November 2003 – Snow on a summer evening

It’s been hanging in our living room for about three years: the photograph of a black tent in a snowy landscape, with a setting sun in the background turning the sky purple. There was something about the series of tents in the snow by the Icelandic artist Hrafnkell Sigurdsson that seized my attention right from the start. They express a certain desolation, a desolation that became part of me a long time ago. The driving force in my life is the search for the antidote to this loneliness.

I know exactly when I became aware of this feeling. It was a warm summer evening. I was ten years old and I was standing in front of our house on the imposing avenue on which we lived. The striped awnings were hanging down, as if the house had shut its eyes from a sun that was already almost out of sight. Despite the fine weather the street was empty and our house looked uninhabited, while my three brothers and my sister were in their rooms and my mother was resting on the couch until my father came back from the office.

            It was still, deathly still. Suddenly it came over me. It started at my feet and crept slowly up to my stomach: a chill that burned, a freezing that did not fade. On the contrary, I heard everything more sharply − the warbling of the birds, the talking in the distance, the buzzing of a bee, a dog barking somewhere far away. I smelled everything more acutely − the leaves on the trees, the moist grass, the sweet evening light. So heavy did that balmy evening weigh on me that my legs began to tremble and I had to sit down on the edge of the doorstep.

            It was not only the heavy feeling itself that had pushed me down, but it was the knowledge that this would never go away again, that it had nestled inside me, to fuse forever with the person I would become. I knew that I would have to find a place that had nothing  in common with this one: a place in the world that wasn’t so  frighteningly deserted, where people were meant to live, not so horrifyingly quiet, where life was meant to flourish.

The work by Sigurdsson is about to leave for the museum where it will be on loan. I look for one last time at the white snow, the black tent, the air that threatens to darken. And I know: through the works I buy I show what I’ve been running from.

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January 2004 – The waiting room

I’m sitting in the doctor’s waiting room amid the timeless furniture, the three-day-old newspaper and the awkward silence. I’m reading a book, but the words pass right through my head. I’m taking notes, but my thoughts are elsewhere. Every action in the waiting room is a diversionary tactic that is doomed to failure from the start.

            Waiting is being condemned to doing nothing. You live in a vacuum between daily life and the not-so-daily life that’s about to happen. All you can do is kill time.

This hovering between two worlds is a comfortable escape in an airport lounge, but in the doctor’s waiting room it’s torture. After the waiting you’re forced into passivity once again. You’re handed over to someone else who torments you for your own good. To someone who tells you whether you’re going to spend the rest of your life lame or half blind. Someone who tells you if there’s going to be a rest of your life at all. And you have to pay for all this.

            While there’s calming music in the airport lounge, in the doctor’s waiting room I always hear the shriek of a drill.

You can’t exactly talk to the other people waiting here about the unheimische of waiting. By starting a conversation you’re letting people know that waiting is tough on you, that you’re nervous about the unknown that’s coming your way, you admit that you’re weak and vulnerable. All this is a breach of waiting room etiquette, which requires that we pretend we’re not waiting.

            The deep sigh, the waiting sigh, the glance at the watch, even the complaint directed at no one in particular that it certainly is taking a long time: these are all desperate attempts to break through the ominous silence, veiled invitations to converse. Some of the others waiting here − who aren’t such amateurs, who’ve mastered the art of waiting − pretend they can’t hear the silent cry for help. A few nod out of compassion and mutter something, but there’s never a real talk about how powerless and dependent we feel. That would only serve to emphasize our powerlessness and dependence. It would break through the illusion that there’s nothing wrong here. Because of that taboo, people who wait can expect little support from one another. We’re all waiting, but each is waiting alone.

The waiting room is so alienating that we don’t even address acquaintances at a normal tone. Speaking at a whisper, we ask how it’s going at home or at work, we talk quietly, supposedly so as not to disturb the others who are waiting. But if that were the real reason, then people would also whisper in trams, trains and other public spaces.

            We whisper in the doctor’s waiting room because the normal world, in which we actually have something to do and still cherish the illusion of control, is not admitted here. We have been handed over to a higher power, just like in church. And in a museum.  We whisper there, too, where a higher power is also present, although it’s usually a bit less terrifying.

Perhaps these two ought to link up somehow: art and the doctor’s waiting room. After all, if you’ve got to keep quiet it might as well be for something that can offer a bit of solace.

            Art in the doctor’s waiting room − balm for sick souls. Not only in the AMC but also in Tytsjerksteradiel and Venlo, in Rosas and Murcia. No Van Gogh reproduction, no weeping gypsy girl on black velvet, no ceramics made by an artistic aunt, but real art, works that are changed on a regular basis.

Maybe I can place something from my growing collection with a GP in Dordrecht, in the district hospital in Overijssel and with my internist in Badalona. That way the patients, I being one of them, would have something to look at − something that not only distracts us but also takes us somewhere else.

            The photograph by Paul Kooiker, the painting by Robert Zandvliet and the minimalistic sculpture by Karin Sander would be bound to evoke reactions. And I’d be able to break through the silence, even in my absence.

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July 2004 – Access for all

A group of school children shuffle through the chic Queen’s Gallery in Bangkok. They stop in front of a work by Shirin Neshat: two entwined hands that are decorated with Iranian motifs. The hands show solidarity and strength.

            The teacher says something. I can’t hear what it is, but I see a girl with long black hair and a Hello Kitty bag nod vigorously.

There’s never before been an exhibition on AIDS in Asia. People seldom even mention the subject. But this year the International AIDS Conference is being held here in Bangkok and I thought art might play a role.

            I’m financing an exhibition with work about HIV/AIDS made by local artists. Curator Hilde Teerlinck and I also asked ten internationally known artists to make something especially for this event. All of them said yes, and now there are ten magnificent works hanging here by General Idea, Lawrence Weiner, Rirkrit Tiravanija and several others.

