Talking about the Far East from a Dutch standpoint is a matter that inherently involves the sensitive topic of colonial history. Or maybe not so sensitive after all? Being a recent resident of Eastern European origin (what in the local lingo is called an allochtone), I am not in a good position to judge the (post-)colonial mentality of the Netherlanders and therefore, in what follows, I will limit myself to commenting on some direct experiences.

In 1993 I was invited together with my subREAL partners to do research in Arnhem for the Sonsbeek exhibition. On this occasion I visited Bronsbeek, an institution set up to document the colonial history of the Netherlands. The building - a replica of the farm architecture used by the colonists in Indonesia - hosted a surrealistic gathering of objects, photos and life-size dioramas. In the entrance hall, a miniature equestrian monument was standing right next to a gigantic Coke machine. The endless corridors were filled with the sweet smell of mashed potatoes. It was noon, and the deserted building suddenly became animated: from unexpected corners appeared a small crowd of uniformed old men - all with huge white beards half covering various medals and military insignia, all crawling or wheelchairing towards the canteen. The museum was also a home for veterans of the colonial wars, who were waiting for their last call to duty among this display of a past glory. Our curator insistently emphasised the fact that such a small country had been able to amass and control such a huge empire. I felt a bit confused by her extremely critical discourse, considering that she herself was from the USA - by no means an innocent country in terms of colonial ambitions - but then I thought - as usual - that it might be just my post-communist naiveté.

Later on, I started to look for traces of that colonial past and to understand how it was dealt with. But there is not much to see in the Netherlands in terms of colonial symbolism or exotica. Dutch history, colonial or not, is a story of endurance, of the ability to circumvent adversity and to adapt to harsh conditions. It is a story of material success without spectacular moments of cruelty or redemption. The Dutch, unlike their neighbours from Britain, France or Spain, were unwilling and unable to »civilise« the »savages« they encountered. And, unlike the Belgians, they managed to exploit their overseas provinces without excessive oppression. At the same time, one will never find here the glorious monuments, the flashy collections and the resplendent iconography that usually go together with imperial ambitions. And that is because there were no such ambitions in play: as the recently deceased Prince Claus said, the Netherlands was never a kingdom, let alone an empire: it was and is a republic with a representational monarchy at the top.

We are now just ending an optimal period for retrospective evaluations here, one which started two years ago with the celebration of a 400-year-long »special relationship« between The Netherlands and Japan, and continued this year with the 400th anniversary of the VOC (the Dutch East Indies Company). The anniversary of the »special relationship« passed off without too much noise, at least in the Netherlands. An outcome that was to be expected, if one thinks of the limitations defining the commercial monopoly exercised by the Netherlands in its relations with Japan between 1600 and 1853. For all that time, the extremely xenophobic shogunate used the Dutch traders as gate-keepers against an outside world perceived as barbaric but still unavoidable due to its persistent military and economic dynamics. Confined on the artificial island of Deshima (right in front of Nagasaki harbour), the Dutch were not allowed onto the mainland, to practise their religious beliefs openly, or to set up lucrative facilities of their own. This weird set-up was made possible by the incomparably low profile the Dutch traders were willing to keep to attain their utmost goal: trading. A nation deprived geographically in terms of area and resources, small in numbers and therefore not able to sustain a military force of strategic importance (and perhaps to push the agenda of religious conversion), the Dutch were no threat to a political system suspicious of any input from the outside world. Of course, this situation had some consequences in other aspects of the relationship: the exchange between the two civilisations went no deeper than the scientific curiosity of the privileged and no further than the regular imagological cliché. Quite exceptionally for the history of European travels, the Dutch were the ones furnishing the exoticism, and not the other way round. While Dutch culture had to wait for Van Gogh in order to integrate the Japanese vision of landscape, the Dutchmen, perceived as an exotic Other, entered the imagery of Japanese visual and applied art pretty early on, and stayed till the late 19 century. In 1802 Hokusai printed an image that I find typical: through a window the viewer can perceive five Dutch officials (probably from the group making the periodical visit to the shogun) confined in a house in Edo; one is holding a round object, presumably a coin, while the others are absorbed in conversation. In the street, a colourful group of Japanese men and women is staring and pointing at the unusual sight.

The VOC story is less simple and innocent. The company was a substitute for the Dutch government in dealing with overseas countries, both in terms of commercial and of political/military issues. From this position, the VOC leaders imposed a rather harsh policy in Southeast Asia in order to maintain peace and to extract profit. The inherently simplifying attitude of the alien force opened painful wounds that are still unhealed today. The gigantic Indonesian archipelago was probably confronted with inter-ethnic conflicts even before the Dutch came in. But their reign did not provide a remedy for the restlessness of the Acheh people, it didn’t solve the Moluccan claim for independence, and it made room for the development of the Timorese crisis. Basically, the VOC policy in Indonesia was similar to the one in Japan - one of non-interference with the local populations and traditions apart from a superficial level of contact with the local ruling classes. After their withdrawal from Indonesia, the Dutch experienced a massive immigration of populations from that area. The Moluccans are still entrenched in an expectant attitude, waiting for their promised independence, which will probably never come. The Indians and Chinese Indonesians are integrated in the »samenleving.« So the Indonesian are allochtones themselves.

