Page, Robin
Bluebeard Junior Fluxus Happenings And Events For Kids
irony? revenge? at least very amusing to read and now available again in form of a reprint by Boekie Woekie of the first edition of the Edition Hundertmark booklet from 1995, stapled, 16 pages, 21 x 14,5 cm, Amsterdam 2010
EUR 12,00
Liebe Freunde! Gefürchtete Feinde!
Es hat sich mir aufgedrängt, bei diesem Anlass dies Dieter Roth Zitat aus der Mottenkiste zu holen. (Mottenkiste: gemeint ist die Kiste, wo die Mottos drin sind.)
Die von Dieters Mut zur Polarisierung, vielleicht auch von seinem Übermut zeugende Anrede fällt mir vor dem Hintergrund einer Ausstellung ein, für die sich die D.R.A., die Dieter Roth Akademie, mitverantwortlich fühlt und für die ich hier ein paar Worte sagen soll. Nur habe ich diesen Hintergrund noch gar nicht gesehen. Ich schreibe dies heute, am 7.11., in Amsterdam auf, damit ich nicht, wenn´s so weit ist, allzu sehr in´s Stottern gerate. In Bezug auf die Souvenirs Ausstellung hören Sie mich also über mein Vorgefühl sprechen.
Ob da in Stuttgart wohl etwas von der ursprünglichen Idee übrig geblieben sein wird, ausser dem Titel natürlich „Dieter Roth Souvenirs“? Als es nach Gertrud Otterbecks Anregung vor einem guten Jahr mit der Souveniridee losging, hatte ich mir unter Souvenirs jedenfalls eher kleine Dinge vorgestellt, etwas, das sich von Reisen mitbringen lässt, Dinge mit einer persönlichen, in den meisten Fällen wohl erklärungsbedürftigen Bedeutung. Ich hatte an das Zusammentragen von Erinnerungsstücken gedacht, bei denen nicht notwendigerweise gleich von Kunstwerken die Rede sein müsste, ich hatte an Dinge gedacht, die Dieters Bild in einem noch unbekannten Licht hätten erscheinen lassen. Das hätten gern auch immaterielle Mitbringsel sein dürfen, zum Beispiel in der Form von Anekdoten oder stories.
Falls diese Ausstellung, hier in der Staatsgalerie und dort im Kunstmuseum, nun doch wieder auf eher traditionelle Weise zeigen sollte, was für ein toller Künstler er war, verdanken wir das dann der Dieter Roth Akademie, die das eine bewirken wollte, aber das andere schaffte? Oder ist es nicht einfach so, dass Kunstmuseën sich überhaupt mit nichts andrem als mit Kunst füllen lassen?
Momentchen mal! Stelle ich mir etwa vor, dass ich nicht glücklich über diese Ausstellung sein werde? Das darf nicht sein. Ich stelle mir vor, dass ich Geschenke Dieter Roths sehen werde, grosse wie kleine. Diese Spielregel, sage ich mir fast heimlich, werden doch hoffentlich alle Leihgeber beherzigt haben? Geschenke müssen es doch sein, Souvenirs lassen sich doch nur als Geschenke verstehen?
Sehr lange dauert es nicht, bis mir klar wird, dass selbst im Falle, dass doch Geld bei dieser oder jener Sache eine Rolle gespielt haben sollte, Dieter für mich auf einer Stufe verkehrt, wo es ihm eigentlich gar nicht möglich war, etwas anderes als Geschenke zu machen. Selbst wenn diese oder jene Sache viel Geld oder Arbeit gekostet haben sollte, ist sie doch Geschenk, weil sie eigentlich unbezahlbar ist. Ich erwarte jedenfalls, dass ich bei der gleichzeitigen Anwesenheit seiner Geschenke in reicher Zahl und allen Dimensionen an einen Dieter Roth denken werde als den Gönner (diesmal mit G, nicht mit K), an den, der uns all diese Sensationen gönnt.
