The Garden of Unreality – 1. The Promise

Introduction

In the late nineteenth century the city of Amsterdam jumped the bounds of its age-old ramparts and began to encroach the surrounding countryside.
The wealthy denizens of the inner city sought their escape from the daily bustle and reeking canals and built their villas along the southern edge of William’s Park, a newly laid out greening for strolling and horse riding, later to become the Vondelpark.
Within the span of three decades an area of roughly a square mile crisscrossed with ditches and patched with old industries, lumber yards, windmills and vegetable gardens, was transformed into a spacious square with two musea¹ and a concert hall² and a grid of adjacent streets, which was bound to grow into a district called ‘Amsterdam South’.

In one of the earliest streets, Palestrina³ Street⁴, just behind the concert hall, I lived for several decades. Around the year 2000 it was a century old and one of my neighbours decided it deserved a memorial book, which was published in 2004.
I ran a street blog in those days and in the wake of the book the editor and I kept up a lively exchange of posts on the inhabitants of what seems to be the last house of our little street but, actually, is part of the sidewall of a house around the corner.
Our neighbours enjoyed our ‘investigations’ knowing them full well for wholly imaginary.

In the course of our correspondence I invented a find of a bundle of scruffy papers in the trash in front of this spurious dwelling. Peeling them apart I happened on a tale of an enigmatic disappearance of two children.

Part I – The Promise

We were staying with our aunt in Amsterdam. We were seven and nine then, my little sister and I. One day, aunt had to do some shopping and she told us:
“Li’l brother, li’l sister, come and listen to me. Aunt has to go out this afternoon to fit a new dress. There’ll be a gala, shortly, and she’s nothing apt to wear. You two must stay home, but promise aunt one thing: you shall not leave the house or you may go astray and never be able to find your way back again.”
We sincerely promised her to remain inside and after serving us tea and cookies aunt kissed us both and left, locking the frontdoor on the outside.

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¹ The National Gallery (1876-1885), in Dutch, ‘Het Rijksmuseum’, and
the Municipal Museum (1891–1895), in Dutch, ‘het Stedelijk Museum’, its new wing a.k.a. ‘the Tub’ (2012).
² The Concert Building (1883–1888), in Dutch, ‘Het Concertgebouw’.
³ Named after the Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi (c. 1525–1594) from Palestrina, Italy, the ancient Praeneste.
⁴ The last house on Palestrina Street as seen with Google Street View.

Amsterdam Sculpture Exhibition 2015

In the southern, prewar part of the city of Amsterdam there's a grand boulevard called 'Apollolaan'. You'll find it in the street map running from the lower right side to mid left, parallel to the blue strip of water. Click it to open Google Maps for a more extensive view.

At the lower right corner of the map you can read 'Apollohal', a sports centre. The 'Streamer' I wrote about in my post of March 27 is just opposite this hall, between the two lanes. The Apollo Boulevard, which runs for about a mile, has two one-way lanes enclosing a strip of turf and bushes of, I guess, forty feet in width.

For several years now, on this strip, there has been an annual summer exhibition of sculptures of international artists and the 2015 edition has been opened by our former queen Beatrix, recently. I thought you might like to have a look. Open this link of Art Zuid and watch the show. Slides will refresh automatically. Here's a preview.

Streamer

In my former post I showed you some pictures of a work of art, ‘Open Ended’, by Richard Serra, a steel colossus, once dominating the garden of the old Amsterdam Municipal Museum, now diminished to mere ornamental status in the shadows of a towering, vinyl monstrosity.

Though, in a way, I still like it, the most appealing trait of the rigid, slightly-tilted uprights being their warm, reddish-brown surfaces, especially in bright sunlight. On overcast or rainy days, the structure casts a drab, almost menacing impression by the sheer monumentality of its naked steel parts. Under those conditions, it seems as if the artist’s main intent was to overawe the beholders, to make them feel insignificant beside the glory of his creation, a trait not uncommon in monumental artists and architects of any epoch past and present.

