André Groeneveld (curator ZZM) eats some fries at my fry stand during “The Potato Eater", an earlier installation and performance of mine. He talks about plans for visual art in the Zuiderzee Museum. My first thought: isn’t that a dull thing there? He sends the postcard of my fry stand to his superiors. Read more →
First a cup of coffee and a view at my portfolio with director Erik Schilp, who is of my age and has modern shoes. We decide to unleash my artistic qualities on the museum. Then I make a tour with André through the nature reserve of the museum where future work must be located. By leaving the path we discover an old watermill that is completely overgrown or actually overtaken by the surrounding trees.
I don’t know anything about the Zuiderzee Museum, I was in love with a blond Frisian girl when we went to the museum during high school. Being 40 now I finally discover that the museum is a reconstructed reality. The authenticity of the installation “The Zuiderzee Museum" makes a great impression. That quality must be in the work that I am going to make! (Do you feel fooled if you come from another planet and find an empty pretend to be assembled town?)
In the museum park I discover the studio of Tamson. A mini house from the back garden of schoolmaster Tamson that he had built around 1890 in a 17th century architectural style. He painted landscapes as a hobby. Tamsons juggling with time makes his studio a good place for the preview of my project. I build a wooden television and photoshop the Aeronef 2008 in a 19th century landscape painted by me in 1987.
I drag cordless drills, pots of polyester and plates of waterproof glued plywood to the slope shed in the Markerhaven. Men working with wooden beams, tar and linseed oil look suspicious at me. During the first conversation they say that the artist who preceded me is a cool guy. What he makes is a different story to them. I hope I’m considered to be cool too. According to them, it is no longer possible to get really waterproof glued plywood (that stuff of mine has far too few layers) and, by the way, everything goes to hell, including the museum.
I am an artist in residence, four days a week, all alone in a lifeless setting after five o’clock. Ikea has furnished three houses in the street in Monnickendam as apartments. Just like home, there is a chicken coop in the garden. The shower is a few houses away. When I am eating behind the kitchen window during the day, I am an attraction for several visitors who stop to take a look. Sometimes they pull at the front door and I confuse them by letting them into my Ikea room. I am late with my project for the anniversary event, the other artists of this art manifestation have already shown their skills. Old fears of being alone and hyperventilation come to the surface. I reassure myself and just try to breathe; if I drop down, I am certainly able to crawl across the dike past café Hindeloopen and reach the permanent guard at the service entrance. Later it turns out that someone else lives in my epmty street Monnickendam: one of the doormen spends his real life in the empty museum park.
I construct the bottom of the Aeronef outside at the antique shipyard in the Markerhaven. I can clearly see from the clouds when the pool cover must go over my structure. Swans and ducks don’t care about me. When it rains, I prepare the top behind the scenes. There is a wood and metal workshop on the site that is not accessible for the audience. A place where you can work on masts and other long things. Erik, the museum’s champion boat builder, is working on two masts. Here I make the twelve sides and the roof. Epoxy that I spread over the top should not be used according to him. The construction time of a Frisian Boeier or Lemster Barge is around 3000 hours, he has a waiting list for customers of about six years. Enthusiasts have patience to wait or haave even more ships. The Aeronef eventually costs me 500 hours of working time.
At the shipyard I seem to be a place of interest that leads to all kinds of questions: Do you make the roof of a mill, is that construction in the soil actually necessary, is this your hobby? If I don’t feel like talking, I refer to page five of the square anniversary book of the museum. “Oh, so you are the artist Arjen Boerstra." After an answer that my structure is a UFO or landing craft from 1880, some people are annoyed and leave. Especially English and Belgians linger for a long time. They do not suffer from the museum as a cultural sentimental legacy, but they view everything in a fresh perspective. “The Dutch are even more eccentric than the English" and “Panamarenko* is retired, did you know that?"
*Belgian inventor / artist
