Last week was my first week of classes, technically. What I found out was that at Willem de Kooning, and at most European art schools, we don't actually have much class to attend. Instead of showing up every day at the same time every week to a particular room to work on or talk about a particular subject, we just make our work and occasionally talk to teachers about our process and thoughts. My classmates are the 25-30 fine arts students who share studio space in one floor of an office building 10 minutes from WdKA, the majority of whom are international students, and with whom I live in Erasmus Lodge. The studio space is open 24/7, and we are expected to talk to the four or five teachers who come there on a weekly basis for a few hours. Thankfully there are also studio workshops and lectures regularly that are free to attend, which I plan to take advantage of.
This is probably one of the most significant changes in my daily life as a student coming to study abroad. In New York at SVA, I had five classes which ranged from three hour humanities lectures to six hour studio classes, each of which I had once a week. On top of this I was employed by work study in the Bronx (an hour and a half away from my home in Brooklyn) for my maximum 20 hours a week. I haven't been without a job since I was fifteen, and the amount of free time I have now is astonishing. Copious amounts of free time is something that can make me nervous and lethargic, giving me more time to sit on the computer, watch Netflix, and consequently feel bad about not being productive, something I think my New England/New Yorker complex definitely formed in me. Whether or not this is a good thing is something I'll have to explore while I'm here, while I practice creating my own routines and structure. It's certainly practice for when I graduate. I always thought I had plenty of self-discipline, getting work done on time and showing my best work, but it was always within a structure that someone else had created for me, whether this was a teacher, employer, or application. Thankfully I've eased into a more open-ended schedule by taking fewer studio classes last semester, taking an independent study, and spending the month of January in New York working but not in class. I'm curious to see how I fill all of this time here.
We do have one class- a requirement for international students called Dutch Art, Culture and Design, on Tuesday nights. The teacher has taken it into her own hands, however, and steered it more in the direction of art theory and semiotics. Our reading list includes John Berger's Ways of Seeing (again, really? This is, like, freshman fine arts reading material here), Barthes' Mythologies, Gender Advertisement by Goffman, Orientalism by Said, and Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers by the Guerilla Girls. I'm pretty freaking excited, considering I frequently mourn the lack of good oppression theory classes at SVA, though apparently these conversations aren't common knowledge at some more traditional European schools, where Ways of Seeing is not taught like gospel.
I've staked out a table in the fine arts studio space, a big one with a chair that's a bit too short, in a quieter part of the room. The only materials I brought with me are my trusty Rosie the Riveter tin lunch box with all of my drawing materials, a watercolor set stolen from the Friends Camp meetinghouse, and my knitting needles with two skeins of yarn. I might be fiddling around aimlessly for a while, but I think it will be good to get back to some 2D work.
This past Friday, however, we met with a teacher named Rolf at the studio, and he brought with him (gasp) an assignment: to collaboratively organize a dinner for everyone in the fine arts department next week. This of course set off fireworks in my brain- thinking about everyday social rituals and forms of community-building is something I've been doing for more than a year now, obsessively, with all of my artwork. I was taken aback to have our first project be both collaborative (with all twenty-something of us in fine arts) as well as related to social practice. I don't think this is very close within the creative spectrum of most of my classmates, and so I think my brain was one step in a different direction comparatively when we gathered to come up with ideas as a group. I got very excited about the simple idea of feeding each other in order to eat- not very original, but working with basic ideas of trust and breaking down barriers. I think my expectations were a bit too high for our first day, but I've become used to Quaker process which has taught me to always get to the root of a discussion collectively and think very hard about our intent before acting, and this not being established as the norm made it a bit frustrating as we discussed our visions. They included a lot of different rules for eating, rules for talking, games to play, color-coding and altering the senses, and eventually we concluded we would build a large rotating table on which the food would be separated by color in a kind of childlike game. Though I wasn't very satisfied by how we had come to this conclusion, making up a crazy, makeshift game for a dinner reminds me of how programs are usually planned at camp, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and hopeful for the result.
Week Two
Spring break! Wooooo!!!! Really, we're on break already somehow, one week after we started class. It was a bit jarring to start thinking about starting to work and begin a routine and to have that interrupted so soon, but I'm trying to make the most of it. One of my roommates and a bunch of other WdKA girls are on a trip to Brussels, which is only a two hour train ride away from Rotterdam, but I opted out so that I could further explore the city I just arrived in.
