| Op Locatie VII |
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Normally speaking I wouldn't harm a fly. For the sake of honesty, however, I
must confess at the time of the Maagdenhuis riots* to having almost hurled a
brick at a policeman on a motorcycle with side car who sped through my alley
as I was standing on the corner opposite the poultry shop in the mistaken
belief that as a college student with a part-time job, I would be able from
a safe distance to get a taste of the hullabaloo. Even after all these years
I blanch with fear whenever I recall my insight at the time into how thin
the veneer of the upstanding citizen is when he thinks he has a point, or
more ominous still, when he confuses having a point with sheer vengefulness.
* The student riots in Amsterdam in the mid-1960s, "Maagdenhuis" being the name of the building which housed the University of Amsterdam's administrative executive. |
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There's something theatrical about art fairs (and by extension, about the
world of art as such). The show must go on and if you want to suffer, do it
behind the scenes (or partitions, in this case). If one considers how long
it tends to take people to decorate their new home, it's nothing short of
amazing how we, as trade fair participants, manage to convert surface areas
which by "compact living standards" (= Amsterdam euphemism) qualify as more
than ample into palatial havens of seduction in barely a day and a half.
I have now come up with a solution for a highly prosaic conundrum. Picture a plywood partition covered in spotless fabric, on which paintings are quickly required to be hung. This requires two people, one of whom holds the painting up against the wall while the other observes and utters words such as "higher" and "lower", in response to which the first person moves the painting up or down until it is in the right position. The handier of your hands is hidden by the painting, you hope that you have grabbed the wire dead-centre, you press the said centre against the wall then carefully slide the wire from under your finger by lowering the painting … and then you don't know what to do, because although you could lower the painting all the way to the floor provided you're tall enough, you have to keep your finger pressed against the wall otherwise you'll lose the spot where the hole has to be drilled and you can start all over again. All that can save you now is a sloppy stand assembler, who has left a lot of fluff behind on the wall fabric. You can use one of these pieces of fluff to mark your drilling spot. If no fluff is available, your only option is to try and mark the spot with a - hopefully grubby - finger. However, all dirt will have worn off after five paintings. It was against this background that I resolved to resort to fly training. I recently read somewhere that students have invented an electronic egg tapping device, which is placed inside a fake egg and put in among a clutch of pigeon eggs and which sits there making scratching noises, thus convincing the pigeons in question that their eggs are about to hatch, which makes them hurry home more urgently after a race. (I would add that I consider this to be most reprehensible. After all, one wouldn't dream of suggesting to a marathon runner just before a match that his wife was about to deliver by putting a guinea pig in the dryer.** Then again, there was a time when bluebottles were used for this purpose, and these have thus been relieved from duty. ** Ever since stand-up comedian Freek de Jonge, the guinea pig has been the symbol of painful miscommunications in human interaction. The terrible ordeals to which the animal is imaginarily subjected serve as a metaphor for the brutal way in which people tend to deal with one another in this type of situation as well as serving the purpose of breaking taboos with equal brutality. Easy it wasn't, but I eventually succeeded in training two flies to such level as to get one of them to sit down in exactly the right spot by making a faint humming sound by clenching a nail between my teeth and admonishing my wife at the same time, thus giving me all the time I needed to pick up a hammer and nail, using both hands. Why two flies? Why, have you never heard of occupational hazard? |