Mir ist hier in Amsterdam schon klar, und ich denke für die gesamte Akademie sagen zu können: wir sind alle glücklich, dass diese Ausstellung möglich wurde und herzliche Gratulation und vielen Dank denen, die diese Ausstellung Dieters möglich gemacht haben!
Man hat mich hier als einen von der Dieter Roth Akademie hingestellt (nun gut, ich hab´ mich freiwillig melden müssen), um etwas über sie zu sagen. Sie erlauben mir, dass ich die Akademie kurz bekannt mache. Wir sind ein ziemlich bunter Haufen und sprechen verschiedene Sprachen – Englisch ist meistens die Brücke auf der wir uns treffen, dabei ist Englisch nur für drei der Mitglieder Muttersprache. Die meisten von uns sind Künstler, aber einige haben auch andere Berufe. Ein paar von uns sind angereist, Uwe Lohrer und Gertrud Otterbeck leben hier in Stuttgart. Wir zählen ungefähr 25 bis 30 Leute, die Dieter Roth recht gut gekannt haben. Was uns verbindet sind zum Teil lange Freundschaften, zum Teil ist es aber auch nur, dass wir von einander wissen, grosse Verehrung für Dieter Roth zu fühlen, sowohl für den Menschen, wie wir ihn kannten, als auch für den Künstler, was sich aber häufig so vermischt hat, dass der eine der andere war. Mehrere von uns haben mit ihm auf verschiedenen Ebenen zusammengearbeitet. Zudem besteht die DRA aus etwa noch mal so vielen, die sich von Dieter Roth über Mittelsmänner haben faszinieren lassen. Die Mittelsmänner waren dann meistens wir.
Eine erste Gruppe dieser Freunde Dieter Roths hat sich also im Jahr 2000 auf Dietersohn Björn und mein Betreiben hin getroffen. Seither sind wir jährlich zusammengekommen. Unterschiedlich viele Mitglieder sind in den vergangenen Jahren dem Aufruf zum Treffen gefolgt – die grösste Zahl ist wohl zur 7. Konferenz nach China gereist – da waren es um die 50 Leute. Es ist zur Gewohnheit geworden, dass bei dem jährlichen Treffen der Ort des nächsten Treffens verabredet wird. Ausserdem stellen die D.R.A.ler aus Anlass ihres jährlichen Treffens gern ihre Werke aus. Das ist auch diesmal wieder der Fall. Wen´s interessiert, der gehe während der Bürozeiten zu den Otterbeck Architekten an den Oberen Haldenweg 9 in Ostfildern. Um es für die im Saale reizvoll zu machen, die beim eigentlichen Thema bleiben wollen, da gibt es auch einiges Dieter Roth Relevantes zu sehen.
Die Akademie wurde zuerst diskutiert als eine mögliche Lösung des Personalproblems der durch Dieters Tod verwaisten Büroskulptur. Dieter hatte sein Büro in seinen letzten grossen Ausstellungen in der Wiener Secession und im MAC Marseille eingerichtet und in ihm während der Dauer der Ausstellungen als sei er zuhause, oder im Atelier, tatsächlich auf Pantoffeln, gearbeitet. Die Vorbereitungen zur Roth Retrospektive waren damals im Gespräch und damit auch, welche von Dieters Linien es sein würden, die weitergezogen werden könnten. Diese erste Ausrichtung, obwohl so direkt nie ausgeführt, zeigt aber schon, dass es uns darauf ankam, den nicht leicht einzuordnenden, zu kommerziellen Zwecken kaum brauchbaren Teil seiner Äusserungen nicht aus den Augen zu verlieren. Mir scheint heute, dass uns vor 10 Jahren schien, dass wir für uns eine Form finden wollten in Bezug auf das überaus lebendige Werk Dieters. Dessen Einlagerung in den Mottenkisten der anderen Art, die nun bevorstand, schien uns bedrohlich für wesentliche Aspekte seines Werks. Schliesslich gab es ja ein ganzes Bündel von Massnahmen seinerseits, die dem Wort „endgültig“ nur einem Platz im Vokabular für Fiktionales liessen. Wir wussten aus vielen Gesprächen mit ihm, dass er seine Ausstellungen dreidimensionaler Gegenstände als eine Art „Road Show“ sah, als einen wandernden Entertainment Park. Es machte ihm Spass „Kulturschrottwaten für alle“ zu sagen. Auf dem Einladungsposter zur Secessionsausstellung heissen die Grossskulpturen übrigens „Apparate“, auf englisch schreibt er „gadgets“. Da wo er mit seiner Kunst angekommen war, bedurfte sie des Personals.