Which reminded me of a different sculpture of oxidized steel, also in Amsterdam, that seems to mock the inherent rigidity of everything ferrous,

here observed from an opposite, less enticing angle, but the lightness of it still exposed by its shadow.

In passing one’s at once surprised by the frivolity of a ribbon of steel bent in such a way as to provoke a feeling of joy and liberation elicited by the paradox of movement expressed in matter. No attempt at grandiosity here, only an artist’s genuine endeavor at catching the meaning of freedom regained by stubborn resistance. The first time I saw it I had to smile.

Freedom regained is exactly what it stands for. From May 1940 till May 1945 Holland was occupied by German Nazi forces, ‘de Moffen’, as we called them. While they were still around, on May 8th, 1945, a vanguard of a thousand Canadian cavalry entered the city of Amsterdam from the south, and liberated its citizens from the Nazi terror. From many a window flew the national colors, red-white-blue, and the orange streamer of the Royal House.

In commemoration, the Canadian invasion was repeated in 1980, and at this occasion the sculpture, named ‘Amsterdam thanks her liberators’, was ceremoniously unveiled by the Mayor and lieutenant colonel Bell Irving of the Canadian Army.

The artist was Jan de Baat, an autodidact, Dutch sculptor who is characterized by his own words in this web page about the monument, where you’ll find several pictures of this joyful, debonair sculpture from different angles. The page is in Dutch, so I’ll translate the salient parts for you.

Wak van licht en lucht / A blowhole of light and sky
“In the indicated place I settled myself on the turf, looked up and saw this enormous blowhole of light and sky. Almost nowhere in Amsterdam an equal place is to be found. ‘I need to reach out into that space,’ was the first thought that came up. And then followed the idea: I wanted a streamer in that blowhole.”

Werkwijze / Course of action
“I wanted to know how a streamer waves. I rented a big blower and connected it to pipes by hoses. I suspended strips of paper, rubber, sailcloth, etc. I made them wave and flutter from different angles and filmed them. So doing I obtained hundreds of black-and-white slides, which I projected upon the wall. The sequel was almost dramatic. I sat down at the table with my wife and said: ‘Make me a mug of coffee, dear, for I seem stuck.’ I took pencil and paper to sketch the cause of the obstruction, put down some lines and… suddenly, I had drawn it! I had become such kind of streamer myself that, at once, I could put it on paper freehand.”

Jan de Baat (1921 - 2010)
“I’m a monumentalist. This means I don’t incorporate personal issues into my sculptures, but I aim at touching the beholder with a thing of beauty. Like, when walking in a wood, you may think: ‘What a lovely tree,’ as such I hope people will experience my sculptures. However, I’m an abstract artist, so my sculptures are abstract.”

In my case, it definitely worked that way.

Walking home

When I was in my early twenties I worked at a private bank on one of Amsterdam’s famous ‘grachten’ (17th century canals). In the morning I took a streetcar to go to work, but in the afternoon or early evening I used to walk back home, which took the better part of an hour.
That time was well spent, on which I'll dwell shortly.

Passing by the Spiegelgracht (Mirror Canal) I headed for the Rijksmuseum (National Museum),

went through the underpass,

which opens unto Museum Square

that stretches to the southwest as far as the Concertgebouw (Concert Hall).

There I took the street beside it - on the left in the photo -

to continue to where I then lived. Often enough, though, I went by different routes, through the Vondelpark, e.g.,

but those were detours that took slightly longer.

Of course, many sights then were different. The underpass of the Rijksmuseum sported no inside glass panes, but solid brick walls; Museum Square was a broad thoroughfare called, mockingly, ‘the shortest motorway in the Netherlands’ (photo 1992).

No fountain on the grounds, no extension of the Van Gogh Museum in its center,

and no ridiculous ‘bathtub’ eyesore to hide the historic 'Stedelijk' (Municipal Museum) from view.
Read 'The New York Times' art critic, Michael Kimmelman's Dec. 2012 article, Why is this Museum shaped like a tub? Priceless.

