put my name forward.

This was to take place in De Kathedraal (“The Cathedral”), an astonishing building in the middle of nowhere near Apeldoorn which used to be a transmission station for long wave radio message to the the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) during colonial times.

Dealing with and taking responsibility for the colonial period, along with the related issues today of immigration an integration, is something which is very much part of the Dutch consciousness at present. It is no surprise then that such a project is being undertaken, in the setting of what is literally a temple to imperial ambitions and attitudes.

What we were basically supposed to do was just be spectators, background voices, while a discussion was held about the role of radio broadcasting in the colonial times both as an instrument of control by the Dutch authorities as well as of spreading anti-colonial sentiment; ironically, the Indonesian declaration of independence was broadcast live over the radio from Jakarta.

A second element to the performance/discussion was the reading of a text by the Dutch rapper Salah Edin, originally written by Soewardi Soerjaningrat in 1913 and entitled Als ik eens Nederlander was (“If I were a Dutchman”), and intended as a protest against the plans of the Dutch colonisers to celebrate the anniversary of Dutch independence from Napoleon. The thread of it is, how can we celebrate this when we (Indonesia) are not ourselves free?

An ironic twist to this is that Edin has been in the news this week due to his photo having been incorrectly used as that of the murderer of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Geert Wilders’ Fitna, the anti-Islamic film which is currently testing the Netherlands’ ability to stomach free speech at any cost.

So, an interesting experience in unusual surroundings, and a history lesson too. Not your usual Sunday afternoon!

I had been advised by a tutor of mine at the DAI, John Heijmans, that there was an event tonight in Deventer which I might like. Now, Deventer is about as provincial as can be in the Netherlands, and so it was quite a gamble to travel the whole way there and pay the train fare on the basis of the recommendation. All the same, the presence of Joost Conijn, an artist who I admire a lot lot lot, convinced me to make the trip.

The Uitvindersavond (“Inventors’ evening”) begun with talks by three artists: Daan Roosegaarde, Jean Klare, and Joost Conijn. All were really interesting, but what became even more interesting was the discussion which took place between them afterwards; Roosegaard is really a typical “artist as entrepreneur”, not at all afraid to jump into bed with business, whereas Conijn is in some ways a exemplary romantic figure, building his own car out of wood and driving it to Eastern Europe. To say that they did not see eye to eye was an understatement, although what brought them together and what served as the theme of the evening was the use of technology in art, and the fusion and interface between these two worlds. As Roosegaarde said, what engineers and artists have in common is a burning desire to create new things and look at old things differently. I myself came long, long ago from a technical background, and I still make part of my living from writing software, the creative aspect of which is very much the attraction for me. In this way, this discussion was very interesting and offered a lot to think about.

As part of the same theme, there is currently also an exhibition of the work of Gerrit van Bakel in the Havenkwartier, the complex of buildings where tonight’s event took place. He built strange art machines, whimsical constructions of steel and timber which are powered by the difference in temperature of day and night, or from the heat of the sun, or the wind. Is it art? Is it science? Part of the fascination is of course this ambiguity.

There was to be an interesting concert afterwards, but alas the last train back west was leaving and I had to go. A very enjoyable evening all the same.

After some troubles yesterday which ended in our having to call off our planned meeting, today Cecilia (the designer from the Werkplaats Typografie with whom I am working on my graduation publication) came through to Amsterdam to see my tiny studio and discuss our plans.

The problem which arises in making a book about my work is that it is quite varied; I have been busy with video, sculpture, photography, text, and other media. To make something which makes sense within the budget available, it seemed necessary to focus on something fairly specific.

We had originally concentrated on my video work, and since our last meeting Cecilia had prepared a concept booklet with frames from four works in four corners of each double page spread.

This seemed to be a bit literal, though, and perhaps a bit limiting in what it would show. That’s not so say that we won’t go down that road, but it would all the same be worthwhile to consider what else is possible.

Cecilia had seen my page about my 3-axis robot on my other website, and suggested that we do something based around this. I was very excited about this idea because I have been really keen to find a way to make a link between this type of personal project, and my art practice. The idea would be to focus not so much on the machine itself, but on the process of building it; like a lot of my other works, this is a work about which the experience of making and doing is perhaps the most important element.

What should hopefully emerge is a description of the process of building the machine and making it do things, along with the mistakes and strange outcomes along the way. I have started by getting it to draw things, and sometimes I get the feeling that when it screws up and draws something very weird, this can be sometimes more interesting than a perfect result.

As mentioned last week, we are to have a space at the Kunstvlaai in May; this will form a platform to present the Here as the Centre of the World project, as well to introduce our forthcoming return trips in September, and also to promote the book about the project (see last week for controversy regarding this last point).