Roth, als Dieters Nachname, und das englische Wort für Weg oder Strasse, das seinem Namen so ähnlich klingt, klar, das lässt einen schmunzeln.
Es sieht mir heute so aus als hätten wir damals gedacht, wir könnten uns vornehmen zu nennen, zu bewahren, zu praktizieren, das Bewusstsein zu hüten von dem, was uns an Techniken und Einsichten bei Dieter Roth aufgefallen war. Seine Kunstwerke schienen nur eine Seite der Medaille zu sein, die nicht ohne ihre andere Seite sein konnte. Die andere Seite war uns Dieters Haltung in und zur Kunst. Als Beispiel: er konnte leicht über seine Bilder als süsslich sprechen. Was da wie Selbstironie klang, war aber zumindest auch wahr. Von seinen Tischmatten sagte er sie seien mit Tränen getränkt. Sprachliche Konditionen stellten sich ihm in den Weg auf seiner Suche nach einem „realistischen Stil“, wie er ihn nannte. Es gab für ihn nur den erzählten Traum. Seine Haltung in der Kunst war also die Beschreibung eines paradoxen Dilemmas. Mein zweites Beispiel liegt in der Verlängerung des ersten, enthält aber den Geniestreich des Triumphes über die Konditionierung. Hier ist die story die, dass er dem Galeristen zeigt, wofür er die wiederholt dringend angeforderten 5 Tausend Mark nötig hat, nämlich für die Musiker im dem Restaurant, in dem man sich endlich zur Geldübergabe getroffen hat.
Diese andere Seite der Medaille fanden wir also ebenso wichtig wie die Bilder selbst und so erhellend, dass der Gedanke, die Kunstwelt schicke sich an, Dieter Roth unter Weglassung dieses Wissen zu kanonisieren, uns schlimm erschrecken liess. Aus Erfahrung mit Dieter Roth´s Widerspenstigkeit gegenüber allem was meinte zu wissen oder mit seiner ironischen Distanz zu postulierter Endgültigkeit käme das Weglassen von all diesem einer posthumen Entschärfung nahe, gegen die wir uns stemmen wollten.
Inwieweit uns da etwas gelungen sein mag möchte ich nicht beurteilen. Doch bin ich froh, dass sich hier, 10 Jahre später, noch mal die Möglichkeit geboten hat, an all dieses zu denken.
Wer das Glück hatte, Dieter Roth zu kennen, konnte bei ihm Mut und Orientierungshilfe finden. Für den, der ihn liest, gibt es immerhin Zeilen, die ungefähr so lauten können: „ich nehme mich bei der Hand und führe mich dahin, gradewegs wo ich schon bin“. Dass er viele Jahre lang seine Lebensschwierigkeiten thematisierte, sich zum Beispiel in einem für die Öffentlichkeit bestimmten Brief als einen „Bediener von Lebensproblemen“ hinstellte, kann der Dieter Roth Akademie eine holperige Reise in Aussicht stellen. Und wenn es denn mal nicht holprig sein sollte, vergesse man das Aquaplaning nicht! Ich hatte meinen Vortrag hier abschliessen und das Wort an Sebastian Boyle geben wollen. Der freute sich darauf, uns die Geschichte zu erzählen, wie sein Vater Marc Boyle und Dieter Roth sich kennengelernt haben. In seiner Geschichte geht es um eine gehobene Art des Aquaplaning. Gestern hat Sohn Sebastian leider absagen müssen, er lebt in London und Umstände dort verhindern sein Herkommen. Desto dringender scheint mir wird es, dass die Souvenir Ausstellungen nachträglich von einem Buch begleitet werden. Immerhin darf man wohl sagen, dass Bücher Dieters liebstes Medium waren, welches er immer wieder bespielte und grade in dieser Stadt sind viele von ihnen entstanden. Ich würde es jedenfalls toll finden, wenn ein Buch die Souvenirs begleiten würde, in welchem die Souvenirempfänger ihre Geschichten erzählt hätten. Ich hoffe, dass es für so ein Buch noch nicht zu spät ist. Und so hoffe ich denn auch, dass in dem Buch auch Sebastian Boyles Geschichte ihren Platz finden wird, die er uns nun doch nicht erzählt hat.
