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I’m in front of the house trying to think of some way of making this side seem less austere. More welcoming. You see standing here in front of the house I feel under the gaze; both of the history of this place, but also the authority, power and wealth of it. It’s quite polarising. I guess half the people that walk past and see it will think, that place is not for me, I’m not welcome there.
What is it that gives the building such a presence: is it the formality, is it the scale? Is it because of the colonial history of wealth in Amsterdam? Is it because it just doesn’t seem friendly?........... But it’s not that big; and almost seems to be smiling; the façade is fairly humorous actually. So why is it still that it has that thing…. Is it an economic thing, is about feeling like you don’t belong, about exclusion. A symbol of elitism, perhaps….. But if you enter the house from the other side its a very different story. You come though the bushes and are welcomed into the arms garden. Of course from the back the formality is still clear, its just as much a status symbol but there’s something more homely about it. Why is that? Why is being welcoming a good thing, perhaps its not. Somehow I think it is.
I could try and do something to make it more… what’s the word…. earthly. You could have a big dung heap, a big pile of steaming horse shit, but it’s not the 17th century. You could have a stack of bicycles. A bicycle parking; that way you’d see that there were lots of people around and perhaps feel more inquisitive. You could….. I guess it’s partly because it’s in the shadow. So you could have a reflector on the roof that undoes that. You could plant. What would it look like if it were overgrown? The Frankendael as a ruin… I’m just romanticising it now.
The mote. The mote makes it private. The gate….. You could have a big sign that says welcome. You could have something hanging from the attic hook. You could use voice, you could have a town crier, crying all ‘welcome’. The sculptures are all looking out at you. Maybe there needs to be something that looks back at the house. Shining a mirror back towards it. Maybe I should turn around these sculptures and let them look back. Could their historic gaze tame the austerity? Trapping it in a kaleidoscope of awareness.
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Suzanne had invited Selm over to meet: a friend of hers who’d just arrived in Amsterdam to work for Frascati. The idea being that perhaps we could collaborate on the play next year.
I’d not arrived long before the meeting, and had not year been round the garden on my usual check to see everything’s ok. We moved from the pond, past Orpheus and were now approaching my shed. We turned the corner here and were met with a wall of leaves. Slightly higher than the hedge, so dense you couldn’t see though, it made an exact line between the two beech boxes. A crown of leaves stood in front of me. I was startled, I took a step back. It was as if the layout of the garden had changed overnight. Our path now blocked.
Approaching from the other side the trunk of the tree had fallen precisely along the path and in so doing blocking the access along this entire section of the garden. This auspicious land grab seemed like it had been executed with surgical precision; falling in just such a way as to impede as many of the gardens paths as possible. Were the plants fighting back against these encroaching deserts?
I took a closer look at the break, it had not been cut but fallen naturally. The tree had been affected with heart rot. A condition common to almost all trees in which fungus spoors enter the outer back of a tree and begin to grow. Moving into the centre of the trunk the fungus grows slowly feeing off the trees dead heart and in so doing weakening its structure. It’s a process that takes years.
It’s said that heart rot causes one third of the worlds annual commercial timber harvest to become unsellable. Its also said that heart rot is one of the key processes in the renewal of forest ecosystems. The fallen trees making way for new growth, their decaying trunks providing a habitat rich in biodiversity. It seems to me that this dramatic interruption could provide a striking lesson that sometimes the value is not in growth but rather in decay.
The fallen tree lay in place for almost a week before being cut into manageable sections and transported away. I don’t know where it all went; but I herd lately that a section of trunk was taken by the volunteers from the ‘river of herbs’ and is now in the process of being made into a bench.
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Its now 6 months since we held the launch event for ‘wild care, tame neglect’. To reflect on what’s been happening would probably be the obvious thing here but somehow that doesn’t feel right at the moment - I’ve been trying but I keep getting distracted - I keep returning to focus on where we are now. Right now actually I’m on the train, no surprise – I seem to find myself on the train a lot these days. This week I’ve mostly been working in the Rijsakademie workshops. In between I came to the Frankendael to meet Susanne who’s taking over co-ordinating the project. I gave her a tour - in the same way I’ve started giving tours lately - by walking with her to specific places and reading these letters I’ve been writing. I’ll soon be reading this letter to someone, maybe you, though I’m not sure at what spot - that will become more apparent as I write. At the moment I don’t even know what this letter is about. The first draft was about aesthetic harmony and disruption but I seemed to write myself into a trap on that one. There’s currently a strong aesthetic logic to the palace. Almost everything in the garden and house becomes subservient to, and complicit in, this logic. The only cracks that appear in this surface I’ve seen so far are the groups of young kids hanging out on the benches and the debris they leave behind. Or the rotting plants falling out of the neatly delineated parterre garden. Even the fence I made around the pond to some extent compounds this logic, although I hope there’s something in its humour, a sort of mannerism that might throw a question back at the viewer.