The names of the artists probably don’t mean anything to the students, but the children are giving the works their full attention.

            The teacher walks up to me. In his best English, he asks, ‘Excuse me, but how do you look at art?’ Such a simple and elementary question. He’s touched the very essence of relating to art: how do we look at it? For me there’s only one way: you look with your heart. The more you look, the more the work will tell you.

And so dozens of classes pass by Shirana Shahbazi, Jef Geys and Leandro Erlich. In the weekends whole families come, with children and grandpas and grandmas. Not because the Thai are so interested in contemporary art, but because the air conditioning in The Queen’s Gallery is set at twenty degrees Celsius while outside it’s over thirty. Even so, most visitors to our exhibition Access for All have probably never talked about AIDS, and now they’re standing here and there’s no getting around it.

            I’m seeing it with my own eyes: art really does change things. ArtAids, my foundation whose purpose is to motivate people to break through the HIV stigma, is born.

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December 2004 – Stephen Shore

One photograph shows an almost abandoned street, a row of parking meters, a low, dark sky. The flaking marquee of a movie theatre, closed for good. Two men are standing on a sidewalk as if they were frozen.

            Other photographs show empty parking lots, and a parking lot full of empty cars. The effect is just as desolate.

            One minute later I’m standing in front of a half-full bathtub. The plastic curtain is hanging just over the edge; you can see the water is lukewarm.  Lying on a scratched table top is a half eaten hamburger.

            The photographs by Stephen Shore are not about the houses, streets and trees but about forms, lines and patterns. The streets and buildings are areas of colour, a telephone pole is a thin, black line. This turns everyday scenes into abstract images that tell us something not only about what can be seen but also about what is missing.

            What the photos allude to more than anything else is the emphatic absence of people. They were here − a few minutes ago someone took a bite out of the hamburger, someone ran water in the bathtub. Five minutes ago people were walking down the street. We’ve just missed them. There was life here up until a minute ago, but not anymore.

It makes me think of myself as an eight-year-old boy, sitting in my attic room and hearing children playing outside. They laughed and shouted to each other. I wanted to be with them. I wanted to run down the stairs, but something held me back. It was just like the recurring dream I had in which I wanted to walk but couldn’t get anywhere. But I wasn’t sleeping; I was wide awake. All I had to do to open my bedroom door was to take one step, but my legs wouldn’t obey me. It was as if they were glued to the linoleum floor. And my arms, too, hung there slack and motionless.

            By the time I finally freed myself, tore down the stairs two steps at a time, pulled open the front door and ran outside without my jacket, the children were gone. I looked around the corner of the street, but they had really disappeared.

We’re too late, Stephen Shore and I. If only we had run faster, taken the stairs three steps at a time, maybe we would have made it.

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June 2005 – The suspended moment

I’m walking by myself through a former school in the town of Altkirch, France. This is where the CRAC d’Alsace art centre is now located, where the opening of the first exhibition of works from the H+F Collection will take place in one hour.

            The guests have not yet arrived. One CRAC employee is in the hall working on some preparations, but otherwise I’m alone, alone for the first time with the works from my collection.

            They look different than they did in the gallery or at the art fair where I bought them. Here they have plenty of room. They’re hanging on a wall alone or in pairs, and daylight is shining through the big schoolroom windows. Here my works can breathe.

            I’ve never seen these works together. Some of them I haven’t seen at all since I bought them; they immediately went on loan to museums, where some still haven’t been shown to the public. Now I’m surprised at how seamlessly they fit together, as if they were bought with each other in mind.

            I know these works, but even so, it’s as if I’m seeing them here for the first time, as if the images had nestled down in me the moment I bought the works and now they’re ripe. This is largely thanks to the curator of the exhibition, Hilde Teerlinck. We’ve worked together for years. Every day, our e-mails go back and forth between France and Spain, filled with ideas. Hilde feels what I feel, sees what I see. In fact, she sees more, as the exhibition clearly shows.

            There’s ‘Deadheading’, the work by Otto Berchem that consists of a pedestal with a vase of flower stems whose blooms have been cut off. The flower petals are lying in a colourful carpet around the pedestal. In the same gallery are photographs by Jörg Sasse in which elements from several different photographs are brought together in nonexistent landscapes that often express emptiness and absence.

            Further on is a work by Bernard Frize, a grid of horizontal and vertical lines painted in different colours, next to a painting by the Spanish artist Prudencio Irazabal in which the colours run into one other. The two works contrast each other, but at the same time they also complement each other. And even further is a work by Paul Kooiker, a photograph that also could have been a painting, a painting that fits in with the other works in terms of colour and form.

            In a separate gallery is a series by Victor Boullet: four photographs taken in a horse hospital. A large white horse is lying against a black dropcloth with bound legs and a tube in his mouth. I see the muscles, I feel both the strength and the vulnerability, which can also be seen in the other photographs of horses that are anaesthetized or being operated on.

            Hanging high on the corridor walls are nine round light boxes by Jeff Wall featuring children from all over the world against cloudy landscapes. It’s as if the ‘Little Children’ really were floating in the air.

The suspended moment. Hilde thought up the title for this exhibition. ‘What do you think?’ she asked in an e-mail. ‘Yes,’ I answered immediately, ‘that’s it!’ She saw the similarities between the various works that I had bought mainly on sheer intuition. That intuition shows what’s driving me. Besides the love of beauty and my penchant for the aesthetic, I want to seize time; I want to grab the moments as they pass and hold them close. That never works in everyday life, of course, except when I write − only art can seize the moment. Hilde is able to bring that art together.

            I stand in front of one of the little sculptures by Karin Sander. It’s an exact replica of someone who has undergone a body scan, made on a scale of 1 to 10. The plastic ‘Doctor Emmerling’ is eighteen centimetres high, standing there with his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

Outside there’s the sound of a horn. The bus with visitors from Art Basel, which is also taking place now, has arrived. They stream in, the gallery owners, museum directors, artists, collectors, journalists, critics, art lovers. I step aside and go stand in a corner so I can keep an eye on Doctor Emmerling.