Instead, the Stedelijk had a secluded garden, through which I liked to stroll in passing,

with a public sandbox,

a fountain where some mad contraption of Jean Tinguely spurted jets of water into the pool in front of the restaurant terrace and there was this sculpture, 'Open Ended', by Richard Serra

standing in the center of the garden - as you can spot in the aerial photo. When you step inside the structure and look upward, you’ll see a perfect triangle of sky. It really is huge, but now, in its new location - scroll back up to the picture of the Van Gogh Museum - optically dwarfed by the monstrous ‘bathtub’.
On a side note, make a mental effort to flip the triangle to the front of the picture. The graphic impression is even more astounding.

Walking home from the office I took advantage of this spare hour to rehearse the conjugations of classical Greek verbs. Not exactly for fun, though under conditions as splendid any mental activity would have passed for a pastime, but in the course of my taking evening classes to finish grammar school.
Being familiar with Latin and Greek, plain English, to me, was still a very foreign language. It’s hard to imagine, these days, but in my youth French was the language of preference. It was taught on a voluntary basis from the fourth grade of elementary school, but English? Never.

When I was in evening class I read ‘In de Ban van de Ring’ (Lord of the Rings) in Dutch and was enchanted by it. Later, when I stumbled upon a copy of ‘The Hobbit’ in an international bookshop, I decided to take the plunge and read it in English. That must have been my first dip into English literature in the original. Soon I found a copy of Tennyson’s collected poems in a secondhand bookstall in the ‘Oudemanhuispoort’ on the University’s premises.

From it I retained a lifelong dedication to ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ - which I translated into Dutch in lyrical prose, published as a free iBook, recently - and to ‘The Lady of Shalott’, which I learned by heart, all one hundred and seventy one lines of it. Need I tell you I rehearsed its nineteen stanzas many times while walking home from the office?

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the fields the road runs by
      To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
      The island of Shalott.

The full poem can be read here.

Living off the waste land

Deer steak from the Waterleidingduinen [Dune resort of the Amsterdam Water Board], wine from Vondel Park *), wild rabbit from Westpoort industrial estate, anything on your plate can be of urban provenance.

Imagine the shelves of supermarkets emptying fast, local food stores shutting down for days, or even weeks. It's not that improbable, a pandemic of pig flu, or a truckers' strike can do the job. Where would us city-dwellers turn to for our supper?

Should we savour sauteed tulip bulbs, like our grand-parents did during the starvation winter of WW II? Or would we resort to the oldest ways of food providing, and revive our dormant hunter-gatherer skills? Even in the built-up areas of our major cities there's ample opportunity for urban hunters and gatherers to catch a furry, or feathery friend, and to take home a rich harvest of fresh and healthy veggies and herbs for free.

I gathered from the web site of 'Het Parool', an Amsterdam daily, an article about urban foraging by an artistic couple, Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinello. Wietske is of Tasmanian birth, but of Dutch parentage. In her former life she was exhibiting in art galleries in Australia, but as of today she and Matteo have become hunter-gatherers in the Amsterdam outback.
Sander Overeinder, chef of restaurant 'As' [reminiscent of 'axis', as well as of 'Ashes to ashes', definitely not of 'ass'!], served their booty, diced and sliced to culinary standards, to a jury of artists and natural scientists.

The four-course experimental dinner consisted of:
1. a consommé of Chinese mitten crab, fished from the 'IJ' [~pron. 'eye'] in Amsterdam's western harbour area;
2. a fresh salad of hawthorn, comfrey, and lime-tree leaves, collected in the 'Amsterdamse Bos' *), a vast park to the south-west of the city;
3. and to add something of substance, collars of eel from the Petroleumhaven [litt. 'Kerosene Harbour', but it's only a name].
Some ingredients had to be bought, though: risotto rice, shallots, and lemons.

"We've been hunting with Piet Ruyter," said Wietske, "one of the last remaining eel fishers. And Martin Melchers, the city ecologist, showed us where to hunt for mitten crabs and American river crayfish. The vegetal components of the dishes I collected myself in Wester Park *) and Sloter Park."

*) Short descriptions of Amsterdam parks.