The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

Happy New Year! It’s 2009. Christ, the last year went past pretty quick. Oh well.

Since last year’s attempt to organise a part for Hogmanay was such a disaster, this time the plan was to go elsewhere. Laura had suggested Pakhuis Wilhelmina, a venue next to the IJ, and for want of anything better to suggest I was happy to go along with this.

I must say that I really liked the place, its kitschy look reminding me of soul nights in the Woody back in Glasgow, bringing more than a little nostalgia with it. The music was brilliant, with the sole exception the appearance of some nervous and over-earnest guy with a guitar at one point just as the atmosphere was getting good. More one for a quiet Sunday evening I would have thought, and not the biggest party (excepting Koninginnedag, of course) of the year.

Once again, the strange Dutch tradition of trying to maim and kill each other with fireworks as the clocks struck 12. Good fun, but my attention span for this sort of thing lasts about five minutes before the desire to return inside for a beer takes over!

Didn’t stay too late in the end, but still had fun. If things go according to plan, I may be in Hong Kong for the next New Year. A lot to come before then, though.

Whist building the huge green archive for the Kunstvlaai the other week, we had been under the impression that it would end up in a skip afterwards. Accordingly, not much attention had been given to dismantling it in such a way that it could be assembled once again.

However, there arose the possibility that it may (or may not) make another appearance, which meant some hasty arranging of what to do with it. Everything had to be cleared out starting at 6pm today (Sunday), which basically involved trying to get the thing separated into the pieces that it was in when it was built, cleaning off all the Vaseline which I had smeared on the moving parts (again without thought for what would happen to it), and get it all loaded into a van. I would rather not have had to do all this since my dad has been visiting the past few days (on which more later), but since I built all the animation mechanisms I was worried that if I was not present it would be quite difficult to take apart.

We ended up having a big enough team though to be able to get everything dismantled, cleaned, and cleared up in a relatively short space of time. As it happened the van was late in arriving anyway, meaning that my earlier stressed state was in fact unnecessary.

Once it was all loaded up for transport to Daniëlle’s studio, I made my excuses and left; I have done more than my fair share of the work on this project!

After all our hard work this week, the day had finally come for the opening. We had briefly discussed what to wear yesterday, with the conclusion being that an officey-type look was a good idea. I need no excuse to dress up, and so it was that I spent the whole morning rushing around Amsterdam trying to find a second-hand suit that would fit me. Eventually I succeeded, finding a beautiful old ’70s number, a little too big but close enough.

The opening was at 4pm, before which myself, Emily, and James arrived and made sure everything was ready. The idea was that we would be making leaflets to hand out during the opening, using the photocopier, stapler, and other office equipment available; hence the outfits. In reality, the whole evening became quite chaotic, with the electricity being knocked out (seemingly by our photocopier), and there being in any case huge numbers of people and a lot of noise. It was all very exciting, although not really the time or the place to actually think about art very much. The name “Kunstvlaai” means “art-tart”, more or less, which is not too bad a description; a crazy mess of people trying to make themselves noticed amongst the countless other people doing just the same.

The evening flew by and soon it was chucking out time, meaning a welcome break from the crowds and a chance to relax with some wine and pizza on the grass behind the Westergasfabriek (the venue of the Kunstvlaai). The air was thick with barbecue smoke as people enjoyed the amazingly good weather that we have been having the past few weeks.

Later on, we had a few beers outside on the terrace, at last able to take it easy after a very hectic week. I have certainly enjoyed the build-up to the Kunstvlaai very much, and it was very satisfying to see so many people interested in what we were doing and to be able to explain what the project is about. The idea of course behind all this was to promote the forthcoming book about Here As The Centre Of The World, a book which is unfortunately still non-existent. Time will tell if we have done our job in this respect.

Thanks to James and Emily for some of the photos here.

After finishing as much as possible of the construction of the archive at the workshop in Weesp, Wednesday morning was time to move the thing to Amsterdam. It’s 3 metres tall and weighs who knows how much, which made this a bit of a challenge. Basically it needed to be disassembled, taken down three floors, and fitted into the back of a hire van. This was not made any easier by the fact that we could not use the lift in the building due to an argument between persons totally unconnected to the project…

In the end it was not too much trouble to get it packed in and sped down the motorway to the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. This was a pretty speedy journey because the time limit for deliveries was 12 o’clock – as it turned out, we got through the barriers at 11:55.

First everything had to be hauled into the huge space of the Gashouder, a former gasometer which is the venue in which we are situated. Next it was a case of trying to work out how to put it back together again, followed by work on sorting out the many small problems with it and finishing off the animation mechanism.

By Thursday evening, the whole mechanism was working pretty damn good, if I may say so myself, and should look even better once my colleagues have done their bit and filled the drawers with content. Tomorrow (Saturday) is the opening of the Kunstvlaai, and I can’t wait to see the reaction of the public.

Myself and most of the rest of the 2nd year students at the DAI have been given the task of helping with preparations for the DAI’s stand at the Kunstvlaai 2008 in Amsterdam. The concept for this, thought up by guest curator James Beckett, was for a large archive of drawers which would document the progress up to now of the Here As The Centre Of The World project.

My part in this was to help with the physical construction of the archive, or specifically with one area which I was particularly enthusiastic about – a system which would make most if not all of the drawers interlinked, so that as one drawer was pulled out, another one somewhere else on the structure would magically slide in, and vice versa. Easier said than done.

I had gone through to Weesp on Friday to see progress on construction, and was quite stressed upon finding that it had not really started. This was a big problem for me, because I couldn’t really start on my part until most of the rest had been completed. Today though things were much further forward, and I was really impressed by what the boys had been doing.

What followed was a backbreaking day of kneeling, sawing, hammering, and drilling, in order to get the mechanism I had foolhardily promised to work. At the end of the day, about half of it was working; not too bad.

Afterwards we sat beside a canal and ate pizza as a strange churning, gurgling sound emanated from some pumping equipment nearby; it’s funny how such a sound can be very relaxing after a day of such hard work.