            Now The suspended moment is theirs.

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November 2005 – The newspaper

I’m kneeling at the toilet, and with every recollection of the article that just appeared in NRC Handelsblad another wave of nausea comes rolling up from my stomach. How could I have been so stupid as to agree to this interview? Yet there it is, in the newspaper, in black and white: Han Nefkens donates 200 thousand euros a year to Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Han Nefkens buys an installation by Olafur Eilasson, with an estimated market value of .... Colossal amounts are printed right there in the NRC next to my name. I’m filled with shame, as if I had appeared in the paper buck naked.

            For five years I worked on my art projects in the strictest anonymity. I was a fly on the wall, small and invisible − and that’s the way I wanted it.  You don’t make a show of such things. You don’t let other people know that you have money. When you give, give in silence − that’s what I was taught.

            But another force has been awakened in me in recent months − a force that wants to let other people in on my passion. If they were to find out how much pleasure I take in contributing to something special, then many more people might become involved − not only in museums but also in medical and scientific research, in their local neighbourhood park, in the world.

            I had thought that the first feeling − the embarrassment − was the dominant one. But not long ago when I was asked if I was willing to be interviewed about my art activities, I didn’t say no. Was it because I thought I would be able to avoid the subject of figures? Did I think the journalist would mainly be interested in my motives and in how my joint ventures actually work? Why did I answer when she asked about amounts of money, when I really didn’t want to make it public?

            Now there I am, in the newspaper: a rich man who gives away money on art. And it knocked me for a loop.

But why? Is it something to be ashamed of? And if it really is, why did I consent to the interview?

            It’s as if my unconscious had taken over and forced me to come out of the closet. My previous comings-out were less difficult. Letting people know I was gay was no problem, and I wasn’t ashamed of being HIV positive, either. But talking about money can be interpreted as bragging, which is totally out of place in the Calvinist culture that apparently has had much more of an impact on me than I thought.

            The longer I think about it, the more I realize what it is about the article that bothers me: the emphasis on money, while money alone is meaningless. You have to know what you want, and you have to be able to select people with whom you can achieve that goal. Vision, persistence and the ability to work together are just as important to the success of a project as money. If one of those elements is missing, you don’t get anywhere.

            But for the newspaper vision and drive are apparently less sexy.

            The waves of nausea finally stop and I sit down on the toilet seat. Yesterday my life changed. No, that’s not right: yesterday I changed my life. I’m no longer hiding behind my art project. I’ve become visible.

            I still feel naked and vulnerable. But I’ll get used to it, and I’ll learn to stand up for what I do. To stand up for who I am.

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December 2005 – Art Camp

My heart is brimming, and it’s running all over my keyboard. Images of the Art Camp that my foundation ArtAids organized two weeks ago in Thailand are still fresh in my mind. Accompanied by thirty-five little Thai children, all of them HIV positive, and forty attendants, I went to the beach at Pattaya to try my hand at painting.

I’m now seven thousand kilometres away, but I can still clearly see the bulldog pin in Muk’s jet-black hair. And the heels of her pink plastic shoes, so high she can scarcely walk in them.

            I can hear the excited shouts of Jeeranak as he catches a glimpse of the sea for the first time in his life. He runs up to the water’s edge but is visibly shaken when the water splashes against his knees. Recoiling for just a moment, he takes a running jump and dives into the waves, clothes and all.

Two little friends spend the whole day doing nothing but zooming up and down in the elevator of the hotel’s enormous atrium lobby. They wave to me and I wave back. At each floor they grow smaller until I cannot see them at all.

            Dangling from the neck of the little girl with the bead rings is a name plate written in those decorative Thai letters that I can’t read. Only later do I learn that my plate says “Doctor Han”. This patient has to go all the way to Thailand just to be a doctor for a few days.

            On the other hand, the children can’t read the English texts that are written on their street market T-shirts. ‘Marihuana girl - she traded her body for drugs and a good time’ is emblazoned across the chest of an eight-year-old girl. ‘I called in sick so many times, next time I’ll call in DEAD’ announces the green T-shirt worn by Muk, whose arms still bear the marks of a recent skin infection. Every time our eyes meet she laughs at me in that typical Thai way - shy and captivating at the same time.

The T-shirts we’ve all been given - white for the children, black for the attendants - are printed with the weekend’s battle cry: ‘rakai’, long live life. Rakai is also printed on Siriporn’s cap. She’s turned up the brim at a coquettish angle. Around her wrist are three braided bracelets, exactly like those worn by many high-second students in Amsterdam, London and Barcelona. Focusing all her attention, she applies coral blue and yellow paint to her piece of batik cloth: a slender mermaid washed up on the beach in Pattaya.

            A doctor who has come here especially from Bangkok will tell her this evening that what she was admitted for a month ago was not an allergy but the same virus that her mother had fought against − and lost.

            Her grandfather doesn’t let her out of his sight for minute. He keeps his red jacket on all day, as if he’s still cold despite the tropical heat. He momentarily rests his hand on her shoulder. Is it to let her know he’s still there, or to convince himself that she hasn’t left yet?

We’ve got an assignment to paint a heart containing eight things that are important to us. I usually go to an expert to figure out what it is I’m feeling, but these children have no need of experts. They paint red, green and bright orange hearts with laughing faces, a fish, a car, a house, a flower, a star, a doctor, a cat and a palm tree. A little boy paints a heart with yellow prison bars, then quickly throws a blob of paint over it so that only a dark spot remains.

Jeeranak paints a big purple heart, and inside it he paints his father, his mother and his oldest brother. They’re all gone. A little while later he goes to sit beside a low wall with his back to the others, staring at the sea. I want to walk over and bump fists with him, as we did earlier today, but something holds me back. I can’t do it. Instead I frantically start taking pictures in an effort to hold on to him.