The second draft focused on these letters as a way to try and say something about the position of an audience in this project. You see there’s been something of a discussion of audience between me and the foundation. It’s not really a straightforward question here. Clearly there are many people who are around the garden on a daily or weekly basis because they live near or work around there. They will pass by the interventions I make and perhaps recognise me as a figure in the landscape. But whether they see it as art, or whether it is even art in that moment is an open question. When is the fence just a fence and when is it an artwork? There are of course the events when people come to see something specifically. But increasingly importantly I think are the small groups and individual visits I get where I can walk round with them reading these letters.
The third draft focused on distance and intimacy, you see I was in Dublin over the weekend and met with Rachel and Jannice at IMMA, I was showing pictures from my laptop and trying to explain ‘wild care, tame neglect’ to them sat in the café there. I could see they were trying to and wanted understand but I could also feel them disconnect the more I tried to explain it. Eventually we reached a point, my inability to convey the project was clear, something had to be done and we went out into the garden where I read these texts to them. It was a very strange experience reading a text about Dionysius in front of a Romanesque sculpture of a woman holding a painters pallet and brush but is it all together irrelevant? Can an act of observation be transferred, can it travel? Or is it only the intimacy of the reading, the care of delivery that makes the journey?
Now I’m on a bus from Schiphol to the Rietveld, this semester we’re focusing on ‘truth’ in my class – a notion undergoing quite a shaking these days. Today we’re discussing a chapter from ‘Techniques of the Observer’ where Crary talks about the moment in the 19th century when our human bodies became part of understanding perception, when we realised that the senses could be tricked - a scandalous almost sacrilegious pronouncement at that time but something we’ve come to take for granted these days. We’re comparing that to a text by Wietske Maas where she writes about a link between photosynthesis and the mechanisms of our eyes. Drawing a line between chemicals used in both - and by implication suggesting both that our eyes are a part of the natural environment and that the photosynthesis of plants may be comparable to some form of sight. The journey’s coming to and end and I’m none the wiser about what this text is about - but perhaps in the end it’ll make a passable summery of the last six months.
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I’d seen him many time before, he was often here in the café sat behind his computer. I couldn’t say how many times I’ve seen him, ten at least. The computer itself is very recognisable; maybe you’ve seen him too. He went out - to talk on the phone - I think - or get some air. On his way back in our eyes met - a moment of recognition - a nod of acknowledgement. He’d clearly seen me here before too. We didn’t speak.
I wondered what he was doing; clearly he was here to work too. I think you notice different things about a place when you’re working there rather than there for leisure. There was a book beside him full of post it notes and well worn at the spine. From a distance given the shape, size and type of cover it looked like a guide book, the sort of architectural city guides you get. I wondered if perhaps he was doing some historical piece about the area.
Now was the moment – I got up and walked over to his table and introduced myself. I told him I’m here a lot and I’ve noticed he’s often here and thought I should introduce myself. Yes he said he was indeed here a lot, this was his ‘office’. I asked what he was working on and he told me a book. What’s it about I asked? A sort of life-coaching book he told me - about strategies and techniques to have a better life. I explained I was also working here, that I was an artist in the middle of a long term collaborating with the foundation and wished him luck with his book.
Life-coaching - I wondered whether he will recommend in his book choosing a café to work in? – I hope so. I’m not really sure what life coaching is, its one of those buzz words that came to the fore in the 1990’s. Its goal I imagine is greater personal control over the path your life is taking. Surely a good thing – I for one am certainly in favour of not just constantly fire-fighting circumstance. Still there’s a taste of determinism left on the pallet after using the word. Who’s free will, who’s agency is the coaching actually befitting. I can’t help comparing this to my situation here. Who’s desires am I fulfilling, how deterministic is the outcome of such a collaboration.