I had volunteered to help with the construction of the stand, which should take the form of a large tower with drawers of various sizes. This is intended to be a physical archive, a representation of the book and the project in a form that will hopefully be interesting and engaging for the public.

Today I had a quick meeting at OT301 with James Beckett, who is curating the exhibition, and his assistant Andre. Owing to the limited amount of money available, the idea is to buy a whole bunch of cheap drawer chests from IKEA, and somehow build them into a tower. This should hopefully appear as a coherent whole, and not as too much of a random jumble.

The original plan was to contrive some sort of mechanism to make one drawer pop out as another would go in, and so on, but James is of the opinion that this is a bit too complicated to be realised in the time and budget available. I was a bit disappointed about this, but on the other hand I do appreciate that he is the one responsible for actually making this happen, and that he has to choose for practicability over optimism.

Monday morning saw the familiar rush, laden with bags and not quite on time, which has characterised one week of every month for me for quite some time now. Of course, there are only a few more DAI weeks left before graduation, and I am beginning to wonder if I will miss this little exodus to the East. It delivers quite a lot of stress and requires more organising than I am really capable of, but it does of course bring in a bit of excitement.

Meetings, meetings, lectures, and the rest were on the cards this week. After last month’s freezing experience in the Balengebouw, and the complaints which resulted from this, we were thankfully back at the DAI for dinner and evening lectures this time.

We had a long and useful discussion on Thursday about our proposed participation in the Kunstvlaai in May. This got a bit heated at times, since what the DAI appears to want is to use it solely as an opportunity to promote the forthcoming book about Here As The Centre Of The World, which we the students felt (if I may say so) to be perhaps a bit exploitative and cynical; we are artists not salesmen. Hopefully this will be resolved in an amicable way.

Apart from that, a few evenings of course staying up late in the Bolwerk and Old Dutch (two of Enschede’s favourite bars with the DAI students), and on Friday the second of the four performance workshops begun last month. This one was lots of fun, with plenty running around pretending to be drunk/in love/tired/cold etc, naturally a bit embarrassing at first but less so as the afternoon wore on. Very nice, but exhausting, and I was glad to get on the train on Friday evening and make it back to my own bed and the chance to sleep until noon the next day.

I have been informed that I have not been posting so many pictures as previously, so here are a few of us acting; I can’t remember what we are supposed to be right at this point.

Oh, and I almost forgot – a strange thing happened on Friday morning. I was the last to get up at the DAI house, and when I made it down to the front door it turned out that it was locked. I didn’t have a key, and didn’t feel like calling up anyone at the DAI and waiting half an hour for them to get back, and so I decided on the (for me) logical option; I jumped out of the window. Not just like that, from one floor up, but first onto the little piece of roof above the front door and then down the pole of a handy street sign commando-style and onto the street below. What was strange was that several people passed by on the street as I was doing this, and not one so much as appeared to notice what was going on.

It’s my flatmate Julien’s birthday on Sunday, and he had gone through to Rotterdam, where his girlfriend Rachel lives, for the weekend.

However, she had plans up her sleeve. She had secretly sent me an email on Thursday inviting a few of us through to a surprise birthday dinner. I am very bad at lying, and so when Julien phoned me up earlier in the day about an unrelated matter, I had to really stop myself saying “see you this evening, then!”. Cat not out of the bag, thankfully.

So, myself, Astrid, and Jae-min turned up at this lovely pancake restaurant in the middle of the woods, and you can imagine the surprise on Julien’s face when we are sitting there as he arrives. Worth the journey, for sure, and the pancakes were nice too.

I have been working on the idea for a new video recently, which will feature me doing things very fast indeed. This will be filmed in a public place, with other people doing normal things at normal speed, and then played back in slow motion. The idea is that I will then appear normal, and the others will appear to be moving veeeeeeerrrry slooowllly (the spell-checker didn’t like those last couple of words very much).

The idea is fairly simple, but actually doing it is less so. It is always this way, as can be seen with my last film project.

Myself and Astrid headed down this morning to the WTC plein next to Amsterdam Zuid station, which is the location that I wanted to use. This is primarily because it has quite a striking architectural appearance, with many long straight lines and sharp perspective, but also because there are always people going past to or from the station and the surrounding buildings, including the unfortunately-named World Trade Centre (WTC).