            Looking through the lens I’m shocked to see that far away no longer exists. Far away is close, much too close.

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January 2006 – Blended images

Because almost all my works of art are housed in museums, I only see them when they’re being exhibited. That’s why every morning I go to visit my website. Today , after clicking on hfcollection.org, I see a car standing on a field of snow. It’s a still from the video ‘Is This Guilt in You Too − [The Study of a Car in a Field]’ by Ryan Gander.

I bought this video in 2005 at Art Basel and I was immediately struck by this image: it could be the beginning of a Hollywood thriller. A woman’s voice describes what’s being shown; she suggests interpretations, she talks about how the art world works, she wonders how real the image is. I can’t hear her very well. Since my attack of encephalitis it’s hard for me to listen to spoken text while I’m looking at an image.

            I provide my own commentary. The sound of my own questions is louder than that of the voiceover. How did that car get there? How come there are no wheel tracks? Was it there before it started snowing? Is it a technical trick?

            These are questions I could ask about many works in my collection. What’s real and what isn’t? What are you seeing? And what does it mean?

As I look at the image on my computer screen another one occurs to me: that of an old car that I saw a few years ago while visiting a pagoda in Vietnam. In one of the rooms behind the pagoda was the light blue Austin (‘heavenly blue’ is what that colour is called) that the monk Thich Quang Duc drove to Saigon in 1963. There he set himself on fire to protest the corrupt regime of President Diem. The photograph of the burning monk, with his car in the background − hood open − appeared on the front pages of all the newspapers. The same photo has now been placed against the car’s windshield. I rested my hand for a moment on the now closed hood.

            I still remember how, as a nine-year-old boy, I scarcely dared look at the photo, and at the same time it fascinated me. That feeling has not changed. Would Thich Quang Duc have used the gas from the gas tank to set fire to himself? Or would he have hidden a jerry can of gas under the hood? Did he leave the hood open by accident because he was in a hurry, and a bit nervous? Or was he trying to say something with it? Was the open hood a signal, a flag? And what would the monk have felt? Why didn’t he instinctively stand up and run away as soon as he felt the flames? Had he completely detached himself from all earthly matter?

The saying ‘A picture tells a thousand stories’ is absolutely not true. The image on my computer screen and the image in my mind evoke a thousand questions, while the snow-covered landscape by Ryan Gander slowly blends into the tropical image in my memory.

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June 2006 – Green candies

As I write, I’m playing with the two green candies on my desk. I stroke them, smell them, bite them through their glistening wrappers. They’re part of a work of art by Felix Gonzalez-Torres that consists of a whole mountain of green candies. Everyone’s free to help themselves and the owner keeps replenishing them. The gallery owner said I could help myself to a few candies, as many as I wanted. What I wanted was to take all five thousand, but that would have been a bit indiscreet. So I took three .

            The gallery owner also showed me another work: a photograph of two empty beach chairs cut out like a jigsaw puzzle, from 1991. ‘Untitled’ is what the work is called, ‘Untitled (Last time)’. I don’t know who may have sat in those chairs, but I miss them. The empty chairs speak of loss, loss and confusion through the bits of cut-up picture.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres has given form to what he knew and what he felt. It’s a strong form that lives on, even after the photographer himself was struck down twelve years ago by the virus I fight against every day. He said it all in one picture, and I am free to guess what happened. The power of Gonzalez-Torres is that he knew what he had to leave out to make his story real.

            Perhaps the chairs in the photograph belonged to him and his friend, who died two years before he did. Perhaps they’re just two empty beach chairs. It doesn’t matter. It’s his chair and mine.

Art releases the most beautiful things there are in a person as well as the most terrible. It’s like love. There’s no difference. You think the other person was made for you, for you alone. You think he would be distraught without you, and that all you have to do is convince him of this simple truth. You want the other person to be your very own, forever − if he’s gone, the whole world is empty. Six billion people aren’t enough to make up for that single loss.

            The beach chairs miss the two who once inhabited them, and my two candies miss their four thousand nine hundred ninety-eight comrades. With his one picture, Felix Gonzalez-Torres has succeeded in saying more than I could ever say in three hundred ninety-seven words.

June 2006 – White is the Colour

Slowly the clouds drift from the corner of the exhibition hall to the ceiling, where they hover before disappearing through the wall, only to reappear on the other side of the room.

            I raise my hand to greet the eight-year-old boy who is stretched out in the meadow in front of his house in a Rotterdam suburb, gazing at the sky. The clouds tell a story meant for him alone. It’s the story of a boy who goes on a journey because the world is calling him. Floating above him is a vast country with a wavy coastline and white, downy mountains, a heavenly bed in a land where nothing hurts. That’s where he’s going to go.

The clouds keep changing shape and they move quickly. They’re hurrying to tell the boy their story, their story that is his story.

            He sees a giant with a big hat and a bird who invites him to fly with him. From the back of the cloud-bird the meadow seems even smaller than his handkerchief, and the houses on the Lindesingel are as big as the blocks he played with that afternoon in his attic room.

            Then suddenly the sky turns clear blue, just for a moment, as if the clouds had to stop and think about how the rest of the story goes. But it doesn’t last long. Soon a ship comes sailing along in full sail. The captain has a pipe in his mouth, and he waves to him. The boy has to climb on board and sail across the ocean to that woolly land where boys never have to go to school and you don’t get punished for lying in the meadow on a weekday morning.

            In that land the weather is always fine and the children play outside until their mothers call them to eat. Chocolate pudding with whipped cream and strawberries on rusks is the main course.

‘The aim of the video projections by Diana Thater is to offer the experience of the encounter between time − the playing time of the video − and space − the architecture on which the images are projected.’

