What Do You Learn in Pursuit of Particleboard?
An Evening at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam
You don’t need to indulge in any of Amsterdam’s tantalizingly legal experiences to feel transported when you approach the Stedelijk Museum. The museum of contemporary art and design’s signature overhanging roof is the embodiment of intentionally evocative design. The phenomenal “bathtub”, as it’s known, does enough on its own to send sensations across your consciousness — it’s arguably the museum’s best attraction.
Biased by my love for design and contemporary art, I find the entrance to be enormously fitting for such a museum. The kind that would be extraordinary while tripping on mushrooms. It is Amsterdam, after all!
If my friends and I’s planning had been more precise, I’d be writing a very different account of my jaunt through the Stedelijk. For my millionth time writing about museums, I can’t skip the Stedelijk; the audacity to hold an exhibit called “When Things Are Beings”, it’s as if they knew I was coming to visit!
Regretfully, I failed to record most of this wonderful museum, but below are short snippets of the works that really grasped me.
The Sceptical Structures of Max by James Beckett might be my favorite piece from the museum’s first floor, although it was the inconspicuous and plainly colored print-book chained to the wall that I was sucked into, not the massive display of particleboard creations. My all accounts, I found the rest of the piece unfortunate and not to my liking.
Subject of the piece, Max Himmelheber, a German engineer and one of the producers of particleboard, was my unlikely introduction to Shintoism. Particleboard, a conglomerate piece of material made from sawmill waste otherwise headed for landfills, is surprisingly correlated to the Japanese Shintoist beliefs and its linked ideas of animism, that all objects or materials possess their own life source, or distinct soul.
James takes the liberty of commenting on neoliberal consumption behaviors and all the “crude” reality of industrial materials, which is great and deserves a spot in this museum. But I’d be lying if I didn’t skip right over it for Max’s writings, displayed silently in the corner. Recounting a 1953 factory experience in Hokkaido, Himmelheber wrote a passage I feel is now resurgent in astronomically different locales. This kind of awareness of interconnection, respect for non-human life forces, and an embrace of intercultural views is seldom in industrial settings, let alone those pioneered by the most-west of westerners. It’s the fruit of community organizers and alternative publications, Indigenous teachers and revived histories. Max deserves no credit for appreciating an idea that wasn’t his, but I certainly didn’t expect it to appear in his pursuit of particleboard.
On the opening day of a factory for particleboard in Hokkaido, Max describes a Shinto priest fixing prayer strips to all sorts of gauges and valves across factory equipment.
“‘We apologize to the spirit of the water for seizing the spring and for forcing it to drive our steam turbines’”. “Surely”, Max wrote, “the Japanese do not believe that committed and continued injustice can be redressed by a ritual act? But this is about a fundamental attitude: where Westerners celebrate their technical achievements as victories over nature, the Japanese confess their guilt”.
Questioning the reality and validity of the human-nature dichotomy construct, and whether it even exists at all, Max says, “in truth there is only a whole world, a sphere of life in which we are inseparably integrated as acting and suffering members.”
I’d transcribe his whole book here if I could.
Shinto-adjacent beliefs are just one interpretation of the inner forces of objects or “things”. Of 24 works in the exhibit, these words gripped me tightest. But bestowing meaning to creative objects and naturally occurring ones alike is no activity new to humanity.
Shani Leseman’s collection of 100 ceramic objects, called Talismagic, focuses on a different kind of soul bestowed to objects. Based on milagros, metal objects part of religious ceremonies on her home island country of Curacao. While the ceramics imitate the original metal subjects, we’re reminded of a non-exclusive practice of magick in many colonized nations. Paganism, Voodoo, Winti — there’s many names to describe the rituals of communities ravaged by colonial monotheism. Each milagro is the supernatural in every day. Bestowed with gratitude, desires for protection, or other specific meanings. It’s a creative expression of how objects “gain agency, meaning, and special powers” in the context of Curacao’s folklore and traditions, what’s not to love!
The Dutch can stand to learn about the communities they conquered, and I can’t think of a more beautiful way to learn along with them.
That was all I managed to record about things that are also beings, but I wouldn’t do the floor justice if I didn’t include the linocut that introduced me to the idea of zaum, or the female-artists’ exploration on gossip.
Elaine W. Ho and Amy Suo Wu used a cozy reconstruction of, well — a pillow fort — as the site of their exploration of rest as a political act, self-care, community between women, and gossip as an informal but legitimate form of knowledge production, particularly for women throughout history.
Lounging on the plush pillows, my girlfriends and I listened to a radio production by the women who first occupied this fort, all with diaspora backgrounds, who use their skills of artistry, activism, and academia to address their “personal struggles, and nurture trust and intimacy”.
Far out from my field of knowledge, or quite frankly interest, is the neologism “zaum”. A Russian concept, derived from the prefix “za”, meaning beyond, and the noun “um”, meaning the mind. It was a major departure for Russian poets: “transnational, nonsensical poetry, merely sound without meaning. I can’t say I loved the zaum I read, but its trajectory into the world of visual art too seemed more playful to me than anything else. I didn’t really care for the explanations of zaum in academic, hyper-dissected methods. I preferred creation for creations sake, and finally, something created without meaning behind it! A rest for the mind or an exercise for the soul.
We could all do with a little creating for the sake of it.