Vielen Dank für Ihre Geduld und dann noch dieses: Nach dem letzten Punkt des gedruckten Programms für heute, dem „Dieter Roth Puzzle“-Film von Hilmar Oddson, kann gern, wer möchte, mit kommen ins Restaurant der Kunsthalle. Die Kunsthalle ist das Gebäude gegenüber der Oper mit dem goldenen Hirschen auf dem Dach, wenn man die Staatsgalerie verlässt schräg links gegenüber. Das Restaurant ist im Obergeschoss.
Lieber Jan,
bitte schicke doch noch zwei kleine Blindb䮤e mit, so etwa im Taschenbuchformat.
Wie war denn deine Peanuts-Ausstellungs-Er?ung
Liebe Gr?SPAN>
Monika
.................................
Die Umsätze explodieren, der Kurs steigt unaufhaltsam, der Anschluss an die digitale Revolution scheint geschafft - Bob Iger, Disneys neuer CEO, hat das Steuer bei dem angeschlagenen Entertainment-Konzern herumgerissen. Dafür kassiert er jetzt einen Rekordbonus. Von Marc Pitzke, New York mehr...
October 16th, 2004 Four years ago the first entry to this diary was begun with an account of what went on when Boekie Woekie returned from its presence at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This year's Frankfurt Book Fair we did not participate in. From I think 1988 to 2002 we never missed once the occasion of the world's foremost gathering of people around their books. That we dropped out last year was due to the fact that we simply couldn't attend. Our presence with a second shop during the Dieter Roth retrospective exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel and the option that we might be asked to do the same at the second staging of that show in Cologne made our participation in the Book Fair impossible. This year, I think it was late in May, I wondered were the book fair booth application forms were. For years they were sent to us without that we had to ask for them and they had to be filled in and be back at the fair's office late in March. I phoned and heard it was too late to participate, and yes, the fair administration does not automatically continue to invite a publisher who paused once. I thought that was not very clever, business wise, from their side (forgetting that it wasn't clever either to think only in May of something due in March from my side). The same being too late counted for Roth's Verlag. That is why in this diary entry I regret I can only report that I went a week ago, last Sunday, as a visitor by train to Frankfurt. I returned on Monday with a terribly heavy suitcase full of new books and the conviction that Boekie Woekie has to re-enter that platform of book concern. There is no better place for Boekie Woekie than this gigantic madhouse to show were it stands. We tried to show our stance at a few art fairs too in the early nineties, but to ironize them turned out impossible. The art fairs ask for stronger display of concern, someone for example should walk through the alleys with a lawn mower to cut down the hairy carpets. But unless you arrange that as an art event you might go to jail for it. The Frankfurt Book Fair has the thinnest carpet ever made. To achieve your goal, it is enough to feel at ease, provided you can suppress the lusty glitter of your eyes. A week in BoeWoe has passed since then. The ongoing performance of Boekie Woekie with its customers and guests reminded me again of that wild dance which needs a lot of expertise to do without falling and tearing others down with you. It was no coincidence that we gave what we began in 1986 a name sounding much like this dance. It was, with good foresight, a program. I have prepared for my next train trip - to the Small Publishers Fair in London. Michael has put the fair flyer on top of the NEWS section of this web site.