            I’m startled by a thin girl who’s leading a group of visitors around. A woman nods respectfully as if she had just walked into church. A boy with his hair combed straight back tilts his head, as if that might help him see the work better. A girl in a flowered skirt is busily writing something in her notebook, the tip of her tongue protruding from her mouth.

            ‘The interesting thing is that people think these are clouds, when in reality it’s the smoke from fires that were started to make this work. In doing this the artist wants to show that ...’

            I turn around and walk away. I’ll be back tomorrow, and then hopefully I won’t be disturbed by people who think reality is more interesting than the imagination.

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July 2006 – Disappearance of a Tribe

I’ve already been sitting for an hour in a Paris gallery, watching the film by Deimantas Narkevičius that I’ve just bought: ‘Disappearance of a Tribe’. It consists of shots of photographs that were taken during the forties, fifties and sixties of members of the artist’s Lithuanian family. I’ve already seen the film twice, but I can’t get enough of it. Images without text, without explanation and with no other sound than soft music: that’s the best way to see it. With images like this I can just drift off, as I do so often in my day-to-day existence. Except reality usually breaks in and whistles me back. An image belongs to a particular situation and must be inserted into that situation, while I would much rather devise my own reality − or rather: realities − in connection with everything I see. But with this film I can fantasize to my heart’s content. No one is going to rap my knuckles.

            In one of the photos there are nurses standing in front of a grey building, which is undoubtedly the hospital where they work. One of them has climbed into a bare tree. That must be the artist’s mother. Another photo shows the faces of four young men, three close to the camera and one in the background. The men look like factory workers or sailors. They’re not looking into the lens, but I can tell by their eyes that they are very conscious of being photographed. They’re brothers, I think. They resemble each other a bit: the father and uncles of Deimantas.

            In another photo six women and one man are posing on a hill. The women are wearing flowered dresses with short sleeves. I think I recognize the nurses from the earlier photo. And the man in swimming trunks on the dune is one of the factory workers or sailors who looked away from the lens. This must have been how the artist’s parents met, during an excursion with friends from work. This is where he comes from.

            A following image shows a procession of people dressed in heavy coats and walking behind a car to a church. Is that the funeral of a family member? Has one of the people from the tribe disappeared? Or by ‘Disappearance of a Tribe’ does Deimantas Narkevičius mean a way of life, under a communist regime, that no longer exists?

When Narkevičius looks at old photographs, does he get the feeling that for just a moment he is stepping into a life that’s long gone, as I do? For a moment the vanished time been restored. For a moment, then is now.

            Maybe that’s why this work so appeals to me: it’s about things that have passed, but because you can keep looking at the film over and over again, you have the idea that this past is still very close. What no longer exists is made almost palpable by the editing and rhythm of the film, as my fantasies are a reality for me.

            I leave the gallery and walk into the Paris summer, along the broad boulevard where people are sitting at sidewalk cafés and enjoying the sun. And here, too, the disappeared tribe and the stories are still united in my head.

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October 2006 – Le Miroir

Once again, I start my morning with a quick visit to the website of the H+F Collection before starting to write, to enjoy the four random works that are displayed on the homepage. It’s accidental, yet there is a similarity between the photographs by, say, Gerco de Ruijter, Dorothé Meyer, Hans van der Meer and Sam Taylor-Wood that are now appearing on my screen.

            This still surprises me. Does my computer sense it? Does it have a feel for aesthetics? If someone else who had no interest in art were to click on my site, would different combinations appear, or combinations of images that don’t reinforce but weaken each other, combinations that clash? Is there such an obvious coherence within the works in my collection that it doesn’t matter what you choose, it always fits in with the other works? Or do I experience it this way because my eyes see the works with so much love?

Today the work ‘Le Miroir’ by the Finnish artist Elina Brotherus appears on my screen. It consists of a series of photographs of a naked woman looking in a mirror. In each photograph the mirror is a bit less steamed up and the contours of the woman − the artist herself − become more clearly visible. On the sink are two toothbrushes in a glass, and next to this are toothpaste, deodorant and facial cream.

            Suddenly I wonder why I bought these photographs a few years ago in Paris. They’re poetic, they evoke questions, it’s a series − all aspects that attract me. But only now that I have the photos on my screen do I understand what the real reason was for my purchase.

            Fifteen years ago, a few months before his death, my brother Victor stood naked in front of the steamed up mirror in his apartment in Rotterdam. Gradually the steam evaporated, so that the mirror image of his scrawny body became visible, his sunken cheeks, which at the time was the signal that someone was suffering from AIDS. I looked at him, he looked at himself, neither of us said a word.

            Is that why I added this series to my collection, even though I’d really rather not think about the past? I want to live in the now, I’m marching into the future. It’s pointless to focus on the past; it’s pointless and it’s much too painful.

How could I have chosen these pictures? They force me to think about that time, while I was doing such a good job of forgetting. But now I feel the sadness again of being cut off, the shock that the unthinkable really happens and that no one is safe, no matter how well you hide. Once again I feel that anger at life for leaving Victor in the lurch, the almost paralyzing fear that I’ll be next.

            I remember how, during his funeral, I sucked the cool outside air deep into my lungs and said aloud to myself: you’re still alive, they’re not getting you down there.

            I try to let go of Victor. I latch onto life, hold it so hard against me that it leaves marks on my skin − scars that make me happy, because I still have time, and he doesn’t.

            I should never have bought ‘Le Miroir’. I’ve got to get on with my life.

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October 2007 – Overnight stay

‘Why don’t you open up your own museum, Mr Nefkens?’

            The presenter looks me straight in the eyes over the microphone. I’m a guest on an hour-long radio programme Kunststof.

            My own museum. I can see it all now − a white, sterile building. Somewhere in the distance there’s the hollow sound of the curator’s high heels. She’s pacing back and forth because tomorrow is the opening of our new exhibition.