The Netherlands is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic community with a strong input from the former Asian colonies (also from South American Surinam and the Antilles). This reality brings some input at the level of the country’s material culture. It also adds to its unchallengeable reputation for long-lasting tolerance. But it does not necessarily add up to a conscious, co-ordinated integration of different values and standards at the spiritual level of the cultural machine. An interesting consequence of the mass-culture dynamics that we assimilate now with »globalisation« is that societal structures become non-transparent; there is no possibility of promoting agendas other than the ones accepted by mainstream channels, or only in a marginal way. In order to experience literally the difference in cultural discourse, one has to make a remarkable research effort. This may be good in terms of filtering out exoticism and kitsch, but it is bad at the practical level of time and access.

Visiting »The Netherlands Meets Southeast Asia 1600 - 1950,« the exhibition organised by the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, has in that sense been a significant experience. While this nodal event of the VOC celebration year is advertised everywhere, it is rather hard to find it in the labyrinthine chain of rooms filled with oppressive applied art. I was wandering around like many other visitors, looking for the right access to the (otherwise modest) display and, while doing so, I realised the typicality of the situation: there is a rich body of evidence lying somewhere near to us, there is a willingness to deal with it and to explore it, but it all stops somewhere, hidden in the middle of so much useless beauty.

There is no political correctness in the Dutch culture, at least at the level of self-analysis and self-contemplation. And I do not know if this fact should make us thankful or worried. On one hand, it is good to distance oneself from a heavy-handed, US-like approach. On the other hand, the post-modern relativism characterising other, less happy societies is somehow a lack here. Dutch artists tend to travel a lot, and to grab their inspiration wherever their [i]wanderlust[/i] takes them. A bit like their ancestors, they are unintrusive traders who just want to experience a place and to take something home, ideally without interfering with the local situation in any harmful way. A kind of sympathetic neutrality, so well expressed in the works of Rineke Dijkstra (to give a very obvious and popular example). Therefore, it is even more precious when this general type of attitude is broken away from in the work of some artist. I had three revelations of this kind lately.

One is a piece by Fiona Tan, using a sequence of archive film showing little naked kids smoking ostentatiously in front of the camera. The sequence is looped and the viewer is left alone with this ethnographic document dealing with such unbearable topics as child abuse, poverty, the arrogant distance of (Western) technology, etc.. The same procedures apply, maybe less effectively, in other pieces where this artist recycles old footage, but in all this body of work, Tan deals consistently with her Asian background, questioning, in a subdued manner, the positioning of two symmetric worlds towards (against?) each other.

Like Fiona Tan, Tiong Ang belongs to what he describes so suggestively as the silent Indonesian-Chinese minority that came in Holland after 1954 and worked hard to integrate (yet again) into a different culture. More than his colleague, Ang assertively questions his Asian identity, and made it a central theme in his work combining painting and video. His most recent film, made on commission for the Shanghai Biennial, is actually a performance enacted together with an African actor playing the role of spokesperson/alter ego. The Chinese/African duo highlight, in a remarkable way and with subtle comic nuances, the absurdity (but also the matter-of-factness) of an existence built along the fault lines of cultural and racial difference. Remarkably entertaining in no matter what context, the film carried an extra shock load in China, where society until recently ignored the existence of dark skin-coloured people altogether.

Roy Villevoye, once the travel companion and collaborator of Tiong Ang, was for several years involved in a personal exploration of remote areas of New Guinea. His relationship with the people and places there took on a sort of permanence, so much so that continuity was established from one film to another and from one series of photographs to the next. What I find admirable in Villevoye’s work is the uninhibited manner in which he copies and distorts old colonial stereotypes. He travels to those remote locations with loads of small presents that we might consider junk (in the line of the glass beads and mirrors used centuries ago by travellers), but are received with joy by the locals. As an extension of this practice he gave away several T-shirts, which were transformed by the people into decorative garbs, skilfully cut and torn in order to make them conform more to their ideas of beauty. Later, he invites people from a village all the way to Amsterdam in order to check on the trees in Vondelpark and to sleep in Roy’s bed. They also meet an old ethnographer who wants to play them a 40-year-old audiotape so they can identity it. The Dutchman has a moment of panic because he cannot manage the tape recorder, but one of the New Guineans solves the problem (a juicy moment of cultural encounter); after that they all listen in ecstasy to the rough sounds while the visitors exultantly manifest their recognition of the ritual patterns in the music. The oeuvre of Villevoye is mainly a flux of images and sounds, not particularly articulated by narratives; but the involvement of the artist is so deep that everything comes together in a pure and somehow naïve story-telling procedure.

I want to close this fragmented excursion with a piece of imagological speculation I picked up from a conversation between two women - a Dutch and a Japanese. In an evening-long interaction, they somehow came to the conclusion that the two nations have a lot in common: the remoteness in expressing big emotions; the acute sense of privacy; the very subtle social codes of co-existence; the obsession with engineering the landscape and mastering natural forces; the fatalism in dealing with adversity; the frugal understanding of personal comfort; the ability to deal with crowds and to live in small spaces etc. etc.. So probably the Deshima period was not only based on materialistic determination, but also on more subtle forces of attraction. After all, the only country that is represented by a theme park in Japan is - of course - Holland.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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