| Head-banger |
| In the museum of the archetypal 20th-century gallery, which as yet has to rise above storage room level, the uniqueness of this casually abandoned sign - which none other than Theo Voorzaat painted with his own fair hand - is yet to be appreciated. |
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It continues to make me feel good to this day whenever I hear visitors refer
to "Stoot je hoofd niet" (Mind your head). Those of you who have been
following the gallery's fortunes for more than 15 years know that this
phrase used to be the second part of the gallery's name, which in all its
glory read "Lieve Hemel, stoot je hoofd niet" (Good heavens, mind your
head). Although at Vijzelgracht it wasn't that much of a challenge to bang
one's head provided one was tall enough, the real star was our very first
location, on Sint Jorisstraat, where the ceiling was so low that even the
vertically challenged couldn't stand up straight - a cause of ongoing agony
which ended exactly 30 years ago, in April 1971, when we moved to the
Vijzelgracht premises. I once read in an article in Adformatie, the
advertising trade journal, that the copywriter's dream, that which in their
own view justifies their very existence, apparently consists in witnessing
one of the mottos they have come up with achieve the status of generally
accepted proverb. A bit like, dare I say it, "Go to work on an egg". You may
be able to imagine how completely overwhelmed I continue to be by my own
stunning success in this respect, which I have moreover achieved in a tiny
sector whose communication paths have never been particularly efficient, to
put it mildly. It never ceases to amaze me how easily the second part of the
name was, and continues to be, remembered. It was midnight by the time I finally got round to having dinner, having spent a significant portion of the evening in what these days I tend to refer to as my forecastle or fo'c's'le - a room which five years ago I had built in the empty store space. Designing it was a drawn-out misery in that the overall height of the shell presented me with an interesting dilemma: how tall should the office space be for prices to be given a little upward leeway, and how low could I make the box room cum work space cum photographic studio underneath without consigning myself to a veritable chamber of horrors? Unhindered by any collective labour agreement, the height of the office came out on top. The thing is that the greater the efficacy of my office operations, the greater the amount of time I am now finding myself spending down below, in the caverns of my own little paradise. There's no escaping it: although I am aware that the whole world has come to accept that banging one's head is definitely a thing of the past, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I'll let you in on what has to date been a jealously guarded secret: not only is the ceiling of my fo'c's'le lower than the lowest low in our previous location, on Vijzelgracht, it is even lower than the tiny basement area where I first set up shop, in 1968! Which means that behind the scenes I am head-banging like I have never head-banged before - that is, as soon as my cautious tai chi-like movements, which I find myself having to make in order to avoid all kinds of objects such as lighting stands, camera tripods, sheets suspended using clothes pins and staples and of course the platform featuring the object of my photographic endeavours, not to mention vast stacks of printed matter, packaging materials, filing boxes, tools, and so on, and so forth from crashing to the floor, miscarry. Those among you who have a taste for blood are going to relish one particular detail, which is that my glorious and most sturdily fitted oak floor sits on an at least as sturdily fitted underfloor, the latter having been machine-stapled. Unfortunately the staples that have been used are a bit too big, so that the ends of the prongs jut out through the ceiling of my fo'c's'le. A clever person would probably suggest I take a hammer and knock the prongs flat against the ceiling, but my thorough nature won't let me: I'm afraid this might cause the underfloor to work itself loose from the top floor, and in view of the warranty conditions I would prefer to steer clear of the exclusion grounds, the phrasing of which I find decidedly threatening. The upshot of this is that I have to be careful not to subject myself to an inadvertent scalping - an argument which I admit would probably do rather well in court, but the principle of winning at all costs is something I have come to abandon. Or could it be that this is how my head-banger's fate now takes its toll on me? |