            My own museum. A dead, white space that I myself would have to breathe life into, hoping that people will come and look. What a difference between that and a museum that’s already alive and bustling, one to which I can contribute. I think about the meetings at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, with the seven of us bending over a project to which dozens of people will ultimately contribute, where everyone has his input, where I’m part of a bigger whole.

When I was a child, nothing was more fun than an overnight stay. It was exciting to walk into another life at my grandparents’ home in Geneva, a life that I could step back out of a couple of days later. In my grandparents’ apartment it smelled different: of the meat that had been roasted that day, my grandmother’s heavy perfume, my grandfather’s cigars, the lilacs on the sideboard. It smelled of a foreign country.

            On the cabinet beside my bed was a little dish decorated with yellow roses, and in it were chocolates. I was allowed to go to bed later and I could get up whenever I liked.

            My grandparents had furniture that was different than ours, big and decorated with fandangles that, as I knew, my father didn’t like. In the living room there was an enormous brown velvet sofa with cushions you sunk into, whereas we had an Italian couch with a hard back. The wallpaper here was striped. Ours was beige. And the paintings on the walls were different, bigger, and with complicated frames. Hanging from the ceiling was a crystal chandelier. On warm days, when the windows were open, a breeze would set the crystal in motion, making a glassy tinkling noise that sounded like water in a brook.

Everything at my grandparents’ was different than it was at home, yet I was part of it. That’s what I look for in the museum and art institutes I work with. If I were to build my own museum, I’d never have that special feeling of simultaneous distance and involvement.

            And then there’s all the fuss: the insurance, the installation, the administration, the dozens of details. Now it all looks after itself. I can concentrate completely on what I like best: ideas for exhibitions and presentations.

            And that’s why, here in the radio studio, I tell the presenter: ‘No, Mr van der Linden, having my own museum isn’t for me. I’d rather spend the night elsewhere.’

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January 2008 – Waiting

‘All art is waiting,’ wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil. For waiting is the condition that allows us to look at the world, at ourselves and at the other with complete attention. ‘Waiting is the transformation of time into eternity.’

            I’m astonished whenever I read this. If Weil is right, then how is it possible that an impatient person like me should feel such an affinity with art? I never have time to stand still. I’m always on the run, as if I wanted to cram a whole life into every hour.

            Then all at once I realize that the few moments when I do stop to rest are the moments when I’m standing before a work of art. The otherwise so frenetic time suddenly comes to a halt, the ticking of the clock falls silent.

            I think about how I was able to stand in front of the photographs by Uta Barth for hours on end when they were being shown at the Whisper not! exhibition in 2006 at Huis Marseille, the museum at which they are now on loan. I was especially captivated by the series ‘white blind (bright red)’, which was chosen especially for one room in Huis Marseille in consultation with the artist. The series consists of fourteen photographs of the same tree taken from a window: bare branches with a red flower here and there. Sometimes the image is completely overexposed, making it very difficult to discern any form at all. Some of the photos look so much like each other that you can only see the difference by studying them very closely. You’ve really got to search, the way I loved to do when I was a boy, studying the ‘find the differences’ pictures in the newspaper. I kept on sitting until I had found all the differences. I did it then, I did it forty-five years later and I’m still doing it.

            Only now, reflecting on the words of Simone Weil, do I begin to understand what she means. I lose myself in looking. Everything else disappears and the noise of life slips into the background, and that’s how I find myself. For me, looking at art has become waiting, the silence in a restless existence.

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June 2008 – No R̶e̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶c̶e̶s̶

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José Teunissen and I are walking through the Arnhem Fashion Biennale. We’re looking for someone who might qualify for the first H+F Fashion Award: a prize for a fashion designer who works on the cutting edge of fashion and art. The winner will be given twenty thousand euros to produce a work, and we will make sure that the work is shown and that a catalogue is produced to accompany it. José is the former fashion curator at the Centraal Museum and is now professor at the ArtEZ fashion academy in Arnhem. She and I have been working together for years. She put me in touch with Viktor & Rolf and with Hussein Chalayan, and since then I’ve financed work of theirs that demonstrated the source of their inspiration but fell outside their couture collections. Those works − you can hardly call them ‘dresses’ − were then given to the Centraal Museum on loan.

            But I want more. I know that many fashion designers have an idea in their head that they can’t execute because it’s not commercially remunerative. With the H+F Fashion Award I want to make that fantasy a reality.

We see several candidates for the prize at the Fashion Biennale. Their designs border on art, they’re daring and unusual, and their form and execution jump out at you, as do the ideas behind them. But then I make out the contours of a deer, or is it a woman? It appears to be a mannequin with a black-and-white checked cape on which a deer is attached that is draped over the mannequin’s shoulders. It’s fashion, but it’s also a walking installation. It’s unbridled fantasy. Whoever came up with this idea will certainly be able to go one step further. That’s what we’re looking for.

A few weeks later José and I are in Brussels, visiting the shop of Christophe Coppens, the designer of the deer cape. I’m sitting in a chair whose arms culminate in lion’s heads. Everywhere you look there are stuffed animals, and furniture in shapes that far exceed every style or classification. In the studio behind the shop, women in white dusters are sewing and stitching. One of them bends far over to get a better look at the hat she’s working on.

            Christophe is happy with the prize, surprised. He asks once again if he really can make whatever he wants. Yes, as long as it’s within the budget.

            He takes us to the basement where there’s an enormous doll house that was part of an exhibition a few years ago. You can tell from the shape, the lighting and the way the details are executed that Christophe went to theatre school and then spent some time working in the theatre. The doll house is ominous, dark, forbidding. When you open the little doors you see bloody and terrifying scenes that make you think of the Dutroux affair.

            Will his new work be something like this? Christopher doesn’t know yet. He’s no closer to deciding when we come for our next visit. But he takes us out to a fish restaurant around the corner.

