The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

Following our meeting last week in Amsterdam, it was time for another meeting about my graduation publication. This time it was in Arnhem, and in the presence of Emily Pethick of Casco, who is editing and overseeing the publications of all the DAI students. To recap, the idea is that we all produce a publication in collaboration with a student from the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem.

It’s about an hour and a half travel time to reach the Werkplaats, for a meeting that lasted half an hour. All the same it was fairly useful and encouraging. Still no concrete idea of how exactly the publication will look, but that will come in time.

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!

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.

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.

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.

In the ongoing saga of the conclusion to the HATCOTW (Here As The Centre Of The World) project, myself and a number of other second year students from the DAI held a meeting today to discuss proposals for what it is that we will end up doing during our (short) trips to either Diyarbakir, Beirut, Taipei, Damascus, or Khartoum in September. We had begun to talk about a specific proposal during the last DAI week, and today sat down to try and get some consensus about what this would be in some detail.

The core of the proposal, which Emily had taken the time to set out in a written statement, is that during these short stays (which we shall do in pairs), we shall prepare an “in-situ publication”, an on-the-spot, spontaneous, untranslated, once-only printed work to complement the formally-published book which is currently in preparation. The motivation for this is that with the original purpose for our visits being to “present” this already-prepared book, there arose a real desire to instigate something not so finished, finalised, and closed off. Since the entire point of the project revolved around the idea of collaboration and inclusiveness, it seemed a little odd to conclude it in such a way. Our idea was to address this perceived anomaly in a manner which seeks to compliment rather than compete with the book in preparation. Let’s hope that our proposals are given serious consideration by the co-ordinators of the project.

A bit of a change in the timetable at the DAI this week; we began on Monday with the private group mentor class, followed by a day of discussion relating to the looming menace of the thesis on Tuesday, and studio visits on Wednesday.

An unfortunate turn of events is that it is no longer possible for us to eat in the evening at the DAI – something to do with cooking not being allowed in the building. This means that we all had to decamp every evening to the Balengebouw on the other side of town, which was freezing cold and not exactly very hospitable in any case. The worst of this was sitting through lectures after dinner; it’s pretty hard to concentrate on even a very good lecture when your feet are freezing.

As the week wore on some practical measures were taken to deal with this, but it was still far from ideal. Gabriëlle promised to do something about this before the next DAI week – let’s hope so.

On Thursday we had a long meeting about the future of the Here As The Centre Of The World project, which should see us return to the five cities visited earlier (Beirut, Damascus, Diyarbakir, Taipei, and Khartoum) in small groups this autumn. There had been quite a lot of pessimism and confusion in the group about what exactly we were to be doing there, since the brief as originally announced was simply to present the book which will be shortly published about the project. Going all that way, and having contributed a significant amount to the costs of the project, it seemed like a very half-hearted, disappointing, and poorly thought through conclusion. However, we managed to discuss some proposals which represent an alternative and more active and engaged way of dealing with these forthcoming visits. I am personally a lot more enthusiastic now that there exist proposals for something to be done with the trips.

Finally, Friday marked an interesting departure in that it involved doing something active at the DAI. There were two workshops arranged, one in video and the other in performance. I chose to take part in the second of these, which was lead by Sanne van Rijn. It turned out to be a very enjoyable afternoon of improvised routines and discussion, and a very refreshing alternative to listening all day or waiting on your turn to be visited by a guest tutor. We have three more of these workshops, and I am certainly looking forward to the next one.

To graduate from the DAI, we need to have produced three things;

1. A website
2. A thesis
3. A publication

The first of these two are fairly self-explanitory, but it is the third which is a bit different. The idea is that we work in collaboration with a student from the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, a sister school of the DAI which offers a masters programme in graphic design and typography. We have a small budget (about €1000) each to produce and print a publication (book(let), poster, etc) which should be about our work as artists. Of course, it remains open what form this will take, but the idea is certainly that the publication become something of a work in itself, rather than simply a catalogue.

We have had several meetings about this earlier, but today was our first visit to the Werkplaats. We would present our work to the designers, they would do likewise, and then the working collaborations would be arranged. I have to admit that I found the whole experience quite stressful, like a job interview or application process that lasts a whole bloody day. The idea is that after everybody had shown their work, we would all list our preferred partners with a first, second, and third choice, and hopefully this would match up fairly neatly. My biggest and most paranoid fear was of course that nobody would want to work with me at all, or only somebody whose work I could not stand, but in the end it turned out to be pretty OK; I was paired with a woman from Brazil named Cecilia who was in fact my first choice to work with. I hope she will find it not too difficult working with me!

This whole horrible process took most of the day, after which time we had a discussion about how we would proceed with working together; I have very little experience of collaboration, and thought it was important to say so. What I find the most difficult is knowing where the boundaries lie between my remit and hers. For example, I am supposed to supply the content while the designer takes care of the, well, design. Since I myself have a background in design before I became involved in visual art, and since I always love to get involved in every detail of the things I am making, this is very weird for me. I do very much hope though that it works out.