October 7th, 2004 It will be difficult to grasp the last 9 days in a short piece of writing. - Okay, I'll see, and you too, where this will lead to. - I took off from Amsterdam by train, again to Berlin. There I went to Andrea. Andrea's sister Carola runs an ambitious restaurant down the street where Andrea lives. We went there for dinner. In case someone wants to follow in my steps: you are there when you see on the sidewalk of Leibnizstrasse a bicycle stand (for maybe 6 bicycles) which says "Europa" - the name of the restaurant. I don't think many of Carola's guests come biking, but the stand shows the level of the thoughtful service and it is a beautiful object in itself. The next day I was to take 2 trains to get to Lodz. The first one was the Berlin - Warsaw Express. I settled in the dining car, trying the Polish beer brands writing my travel journals. At the next table I overheard 2 ladies talking (in German) about art matters - "stretcher" and "canvas" were words mentioned. I understood I was not alone when a person I slightly know from former times in Berlin appeared. A whole group of art involved people was traveling to the same destination as I was, namely to the Lodz Biennale. They were on their way as observers, I as participant. In the 2nd train from Kutno to Lodz the exchange rate for Euros and Zlotys was only an approximation and in the advantage of the fellow who sold the beers. Arrival in darkness, no currency exchange to be found at the station, a taxi, the driver of which nodded yes to Euros, the Savoy Hotel, in front of it: Malcolm and Brigitte, waiting with the information were the dinner would be. Room 325 had a very high ceiling, maybe 4 meters or more. A framed picture smaller than a Din A4 sheet of paper with faded colours was hanging high above the bed. I couldn't make out what was on it even when I stood on the bed - and I'm 1 m 90 of length. Poland remained a mystery for me. I'll just relate one other impression, from the premises of the exhibition this time. The exhibition took place in abandoned factory halls of a former weaving mill, if I got it right. The machines were gone, the walls were white and art was all over. In one corner, behind a door, there stood a chair, beside it was an empty wine bottle and in front of it an empty pair of shoes, and nowhere a sign with the name of an artist. After 3 days, many beers and little sleep, I took a cab for the 6.30 am. service to Kutno, but I missed it. A few hours followed waiting for the next train during which I worked on myself to learn to appreciate the style of the architecture of this station. For Lodz Kaliska I had no ready recipe. At the end of that day I was in Berlin again, found Andrea in her sister's restaurant, we were sitting at the bar and laughed and laughed when Carola did "the grandma" with her fist wrapped in a napkin. The next day with Radeberger beer in the dining car to Amsterdam writing. Across from me a pretty Polish miss with very high, heels drinking sparkling wine and smoking one cigarette after the other all the way to Osnabrück. Well, I never had been to Poland before, and I don't know whether I will return. I hope I will. But for this first experience I have to thank Emmett, he caused that I was invited to go there.
September 28th, 2004 Have returned contrary to my planning for 3 days to Amsterdam after a few days in Berlin and another few in Frankfurt. I arrived in Berlin to attend the opening of the much disputed grand exhibition in the Museum Hamburger Bahnhof. My Icelandic friends, Björn with his son Oddur, Eggert and Gunnar, had for the last time in a long time to come, and maybe forever, installed Dieter's Garden Sculpture. We soon were sitting at one of the tables belonging to the Garden Sculpture and drank Doppelkorn. My brief stroll through the exhibition left me once again dissatisfied. I blamed it on the arbitrariness of art works which I often before found difficult to cope with. But faces of friends and their words and the alcohol encouraged mood made the night and the next 2 days quite enjoyable. Aldo had come from Frankfurt, Erwin from Basel, Andrea was there and Dorothy had pulled herself together, and though exhausted, showed up, I saw David briefly, and I saw Jes for the first time in many years. The staff, or actually the owners of a bar/restaurant fashionable for many years still looked pretty much the same. Marinated in what they sell, I suppose. I also visited Dizy and his young family. Dizy ran with his then wife Gudrun the pub I used to go to as a student. Now Boekie Woekie intends to make a book with Dizy. I went to see Dorothy in her brand new and not yet fully furnished big apartment, and stayed in Andrea's guest room. Then Frankfurt: Beat and Johannes and me met to talk for 2 days and for the 3rd time in half a year about a project I suppose I will write more about once it is accomplished - in March next year if all goes well. My going to Basel with Beat turned out to be not necessary, and instead of returning to Berlin, where I knew I would not have much to do, I returned to Amsterdam to desoak myself. This change of plan resulted in that I was present when Hetti returned from hearing the results of a health check she had undergone a few days earlier. The results were confusing, more checks are to follow, but I was happy that I hadn't gone to Berlin.