            ‘What I’d really like to do is throw everything overboard. All references to my own work, all references to books, to artists, references within the fashion worlds, references to materials, techniques and form,’ he says while taking a bite out of a stuffed tomato. ‘I want to take another look at the purpose of the accessory. I want the imagination to take over.’

            I nod, but my mind is blank.

            ‘What’s a colour? What’s a shape?’ Christophe continues. ‘What is fashion? What is a body?’

            I have no answer to these questions. What is something without a frame of reference? Isn’t that like a person without memory, as I was almost seven years ago? How is he going to express this? I find it suspenseful, pleasantly suspenseful.

            In the months that follow José and I are sent sketches − sketches of strange shapes with lines and arrows pointing from one to the other. I can’t visualize it, but I have complete faith in Christophe and I’m very curious as to the  results.

In December it’s ready. Christophe’s work, No R̶e̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶c̶e̶s̶, is being shown at Platform 21 in Amsterdam. It’s a cold day, but inside it’s warm. I climb the stairs to what once was a large, round chapel, and walk into heaven. Placed on low tables are parts of shop window dummies: heads, arms, legs, thighs, fitted with decorations that are all connected to each other. There are thirty-three couture accessories, illuminated by low-hanging lamps. Attached to one leg is a treadmill, attached to another half leg is a garter. Cavities are filled with material: protruding from a head is an enormous tongue spitting out bits of fabric, another dummy head has two horns at the shoulders, like enormous ears.

            They’re abstract forms, but recognizable. The whole thing suggests a studio as theatre décor, or more than that: a studio as a play. It feels like a dream that has become reality.

            At the same time, it is a studio. The women in white dusters who are standing and sitting among the dummies are busy sewing and embroidering. Christophe himself will also be here a few times in the coming weeks to continue working on the piece, and people who are so inclined and who possess the necessary skills are invited to help.

            No R̶e̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶c̶e̶s̶  is a work in progress, a work that will never be finished. Yet it constitutes an entity. It’s many forms make it dynamic, the light colours make it peaceful, and the use of material and the presence of people make it lively.

            Christophe has succeeded in producing something without reference to anything else. But I know for sure that in the future this installation itself will be a reference. No R̶e̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶c̶e̶s̶  itself is clearly a reference.

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July 2008 – Bangkok love ball

‘Do you want to dance, Khun Han?’ The young Thai curator of our exhibition gives me a shy smile.

‘Yes, I do, Chattiya.’

       But I’m already dancing. Everyone is dancing in this Bangkok disco during the ArtAids love ball. There’s really no dance floor here. You just move wherever you happen to be.

       We organized this party as part of the ArtAids event More to Love, which is being held at five different locations in the city. The club is packed with young Thai: lovely slender girls with straight black hair, like Chattiya, and boys in white sneakers with their caps on backwards to look cool. Among them are the Thai and European artists whose work we’re showing at the various exhibitions, and the staff and board members of ArtAids. We, the ArtAids people, are by far the oldest.

       Videos are being projected on the wall that were made by the VJ, Gerald van der Kaap: red, purple and yellow images, almost fluid, alternating with shots of condoms and young people making love. The music is so loud that talking is pointless unless you’re a good lip reader, but it’s difficult for me with the Thai-English that people speak here.

As I bob to the music, images from the past few days pass through my mind. I see before me the Thai princess who opened the big exhibition at Chulalongkorn University. I led her past the works and caught a hint of perfume, Chanel No. 5. I saw the white powder on her face and the three small drops of sweat above her lip. One of the works is a chalk drawing, and visitors are invited to rub parts of it out. ‘Ah, wipe out AIDS, very good,’ said the princess with her husky voice, and she nodded with satisfaction.

            I see the children who took part in the workshop we held in a large shopping centre. One of the Thai artists had made a stamp, which was used to make prints that were given to the children to colour in. I watched as one mother picked up an ArtAids brochure. I see a large golden Buddha with an enormous red AIDS ribbon, the work of Leo Copers that is being exhibited at Silpakorn University. Until three minutes before the opening yesterday Leo was still arranging and rearranging the ribbon.           

            There was also music at the opening of our exhibition at the Tadu Art Gallery, as well as dancing and delicious snacks (when Thai get together there’s always food). I see the buttons in the shape of eyes that Kamol Phaosavasdi made, one for positive and one for negative. And I see the thirteen framed forms, the work of the young artist Patiroop Chychookiat. He asked his fellow artists and the ArtAids team to take an HIF test. Twelve negative results are now hanging in the exhibition room, and one positive: mine.

            I see the faces of the children with HIV who were photographed by Manit Sriwanichpoom. The Thai authorities didn’t allow us to show the photographs at Silpakorn University because the children were recognizable, and that could lead to social exclusion − even though the subtitle of the exhibition is ‘A contemporary art event to fight the stigma of HIV’. So we organized a separate exhibition in the photographer’s gallery called Life is Beautiful.

       Slowly all these images begin to merge. The colours and the shapes become one with the other ideas in my mind, and then they fade. Not only do my thoughts seem to be dissolving, but I, too, am being swallowed up in the whole. My self is disappearing and there no longer a border between me and the music, between me and the constantly changing images on the wall, between me and the all the others who are here. I don’t know if it’s the high I’m feeling from the past few days, from the beers I’ve had, the heat, the pounding of the music or the dancing bodies right next to me, but I feel terrific. Being one with the people around me − there’s no more perfect happiness imaginable, even if it only lasts as long as a number by Lady Gaga.

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Augustus 2008 – Exposed

Some people ask me why I do it. I shrug my shoulders and peel off a couple of practical reasons, but actually I don’t really know. I just do it, without thinking about it. It’s intuitive.

            But today I suddenly know. I know why I feel the need to show other people the things that I think are beautiful: it’s a form of exhibitionism. I like to be naked, and (this just makes it worse) I like to be naked with somebody else’s body. I’m a cowardly flasher.

It seems prudent and safe, but that’s deceptive. There is no safe exhibitionism. You’re naked, even if the body is borrowed. You expose yourself to criticism.

