What was I talking about?: Part Two
The government quickly realized its error as its workers buckled under the stain of accepting voluminous folders of LSD-induced scribblings and automatic bum prints (photocopies and originals): concluding that, even by the increasingly lax standards of subjective worth, history would likely fail to find too many Rembrandts or Vermeers in this panoply of giant eyeballs and cosmic wormholes. By the time the Dutch had closed the floodgates (always a good analogy to use with the Dutch; kind of like using “drought” with Africans, or “wanker” with golfers), they were forced to purchase an aircraft hangar to store the paper tsunamis of this massive public legacy.
I have heard of this aircraft hanger (some say it may be two hangars, three even) for decades, and it has exerted a fascination over me that I have never been able to wholly shake off. On occasion I have tried to track it down, failing only because I have the attention span of a gnat (in my old days I was an “artist” myself, and I think it did something to my ability to maintain focus…); but it still looms large over our collective consciousness.
Less of a curate’s egg than a curator’s turd, the hangar museum is dying for a selected show - for one brave soul to dive into its immensity and bring forth both the pearls and the manatyee shit - and I have often dreamed of walking up and down it’s serried aisles, like Indiana Jones searching for the Ark of the Covenant, pulling out weird wonders of the mind in a revisionist frenzy. Imagine what jewels await: polaroids of tattoo poems scratched onto pale white arms; flicker books of scratchy nudes with saggy tits surrounding dolphin enclaves circling a glowing cosmic egg; papier-mache void containers meant to be angled on a tripod and rotate disconsolately in the cold winter winds blowing in from Dam Square.
I imagine sections devoted entirely to Jim Morrison caricatures (sub-divided into materials: “Jim Morrison clay,” “Jim Morrison silver foil” and “Jim Morrison biological issue”); fragile kinetic works made from chewed straws; huge piles of Lovecraftian doodles of Cthulhu driving trams, riding bicycles, giving a thumbs up like Casey Jones, peering out from behind the glass doors in the Red Light District; automatic traces of fever dreams logged in Meccano constructions dipped in salad cream.
Most of all, I imagine that the vast bulk of the donated works - about 98.97% - would be desultory sketches on lined notepaper in red and green biro; slapdash scribblings that took a total of one bong hit to complete, a year of additional benefits secured in one spastic gesture. Enormous stacks of these papers, haphazard and ready to crush the unwary docent, would hum with the accumulated psychotropic power of their residual energies; the termite artists that created them long since crawled off either to OD oblivion, or the horror of cutting off their ponytails and getting a proper job (the poor fools, if only they realized they lived in Europe they could have kept the ponytail and got a job).
Any resulting exhibition from the aircraft hangar would be curated into three separate areas: those works which were submitted by people who thought themselves to actually be legitimate artists operating at the time: those works of sniggering meth-lickspittle cynicism which were submitted purely in order to qualify for some extra cash: and a hinterland where Dutch citizens actually believed that the scheme finally legitimized their nascent outsider art psychonaut aspirations and entered wholeheartedly into donating all their coffee-grinding chiaroscuros. Even better, I’d include a survey questionnaire in which visitors would be threatened at gunpoint (it’s my show, I can do what I goddamned like…) to fill in so we could see if anybody tell the difference.
For those who don’t have access to Dutch aircraft hangars, I would suggest that, in the timeless spirit of the original experiment, that art is all around us and you can curate your own exhibition regardless. If you work in a corporate environment, be sure to be the last to leave the meeting room, and collect all those rhomboids and skyscraper tracer bullets (“what is it with that guy?”) doodled on blotters whilst the sales figures are analyzed by the blowhard in marketing. If you work in public lavatories, be sure to use your digital camera to capture all those lovely banana-shaped spurting cock pictures scratched into the bog walls. If you ever hike, be sure to make casts of the love declarations carved into the local flora.
For my next project, I have taken it upon myself to write appreciations of the latest automatic internet poetry AKA junk mail. Stick around; I’m going to display it as a wifi anthology on an Airbook in an Amsterdam coffee house, and see if they’ve got any of those grants left…