The last few days have felt pretty uneventful; Amsterdam has a very boring sheen to it. There's no reason it should be totally uninteresting, but I can't muster up the enthusiasm. It could just be that I'm over traveling entirely. I'm sitting in a hotel room with heavy black out curtains drawn over this massive glass window that runs the length of the room, because if I don't close them everyone who walks by the hotel can see me sitting here. This is what we call a Major Design Flaw.
The opening for the exhibition was fine. I milled about texting Zoe while they christened the museum and interviewed the curators, all in Dutch. I felt that it couldn't possibly count as rude to be texting when there was no translation. After the remarks they had this black drumline band with kind of carnivale style dancers march the length of the out-of-use munitions factory that houses the institution. This was pretty funny; all these Dutch people clamoring to get a video of them. It stopped being funny when I thought about it for another second and realized the scene was indistinguishable from something that would happen in the US.
I ran into a woman, J, a nice curator who I'd been missing emails from for at least a year. A bit desperate for someone to latch onto, I wandered around with her a while and hoped she didn't think I was annoying. We eventually sat outside on the patio overlooking some body of water and talked about institutional politics and her life in Amsterdam. She expressed a wistfulness about the reliance on government money in the Netherlands, and said it would be so great to have more private funding like in the US. She was the second young art person on this trip to say something to this effect–the other being L from Madrid. I told her that the grass is always greener and it sounded meaner than I'd intended.
I was meant to meet with this important woman, H*, while in town. When I arrived at the opening Liv texted me and said H would be there; so, I spent a lot of time anxiously scanning for her. Finally, fortified by my reasonably successful 30 minutes of social interaction with the young curator, I introduced myself. H enthusiastically hugged me and we sat down to chat. She introduced me to some guy she was standing with and he quizzed me for a while about my interests and my practice and I felt a bit like some sort of wind up doll, but it was okay. Then H and I talked for a while, just the two of us, about art and dirty money. I was a little drunk and probably talked too much. At one point I said, "oh my god; I'm talking your ear off I'm sorry." Which was lamer than just talking incessantly. Anyway, during our chat, all these people kept approaching her and saying they were big fans and fuck the haters (H has been on the receiving end of some distinctly unfavorable press over the last few years). She was very gracious about it, but it seemed to be frustrating.
She wanted to see my video so I took her inside to show her. We stood in front of the video and I told her I was a bit over explaining the piece to people because at this point it feels like just a study for future work and I don't care for found footage. She seemed to get that and then we talked about Arthur Jafa and Mark Leckey and music for a bit and she seemed impressed with my take. She and her friends asked if I wanted a ride back to town, and I took them up on it.
This ended up meaning that her collector friend's driver was going to take us to this old school bar for a night cap. We drove really fast while the collector blasted 70s Dutch hits from the front seat and told us that this was his city. At the bar, this old woman with fishy plastic surgery lips and a pink tee with leopard print text that said something in Dutch served us Jenever, which we then drank with our hands clasped behind our backs as was the tradition. The collector told me that H spoke highly of me and listed the last few artists she'd spoken so highly of as if to say hang on to your hat. This was flattering and H seemed bashful, like she'd been outed for liking me. He also told me he didn't believe in the concept of Black Art, only in artists who are black and in art. This was the second time I'd heard this distinction drawn so aggressively that day–once by a white man and now by this black guy–and I wondered what about Dutch language or culture engendered such an intense stance on the matter and then I wondered whether I was giving culture too much credit and this was just a thing people say. I found myself nodding and agreeing with him. "Sure," I said. I thought I was humoring him, but today I think maybe I don't really disagree. Haven't I basically been proving to myself through failure after failure that there is no observably 'black' object, only sets of relations that are structured by blackness and therefore reek of it somehow?
Anyway, the collector guy seemed to like me but also seemed strangely skeptical of me. He said that I talked and he heard words but didn't "feel" anything. I said that I have a tendency to speak in disinterested terms when I'm excited about something. H said I shouldn't say that to be nice to him and that she felt a lot when I spoke.
The collector said that my generation didn't know how to be challenged or didn't want to be; and I said that may be the case more broadly, but I–perhaps out of step with my peers–am always looking for a good fight.
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*name has been changed because she is important-important!!! like whoa you're talking to me right now?
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