On Saturday I went to the Blaak open-air market, which is an incredible and overwhelming experience that will tingle all of your senses. The tents stretch on for a quarter of a mile down a wide, carless plaza in the middle of Rotterdam, and it is easy to get lost in the crowds pushing and shoving to get their weekly groceries. Rotterdam is sometimes so windy it feels like a hurricane, and the winds almost pick up the tents and everyone yells as it happens. You can smell multiple chip vendors (the Dutch love their fries), flowers, cheese permeates the air every few steps, fresh fish, sweet stroopwafel, and my personal favorite, the olive and tapanade vendor, from which the smell of garlic, olives and fresh hummus makes me drool. The market is great for finding all of your produce and groceries and really cheap merchandise- a bike lock for seven euros, shampoo for two. There's even an entire street dedicated to just fabric. Oh dear.
Now that many of my friends here have bikes we're able to wander around more parts of the city, exploring quaint old residential neighborhoods north of Erasmus Lodge, shopping plazas in the center, artsy shops along Witte de With and the modern-looking museum park. Today my roommate Mair and another British international student, Beatrice and I biked to a neighborhood called Delfshaven, a historic port untouched by German bombs, laying to the west of central Rotterdam and originally its own town. Delfshaven happens to be the port where the first Pilgrims set sail to America- which makes sense due to the Dutch tendency for religious tolerance. The Delfshaven canal cuts through the middle of the neighborhood in a straight line, full of boats old and new, and is bordered by cobblestone streets and little cafes as well as a couple of (very old) distilleries that once manufactured gin. The historic buildings, with their high-peaked roofs and intricate brickwork, transport you to another era in a way that Rotterdam's city center cannot. The canal is surrounded by Rotterdam's Turkish neighborhood, which was interesting to visit in contrast to the rest of the places I've found in the city which market towards the primarily white upper-middle-class, and the prevalence of minority neighborhoods are something I've come to expect from cities after living in New York.
After eating falafel in Delfshaven we biked back east toward home, but steered a bit north to ride through one of the most beautiful parks I've ever seen. We rode into our neighborhood Kralingen, a sprawl of old, 19-century-looking row houses, again with the peaked gables and artfully designed red and white bricks around high windows, and cobblestone streets. This antique semi-suburbia stopped suddenly to reveal a huge lake and a flat expanse of green lawns, marshland, canals and woods- a park ten minutes from my house that was somehow ignored by our tour guide, though it's definitely several times bigger than the Boston Common and wilder (or at least more natural) than Central Park. It took us a couple hours to bike the entire perimeter of the lake, passing several adorable and very Dutch-looking restaurants, a small beach, many playgrounds, hundreds of beautiful bridges, and a free petting zoo. We stopped at the petting zoo, of course. I can't wait until May and June when we can barbecue at the beach and swim in the lake. The wildlife is amazing- there is so much marshland that ducks, herons and geese are everywhere, and probably a lot of other things living in the reeds and in the woods, which smelled of lovely dirt smell.
IT IS SPRING HERE. Little purple and yellow flowers have started blooming along the wide avenues in Kralingen, and it was 50 degrees and SUNNY today, a proper miracle in the Netherlands. The rain here has been unbearable, the wind pelts it at your face like little freezing bullets, but today I was happy to be outside the entire day, especially when I think of the Northeast US getting buried in snow for yet another month.
So today was a day from heaven, I feel like I've really begun to explore Rotterdam myself, and I forgot my damn camera. I'll go back and snap some photos of Delfshaven and the park because I'm definitely going back and telling everyone I know to come. Our little international group is starting to get really good at organizing events and following through on them- we had our second Sunday dinner last night, another success. On Wednesday I have organized a bike trip to the Hague, an hour and a half ride, but we'll have to see if we make it all the way there. And even in my own flat the three of us have our own routine of drinking tea and sitting at our kitchen table to talk, where we don't have internet because we only have ethernet in our rooms. It's nice to have that sort of relaxed space to talk for hours without distraction; it makes coming home a treat and has allowed me to get to know Jen and Mair much better.
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| A sculpture in a Rotterdam plaza by American artist Paul McCarthy, nicknamed the Butt Plug by locals. |
Maggie
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