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I’m on the train right now, I’ve not spoken much about the train so far although its fair to say that for every day I’ve been at the Frankendael since May I’ve spent about two and a half hours on the train getting there and back. Yes I’m a commuter. Its quite frustrating, I don’t really like the train. Sometimes I can work, but mostly I just check stuff on my phone or sleep. I like that it gives time to listen to music, that’s probably the best bit about the journey. When the weather’s good or the light’s doing something unusual you can get a sense of place, a sense of distance. One of those spine tingling moments when reality seems to hit harder than usual. We all strive to reach these moments I guess, but they’re few and far between. I always think they’re something to do with déjà vous, a noise you almost recognise, a scent you’ve come across before, the way the reflected light sill warms the skin. When I worked as a postman in Rotterdam I used to deliver to this sun tan studio and every time I approached I got just such a feeling. I used to look forward to that part of the round especially just so I could get that sensation. You see their air conditioning was pumping the hot scented air out. I don’t know if it was deliberately perfumed or if it was coming from some of the tanning products inside. Whatever way this scent transported me instantly back to a nervous teenage excitement. I’ve had a cold this last week and its felt like my head’s been buried in an oily puddle, but today, today I feel alive again.
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Five days ago a man came up to me here - at the benches in front of the house – I was waiting for Kate. She was late. It was the coldest day of the year so far and ice had formed on the canals and the dew on the fish and heron fence had frozen covering the chain in a glimmering dust. I’d rushed from the station to get a fire on before Kate arrived and was now waiting for her sitting on the bench. I don’t normally sit here, in front of the house because for some reason it makes me feel uncomfortable almost unwelcome.
I was listening to a musician I’d coincidently reacquainted myself with earlier in the week. He’s from the part of Scotland I grew up in and played regularly in one of the bars where we used to hang out. We shared friends but didn’t really know each other. It must have been over 15 years since I’d heard him play. Back then it didn’t really interest me but now I was obsessed, I’d had him on repeat all week and the simple pop songs seemed to reverberate in me with a new emotional resonance. Perhaps I was just being nostalgic. Kate still hadn’t arrived so I waited some more.
The man approached me and asked how many people can the house accommodate? ‘Can it fit 60 or 70 people?’ he asked. He’d come over from the De Nieuwe Ooster cemetery and was looking for somewhere to have coffee and tea with the group. A wake I assume though he didn’t specify. I told him the coach house is the biggest space in the building but he’d better talk to the people inside and pointed it out. Between the house and us was an A-frame chalkboard sign with the name Annie written on it. He asked which Annie? He’d been trying to contact an Annie for the last couple of weeks without success and though maybe it was she. Like me had he’d obviously just seen the hearse crossing the bridge with the funereal procession behind. I told him I didn’t know Annie but that Annie was a common name so it probably wasn’t her. He explained that giving what he’d been going though he couldn’t help but jump to conclusions. He left to ask inside about the space and I got up to walk towards the entrance bridge.
As I passed in front of the house I began to think about just how many funerals and weddings I’d seen in the last months here at the Frankendael. Its not like it’s the only thing that happens in the house but its certainly a weekly occurrence. What is it that we look for in a place when we chose where to marry or where to commemorate the death of those close to us? Indeed the Frankendael seems an obvious choice, but why?
The man passed on his way out wishing me a good day and I walked back to the bench trying to record my thoughts about the relevance of a place’s history and its aesthetic value in relation to ceremonies. The microphone was pointing down so listening back to this recording all you hear is the sound of footsteps on gravel.
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The lion’s head at the edge of pond has been on my mind. Weather worn, the soft stone is loosing its definition as it slowly melts into the pond below and I can’t help but admire this stubborn resistance against the changes around it. I also can’t help making a connection with the sculpture of Dionysus on the front side of the house, where a leopard skin hangs nonchalantly draped over his shoulder. The leopards’ head coming to rest in the small of Dionysus’s back. Looking upwards, the leopards’ look of patient boredom is aimed through the house back towards the pond. What do these two symbolic big cats have to say to each other, and more importantly what do they have to say about us? Are they still symbols of power and subjection or has their stubborn resistance recast them?
For some reason when I was considering how to work with the fence around this pond over summer I decided to go to Artis zoo. I though seeing these animals for real might give some answers. Answers as to why their presence seems increasingly relevant to me. As to why they seem to suddenly be subverting a dominant logic of aesthetic harmony. Logic embedded deep within the Frankendael and re-enacted through its place in the contemporary leisure economy. Yet the big cat encloses offered no clues, in fact it was not until I’d seen the whole zoo and was disappointedly meandering towards the exit when I stumbled across a new piece to the puzzle. A line, almost a chain, of herons sat perched atop the fence at the edge of the aquatic bird enclosure. Clearly their opportunistic attitude brought them there. Some might see them as a pest, an unwanted and uncontrolled element only here to snatch the fish from the birds belonging to the enclosure. But their persistence, staying put almost to the point of intimidating passers by, made them seem more like they were actually part of the enclosure. Were they the real fence, the real boundary? Do they define an edge between what is being acted out within the fiction of the zoo and what is being enacted in the drama of reality?
