Potato Eaters Love Mondrian Too
Potato Eaters Love Mondrian Too
Art and television have always been a painful combination in the Netherlands. Thanks to AVRO broadcasters and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, television has a whole slew of art commentators, but a worthy successor to Pierre Jansen is not yet among them.Renee is as free as a fox on the island of Terschelling. He no longer shoots up or pops pills and no longer sleeps under a dripping privet bush in an Amsterdam park. Renee has a house to live in, even though he still sells newspapers for the homeless outside the supermarket in my street. One step at a time, metre by metre, Renee has expanded his street-paper territory. From a blanket outside the supermarket, he moved up to a table, a chair, a parasol, a bench for Donna, his dog, food bowls filled, brooms, a newspaper rack and cash boxes. From here, Renee rules the street – my street – with unabashed self-confidence. ‘When are we going to wipe the art world off on our boot?’From the pavement, Renee yells at anyone discourteous enough not to get off their bicycles, sending them into the street (‘If I see you run into a child, I’ll shoot you dead!’). Renee sweeps the pavement, puts trade school kids who bother the cashiers out of the store. In exchange, he cashes in on dog food, microwave dinners and sometimes a beer at the pub. Renee’s best deal, however, is parked cars.Whenever I see him making his rounds, the sheer bravado with which Renee flaunts his disdain for the parking policies of the city of Amsterdam makes me laugh. The system, as Renee once explained to me, is simple. Once every hour, he walks along the parked cars and sees whose parking time has expired. He helps anyone likely to get caught by buying a ten-cent ticket and putting it under the windscreen wiper – with a friendly greeting from Renee and his dog. If you have guests, by the way, just give Renee a sign in advance. For five euros, he will watch out for their car all day long.Renee is too clever for the traffic wardens. Shoppers are delighted: tips in the cash box by the supermarket, thank you. Renee could not care less how things are supposed to be done and is vociferous about letting everyone know it. Meanwhile, all on his own, he deals with troublemakers, tearaways and litterers. I could not pretend to walk in his shoes. On a cold, wet Saturday afternoon, as I was watching a new AVRO art programme on television and hearing Renee screaming in the street below, it dawned on me that this was precisely what is missing in Dutch TV shows on art – someone like Renee! –somebody who can make everything out of nothing, someone who follows his nose, someone who is utterly fearless and happily immune to authority, whether it is dressed in a police uniform or an art uniform. I know: complaining and making fun of television art programmes is a long-standing Dutch folk tradition. They are too intellectualistic, or they are too simplistic. The décor is always a horror and the cameraman sets to work on a mix of vodka and speed. Guests have nothing to say and the presenters stammer through their lines. The ritual benchmark for all this is Pierre Jansen, the man who explained art to millions of viewers who stayed glued to their sets every Sunday evening in the 1960s and 1970s. And it was really true: thanks to Pierre Jansen, potato eaters learned to love Mondrian. Today’s Bart Ruttens, Ann Demeesters, Hans den Hartog Jagers, Valentijn Byvancks, Joost Karhofs and Cornald Maases cannot hold a candle to the late, lamented Pierre. These makers of art programmes are no street hounds. They are no pleasure-loving hedonists, no hotshots with substance. Nowhere do they defend a striking, let alone controversial standpoint. And might they do so in their ordinary lives, once in front of the camera they play their acolyte role with perfect aplomb. They ask sympathetic questions while looking admiringly at the art and those who make it, and their selections dutifully follow the agendas of the museums and other established art institutions. Is there a Ger van Elk exhibition in Amsterdam? Then Van Elk will explain to us that the content of his work is primarily an ‘anti-approach’. The interviewer’s commentary is, ‘Yes, yes, yes….’ If Christiaan Bastiaans is showing at the Kröller-Müller Museum, then, without a whisper of criticism, the artist can freely ramble on about his work, whose qualities are inconsistent. This way, there is never the risk of a counterbalanced discussion between two individuals, a conversation that – just maybe – might end in disagreement or argument, one for which viewers would stay peeled to their seats from start to finish. In the United Kingdom, there is such a person. Matthew Collings is extremely successful as the author of books on Brit Art, a movement originally dear to him, but which he later grew to despise, and with television programmes in which he presents his personal commentary on the art world. See the fox chase the hares! Issues such as these are never – not ever – broached by the producers of the Dutch programmes, undoubtedly because they are all part of the same establishment. With Collings, we get a clear, occasionally hilarious and sometimes even toe-curling image of power structures in the contemporary art scene, from artists who contribute to it and artists who do not, from fresh discoveries to old masters with the cobwebs newly brushed aside. Everything is always subjective, and that is of course what it is all about: Collings’ style; Collings’ taste. Matthew Collings is the hand that leads the viewer into the unknown. You follow him whether you want to or not. Here in the Netherlands, a hand reaches out, but it does it so feebly and is so grey and indistinct that you prefer to scan the weekly art reviews in the paper or pick up the latest book by Nelleke Noordervliet. Indeed, a great deal would be gained if someone were to step up to the camera for a change and ask, ‘Why is contemporary art so confoundedly complicated?’ Or, to apply the credo of a simple street seller like Renee, ‘When are we going to wipe the art world off on our boot?’Lucette ter Borg is an art critic and writer based in Amsterdam.Translation: Mari Shields
Lucette ter Borg