Well, it didn’t go all that great today, mainly because of the weather. It was a lovely sunny day, too sunny in fact to film in the direction of the station, but more serious was the wind; because the plein is surrounded by several tallish buildings, it funnels and accelerates the wind, making it very difficult for me to do things at normal speed, let alone super fast. For example, one of the things that I would be doing is flicking through the pages of a book, which is of course a bit difficult when the wind keeps blowing the pages back and forth.

After some pointless attempts to get some usable filming done, during which I got very worked up and stressed about all the things that were going wrong, I decided to call it off and begin again another day; next time, do not ignore the part of the weather forecast which says windkracht 5 (“wind force 5″), as I had stupidly done.

I travelled through to Utrecht this evening for a lecture by Dick Hebdige at Casco. The lecture itself was nothing special, but for other reasons it turned out to be a slightly unnerving evening.

Firstly, as I left the cavernous bulk of Hoog Catherijne (the Cumbernauld-esque shopping centre through which you must travel to get out of Utrecht station), there was what looked like a car which had been sprayed with machine-gun fire and set on fire. This turned out to in fact be an advertising stunt by the TV channel Veronica, but it did set the tone for the night, as I shall explain.

Having listened to the lecture, and leaving once it was clear that there was no more beer left, myself and Julien along with some students from Piet Zwart whom he knows set off in search of a squat building in the neighbourhood, which was rumoured to have a bar. This we never found, but on the way witnessed a minor road accident.

What happened was that a pizza delivery lad on a scooter somehow managed to get knocked off his bike by a passing van. In comic style, a police car just happened to drive by at exactly that moment; cue Monty Python style “‘ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, what’s all this ‘ere then?” We tried to help in a pretty ineffectual way by getting his scooter off the ground, but it turned out in any case that he wasn’t too badly hurt, and since it didn’t look like we would be needed as witnesses, we moved on.

About ten minutes later, we were walking down a narrow alley looking for a bar that didn’t look too expensive, when a woman who was leaving a restaurant with a friend suddenly collapsed on the ground right next to me. She ended up also not being in too bad a way, but it did give me the creeps a little; I was just waiting for a piano to fall out of the sky and land next to me or some such thing.

Thankfully I made it back to Amsterdam in one piece.

For most of last year (2007), I was fortunate enough to receive student finance from the Dutch government, despite my non-Dutch nationality. This was because of a little-known law which states that if you are a EU citizen who works for a Dutch company for at least 32 hours per month, you may receive the same student finance as Dutch nationals. Since I worked the during last year at the Sláinte bar,
I was eligible for such funding.

The problem is that now the year is finished, they need supporting evidence for my having worked sufficient hours during each and every month (previously they only checked every three). This was to take the form of a copy of my wage slip from each month.

This would not be so much of a problem in itself, except that I was missing a few of these, and the Sláinte of course closed in December due to a screw-up with the licence. I have already been back and forwards a few times in search of the correct documents from my former employers, a task which has been made more complicated by the fact that the place changed hands at the beginning of November.

Today was my third such visit; this time all that I needed was the salary sheet I never received for last April (yes, almost a year ago). The guy who I spoke to got really annoyed this time, since he really didn’t see how it was his problem that I had never received the correct documents from the former owner. I would have made the point that when you take over a business you also take over responsibility for consequences of what any previous owners may or may not have done, but it didn’t really seem like the best time to do so.

Finally I got him to make a phone call and get the document faxed over to the Sláinte, having explained to him how much money it would cost me if I could not get the correct document. This should have been the end of the story, except that the idiots on the other end faxed through February by mistake, which meant I had to once again plead with him for assistance. Still cursing that it was not his damn problem, he told me that I would have to ring them myself. This I did, the document got faxed over, end of fucking story. At least I hope so.

Courtesy costs nothing, so they say, but it seems some people have other ideas.

Last month, we had a big get-together at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, where it was arranged who we would all work in collaboration with on our graduation publications. Today was my first one-on-one meeting with Cecilia, the student with whom I will be working. The idea is that I will supply the content, and she will provide the graphic design. It’s not so much a catalogue or artist’s book in the conventional sense, but rather a real collaboration to produce something which is in itself an independent work.

I travelled through to Arnhem this morning for a discussion, which I would say went very well and was very productive. We had a long chat about art in general and about my work and attitude to the subject, which shall I hope help towards a better mutual understanding and consensus about how the publication should turn out. It must be said that it is easy in such a conversation to get addicted to the sound of your own voice, and I did certainly get the feeling at times that I was going on and on a bit.

Nevertheless, I was very glad for our discussion and I am very confident that we can work well together. We’ll have another meeting next week in Amsterdam, and I am certainly very curious and excited as to how the project will develop. I don’t have so much experience with collaborative working, and so this will be if nothing else a very educational experience.