What was I talking about again? Part One.
Legend has it that there’s an aircraft hangar somewhere in Holland that holds an incalculable treasure. Lost in the mists of time, created by the minds of government bureaucrats in unholy alliance with the stoned wraiths who populate the coffee houses that hug Amsterdam’s canals, this building is a repository for all that is groovy and insane and provocative. Those who can remember its establishment speak of it in hushed tones, outside of the general ear range of backpackers, tulip buyers and other outsiders who might not appreciate this hybrid wonder, totally forged on the anvil of European thinking.
Nobody knows for sure what is inside… except that there’s some Op Art and charcoal residues and maquettes, and that this is an art museum if institutions were run by Charlie Meadows (the serial killer played by John Goodman in Barton Fink (1991) who tells us “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”)…
Back in the ‘70s, when the Dutch government was even more liberal and progressive than it is now (they should never have let all those Eastern Europeans in, it was asking for trouble…), it decided that, as a way of further encouraging a holistic integration of creativity into society, people could register themselves as “artists” and receive additional social security (welfare) benefits; in short, that they would still receive their already generous (at that time) subsistence payments, but would also get a financial top-up as an incentive to continue to follow their mojo and thereby benefit the fabric of Dutch daily life and society at large.
Once registered, “artists” would have to donate three art works a year in reciprocation - the work to be entirely their own choice, no need for adjudicating panels or any of those artifical public filters - which would be held in collection by the government in an archive for future generations. Simple, eh? Bless them, and their grand social investigation, that’s what I say; can you imagine members striding the US Senate floor demanding an addendum to a Senate Bill that recognized the need for a little ‘pork’ to safeguard the legacy of dried pasta tableaux specialists in Georgia? Or the leather-chapped performance art penetration re-enactment societies of San Francisco?
The main problem with this scenario was that the Dutch government failed to foresee that junkies and pot-smokers – already a significant urban community in Holland thanks to a range of other related progressive experiments – were indigents with a lot of time on their hands to think shit up, and very fluid concepts of what reality was in the first place.
For a whole generation of people used to sucking up industrial qualities of prototype pre-British-Columbian skunk, and then ruminating for hours about how to weigh a flame, or whether vegetable screams could be heard if you put a contact mike on the knife (“You can’t hear meat scream, man, ‘cos it’s, like, already dead, right? But you put a healthy cucumber on the chopping board…”), this was a fine chance to insert themselves at the forefront of contemporary art and collect a few Guilders more in the bargain.
The response, of course, was phenomenal – especially seeing as the government was loathe to apply bourgeois values of what actually constituted “art” as applied by its snobby European cousins, such as the French, in terms of abstract qualities such as “quality” or “talent” – and tens of thousands more than anticipated artist applicants crashed the government rolls like Orcs on PCP swarming a Hobbit farm.
IN PART TWO: total art democracy is achieved.