Artist’s despatch 1
Going Dutch



AMSTERDAM
OCTOBER 
2011

I submitted a short text, different to this, that was rejected by ARTQUEST team for good reason. As they made clear on interview, and through intermittent emails over the first few weeks of my stay here in Amsterdam, the purpose of these quote-unquote reports is to orientate other artists visiting the city or staying here for any length of time towards artist supplies shops, galleries, festivals, etc., etc. that will somehow nourish them. I’m writing this with barely 4 weeks to go till I pack up my strangely dividing and doubling possessions here. What was good about arriving here was that, though well stocked with glasses, towels, bedding, tvs, printers, and so on, it felt breezy. Intimidating blank walls and a vast studio that I’ve hardly filled, save for drying clothes. I’ve put up pictures and pieces of writing and taken some down embarrassedly when other’s have come over to visit. My mum, for example. My sister, my wife and daughter and daughter’s Godmother from Strasbourg; my five brothers from Scotland, and this Friday another four from London. I encouraged this, these visits from friends and family, to begin with and saw it as an excuse, the time, to visit the larger museums, tourist spots, restaurants and bars that I wouldn’t normally on my own. Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly happy with my own company and since being here have never once felt lonely. Perhaps once but that was more to do with a dull ache that was by no means metaphoric. This is odd because I have a wife and young daughter whom both I adore, but my missing them is not loneliness. It’s just missing. Also, this time for me has been like catching up on all those activities one does before parenthood that all recent parents tell future parents to do as matter of urgency. This one activity, for me, is going to the cinema. 

I’ve rinsed the English-language or English-subtitle films here at several good cinemas. These are: The Movies in the Jordaan where I saw Melancholia on my second night here. I shit you not, a septuagenarian farted as the credits rolled and broke our dumbstruck mood. Rather than being embarrassed, the man, with white hair and shirt, a bona fide gentleman, clapped his hands together and swung them in double pumps either side of his head triumphantly. People clapped and cheered. Those waiting to come in for the next screening were, I’m sure, perplexed to see an audience exiting a Lars von Trier’s film so smile-eyed. Third night I went across the Ij river on the ferry to the new EYE Film Institute but I quickly realised the new building has not yet been skinned and nor were there any staff inside the half-lit foyer. My hat blew off in the wind tunnel lot which added to my ridicule. I did, however, find the still-functioning EYE in the Vondelpark (wonderful aural pun with the ‘v’ pronounced ‘f’, of course, in Dutch) where I spent an evening with the exceptionally talented and that-night-hacking- designer Sam de Groot and artist Jeroen Eisinga (a film of his not shown but good, Het Hijgende Schaap, trans.The Panting Sheep, 1997) who’s recent film was screened after a build-up of several short films by Chris Burden (‘Shoot’, 1971), Fritz Lang’s ‘M’, (1931) Godard’s ‘Contempt’ (1963) and others. The conversation between him and Bart Rutten, curator at the still-closed-for-refurbishment, Stedelijkmuseum, was in Dutch and I could only understand what each was saying in my wooly, half-sleep, eight per-cent stupor. The film, Springtime, 2011, shows Eisinga partaking in a version of the side-show practice of bee bearding: the queen bee is fastened round the chin of the keeper and the pheromones she emits attracts the rest of the colony to swarm around her, covering the host in her prickle footed subjects. The film was shown in 35mm projection and is mesmerising. The artist looked like a wax Gollum. A chubby God. I didn’t have the courage to break the register and ask in English (though no-one would care, save me with my British credentials): How warm was it in there?