One thing was sure, I wanted to bring these birds into dialogue with the Frankendaels’ big cats.
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There’s a sculpture… it’s standing on its own… at the end of one of the central axis alleys of the garden, adjacent to the pond. A classically detailed plinth supports this representation of a man holding an instrument: a small harp, maybe a lyre. This makes me think it’s meant to be the figure of Orpheus though I can’t be sure. Still, Orpheus, a symbol of the power of culture over nature would seem to make sense in such a location.
He’s stood there on his plinth looking away to the side. Not down the ally to see who’s coming, but has turned his head away to the right. Chin cocked slightly upwards he appears to be looking nowhere. A gaze of indifference or boredom. This laissez-faire musician seems preoccupied but not by his music. I feel he’s not really here….
I look again at him. He doesn’t look back. My questions go unanswered. He arouses an instinct of sorrow and frustration in me. What is he really doing there? Is he there to evoke a way of framing my experience in this garden: a way of placing an experience within an abstract context? Is he saying that we have the possibility to form nature in any way we want? Perhaps... but his distraction makes me wonder if he’s not grown tired of such power, being so separated from the reality of the world. What is he longing for?
As the flies chart their rectilinear flight paths around his crumbling torso and the spiders spin their traps beneath his chin, the pleasing feeling starts to dawn on me that his authority might be starting to wean.
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In conversation the other day I was asked how visitors to the garden would know I was working here at the Frankendael, in what way my presence would be visible? At first I was a bit confused…. in a normal exhibition set up the presence of the artist is by proxy through their artwork. But here, where I will be engaging with the house and garden over the course of two years, the daily position of the artist could become fundamental. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that conversation since; about how the works I am making here come into being and how that process becomes visible.
In the first instance it could be a question of from what position am I working, what’s the nature of my relationship with the context? For sure the starting point is to embed my practice here but what does an embedded practice really mean and what does such an artistic choice imply?
In a way I think the primary question is whether your work comes from inside or outside the social context.
If I’m going to be working here I could be working from inside the house, I’ve been offered space within the offices, but what would that imply?
Certainly it would be amongst the staff, but perhaps too close, or too far from getting the soil under my nails.
I could stick to working in the garden as I’ve mostly been doing, but that’s really impractical, nowhere to put my stuff and under all weathers.
Or I could work from my Rotterdam studio using the Frankendael as a location but would mean being too distant as if flying in to plan interventions?
Somewhere in-between then; perhaps between house and garden. A position entangled physically and socially in the Frankendael undergrowth.
This makes me think of putting a shed in the garden.
Perhaps in one of the ‘wilderness’ areas: as in behind the hedge. There’s an area beneath a yew tree…. where the chicken coops are. That could be the place. A shed: a shed as a studio…. a place to work from physically and socially.
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In the middle of the garden is a small pond. It’s round. No, circular, with a brick edging.
There’s a ring of planting around it which looks like… well, I can see some sort of… hmm… actually I have no idea what that is. It’s all died back anyway, not yet come out for spring.
There’s a small fence made from wooden poles and a thin green metal mesh. The fence is probably about 40 to 45cm high. At one of the edges is a section of brick wall with a stone-carved lion’s head. I think this is probably a fountain because there is some piping in the pond which leads to the back of the lion’s head. Let me see… yes, unplugged, probably why it’s not working.
The level of the water in the pond is quite low. Looks like there are some lilies in it and a lot of green vegetation around, dense.
The pond is an all seeing eye in the middle of the garden, centrally located, stretching in all directions at the crossing of the two main axis of the garden. But this is just in plan, so perhaps it behaves more like of a ‘node’, if you put it like that… or then not really, it could be a void, empty.
You’ve got the symbolism of the lions head… oh there’s a butterfly, first butterfly I’ve seen this year… the lions head is pointed back towards the house which, if it were not such a symbol of authority, if were actually about the untamed lion that would be something.
One of the poles has fallen over and is leaning in towards the centre of the pond. Maybe my job is to restore this fence. Should I just fix it or replace it with something else? The current fence sort of makes the pond disappear. What is it doing? If it is a barrier, what does it contain? Is it stopping you falling in or is it stopping what’s happening inside of getting out.
Inside or outside, whose park and garden really is this, yes this fence, this small fence here is where I’m going to start.
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