            I know that there might be nasty reactions, that what appeals to one person may leave another person cold. It’s an occupational hazard. ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen’ is what the Americans say, whose practical streak is evident in so many of their adages. I love to cook, but I have no interest in burning my fingers. I want to have  my cake and eat it too.

I know the rules of the game, yet each time someone doesn’t share my enthusiasm it hurts my feelings. Recently I read an article about an exhibition that appeared in an evening newspaper in which the reviewer had made a few critical remarks. ‘That man doesn’t know what he’s writing about!’ I shouted angrily as I tore the paper into a hundred pieces and tried to flush them down the toilet. The shreds of paper just kept on swirling, around and around. Even the john doesn’t like this shit.

It’s painful to be naked. It’s risky. You feel the cold on all sides. And yet I flatly refuse to protect myself, to cover myself up. I can’t help it. And I’m going to do it all over again: buy another beautiful piece to hang on the wall of a museum in the hope that as many people as possible will see it.

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July 2009 – No estas solo

‘Take the hand of the person next to you and hold it tight.’ The words echo throughout the Fundació Joan Miró museum. Markus, one of the co-workers with Pipilotti Rist, sets an example by grabbing the hand of the woman next to him and nods encouragingly to the gallery full of Catalan authorities and people from the Barcelona art world. He’s here on behalf of Pipilotti (who couldn’t be here herself because of the pneumonia she contracted in Vietnam) to accept the Joan Miró prize that she’s been awarded.

            ‘Go on,’ says Markus. The people look at one another somewhat awkwardly. They’re not accustomed to grabbing the hands of strangers. After all the official speeches in which the importance of art in general, the importance of art in Catalonia in particularly and the importance of lots of other things is solemnly acknowledged, this is an unexpected request. But Markus repeats it. The man on my right searches in vain for my hand and finally takes hold of the empty sleeve of my jacket.

            So there we are, hand in hand: the jury members for the Joan Miró prize, the director of the Fundació Miró and her closest colleagues, the various dignitaries in their dark suits, the art critics, the Catalan artists, the journalists and all others present.

            ‘Raise your hands in the air and repeat what I say,’ Markus cries. ‘No estas solo’ − you are not alone.

            ‘No estas solo,’ responds the crowd softly, almost inaudibly. ‘No estas solo.’ Louder now. Then finally, ‘No estas solo!’ resounds throughout the gallery.

            It gives me goose bumps. No estas solo. These three words explain what art is and why art is. They say why we live and how we ought to live. These three words reflect the essence of my existence. This is what I aim for with my writing, with the way I collect, with my art projects, with my friendships and my loves.

            No estas solo. The words are still resounding in my head later on as I stand on the patio of the Fundació Miró, holding a glass of cava. No estar solo. That’s what I want.

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September 2009 – Finger on her Cheek

Walking through Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen on my way to the opening of The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions, the exhibition on the interface of fashion and art that José Teunissen and I first envisioned two years ago, I see it immediately: the painting I used to visit with frequent regularity when I was a boy of ten.

I often came here on Wednesday afternoon, when I had no school. I did want to play outside with the other children, but something kept holding me back. I preferred to take the tram to the city − line 4 − and get out at the Heemraadssingel, then walk to the museum.

            There was a solemn, mysterious smell in the entrance hall, something like in church but sweeter, more chic. It was enough just to walk through the galleries, to soak in the restfulness and silence. I felt respect for the paintings hanging there.

            My favourite place was one of the bay windows. I would install myself there so I could look at a painting of a woman with big dark eyes. She had black hair and wore a flowered shawl. On the table in front of her lay a closed fan. The woman was holding the index finger of her right hand against her cheek. She was a Spanish dancer, I was sure of it, and she was taking a bit of a rest in a café in Paris after a performance. What a Spanish dancer was doing in Paris was a question I couldn’t answer (I had never been to Paris), but there was no doubt in my mind that this was Paris.

            I imagined artists sitting in the café drinking wine, in the middle of the day, and French ladies with low-cut décolletés, like the ones I had seen at home in a book with posters from that time. The dancer looked around, amused by the people she saw. Everyone was deep in conversation, but not with her. She didn’t care, though. Looking was enough. Later she would open her fan and fan herself in such a way that the men would wonder what she meant. Were the movements of her wrist secret codes that she used to send a message?

            I loved hidden codes, gestures that only insiders could understand. I myself had a whole series of them. If I scratched my ear it meant, ‘Look at that man there’. If I ran my arm along my cheek, that meant, ‘I’m tired’. If I half-closed my eyes, it meant, ‘Let’s go outside’. But I had no insiders to share my gestures with. My brothers and sister were too young, and the boys in my class were too rough.

As I sat in the bay window I could hear the creaking of the parquet and whispering voices in the distance. The sun shone through the net curtains onto the velvet upholstery. I stood up to look at the sign that hung next to the painting and saw to my surprise that it didn’t say ‘Spanish dancer’ but ‘Finger on her cheek / Le doigt sur la joue’. The work was painted in around 1910 and donated to the museum by a certain Mrs L. de Graaff-Bachiene.

            Would it have hung above the fireplace in this lady’s house, in a living room that she called the ‘salon’? Would she have sat in a chair every day looking at the Spanish dancer? Would she have spoken to her? Told her about Mr de Graaff and his bad temper, about the gardenias in her garden? Would she know what part of  Spain the dancer came from, whether she was married, and if she was, whether her husband was also in Paris?

            In the museum shop I bought a postcard of the painting with my pocket money. I hung it opposite my bed so I could look at it every evening. Maybe the dancer would also tell me where she came from, where her husband was and what the motion of her fan meant.

I say good-bye to my Spanish dancer. The opening of The Art of Fashion will start in a few minutes, and there are dresses being shown in that exhibition that wouldn’t have looked bad on her.

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