Other films I’ve been to see and where: Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin at Pathé City (as part of the Amsterdam Filmweek, where they show winners of all the major international film festivals; an odd premise, I thought, for a not moderately funded city-wide film programme); Drive, also at City; Pina at The Movies, again, where incidentally they have an excellent restaurant and delightful staff, so much so that when my sister faked a birthday, she received double portions of pie with no shame. “It’s your birthday tomorrow,” she propounded; The Bully Project, a documentary of peer-to-peer bullying across US schools shown here as part of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). From the first scene of a father nuzzling the neck of his one-year-old son on VHS, cut to a now older dad in HD, bleary eyed, I understood and wept. I have never wept or heard a room full of people weep so hard and for so long as in this film, and still I rated it Good rather than Great or Excellent on my Audience’s Choice return. It is good though. Recounting some of the scenes anecdotally has had similar teary effects since to a number of large-hearted, perhaps too sentimental humans. More films: Barfly (1987) at the Rialto; a dreadful, dingy production of Charles Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical script with a chin-jutting Mickey Rourke and still fine though waxen in every sense Faye Dunaway as a barstool whore. I read Barry Miles’ biography of Bukowski in my first week here and this seemed like a neat way to end the endeavour, which it was in a rather fizzled way. I did the same for Joe Dunthorne’s (writer) Submarine after re-reading his chap book of poetry (Faber New Poets No. 5, 2010) for Faber & Faber. And, too, Lust for Life, the 1956 biopic of Vincent van Gogh. The Van Gogh Museum is one of few museums not under restoration or refurbishment in Amsterdam (at time of writing, much of the Rijksmuseum has been closed since 2003 and all of the Stedelijk, save for the odd temporary thing, has been closed since 2004. But ah! Add to the mix that the Van Gogh Museum is due to close next October 2012 till the following year and Museumplein seems fated. However, government cuts are hitting hard here as well as everywhere else on the continent and much of these continued closures can be attributed to wheeze-inducing budget constrictions. Read more here). They’ve done well in contextualising Van Gogh’s work on the lower floors of the building, a building, incidentally, designed by Merkelbach, whom also was the principle architect behind the Tetterode’s modern extension; an example of Dutch industrial-functionalist style and my home till the end of December. (A Tetterode-fantasist and Briton, David Carr Smith, has a site about the history of this remarkable building). The building celebrated its 30th anniversary of being occupied on my second weekend and was saluted by my five Scottish brothers by the downing of several one-euro beers and some at the Trut [gay disco Bilderdijkstraat 165, every Sunday-evening from 10.00 / 11.00 till very late] by downing their peppermint-coloured underpants). The VGM’s upper galleries show more of his most famous works, though only a handful of his time in Arles, France, which Vincente Minnelli (a name, I’ve found, I enjoy saying aloud) -’s film features in spades as Kirk Douglas, dimpled chin disguised excellently by a fine red beard, squeezes out ochre yellow oils in seizure brought on by a fury of labour and colour. 

I have begun to work, however, and particular excursions have featured in two of the few poems I’ve written here so far. One, a visit to the Noodermarkt down on the corner of Westerstraat in the Jordaan; a food and flea market which recalls Saturday scenes of Stoke Newington without the scores of hipster mums and roll-top beanie musicians, ah, the dreadful irony. And two, Koningsoord Abbey out by the town of Berkel-Enschot. Via friends exhibiting as part of Dutch Design Week 2011 in Eindhoven, I spent a night in the now abandoned monastery. An eerie experience assuaged only by sliding-sock badminton in the former refectory, booming discourteously with each thwack of the cock. The monastery was established in 1937 and was deconsecrated in 2009 when all the nuns left to a new convent in Arnhem. Similar to schemes in the UK, a property management company now rents out several spaces within the monastery to artists at a hugely reduced rate to protect and keep up this (listed) building through occupation. The experience was the antithesis to the one the previous afternoon on a visit to Piet Hein Eek’s vast studio-cum-factory-cum-retail outlet in Eindhoven. Of Koningsoord, I wrote ? in my correctly rejected first submission to this project ? about walking with my daughter down a colonnade of elms. More accurately, I wrote about my desktop image of me walking with my daughter down a colonnade of elms. It was wildly sentimental, the moment and the poem.

More on galleries etc. in the next report.
Siôn Parkinson







































© Siôn Parkinson 2011