September 19th, 2004 There will come a pause, I won't be able for 2 weeks to add to this diary. I'll be zigzagging central Europe by train. If things go as planned I'll get to Berlin, Frankfurt, possibly Basel, and Lodz in Poland before returning to Amsterdam. (I assume I announce this so that you readers can wish me a safe trip. Thanks.)
September 14th, 2004 Hetti came back Monday a week ago and during her first night at home Pietje our 19 year old cat and comrade died. She had slowed down a lot and I had been afraid Pietje might give up before Hetti's return. But the two seeing each other again resulted in that both were purring each in her own way. 19 years are also for humans a long time and Pietje's death we felt with more than a sigh, marks the passing of a period of our lives during which we practiced far reaching changes. We slipped in 86 into the guise of shop keepers. That was the year Boekie Woekie was begun. We lured back then the not full grown Pietje with a dotted line of ham from under her miserable shelter of parked cars into the house. She never left it after that because she wanted to. Pietje never came to either of the shop spaces which we have rented for BoeWoe, but she was waiting to be fed when we came home from BW and we fed her before we went there. One half of our self-inflicted obligations has ceased to be one.
September 5th, 2004 There has been a coming and going of guests. The result was that more often pieces of ducks were eaten in the evenings, and even more beers than normally were drunk all day long. A proper account becomes impossible, too many short-lived excitements. Through all this turbulence I was clinging to my task of completing the bookkeeping of which Hetti has done what is necessary to pay the VAT. The last month she did was June. But I haven't been able to get further than March. Hetti drove yesterday the 400 km from were our place is in the north of Iceland down to near Reykjavík where the Lada will be stalled. After one month up there she is coming back to Amsterdam tomorrow.
August 28th, 2004 Rúna was cutting a cardboard box down to postcard size pieces. It was the box in which she had brought 6 bottles of red wine to BoeWoe. She was busy with replenishing our stock of
Voss, Jan Ansichtssache by Jan Voss & Co PICTURE POSTCARDS cut-outs from all sorts of printed matter pasted as pictures on postcards, since 1989 EUR 1.-
She cut the corrugated cardboard to size with the printed-on side facing down. The images of the postcards-to-be where therefore random results. She held a few cards up and they looked great to me. I said something like she should become a designer. Rúna was joking, she could open a firm under the name "Rúna's blind design". She got 19 beautiful cards out of the box (which, shopkeepers have to calculate, will have lowered the price for the 6 bottles of wine to 2 euros something, once the cards will be sold). We were impressed by our business mindedness. But the best was still to come. It struck us a little later that this procedure (postcard making from packing material) must entitle Boekie Woekie to do all shoppings, provided the goods are packed in printed-on wrappings, and declare them to the tax office as the buying of raw material for more merchandise. It felt like a pretty genial solution, we had given a twist to something. Only why did it take 15 years to think of this?
August 22nd, 2004 Sunday again, but now it is dark out there. Dark after a day during which I had a shirt on with short sleeves. The sleeves were short because guests had been sleeping on the bed in the room where my wardrobe is - I did not want to trouble them to get a warmer shirt. I put the same shirt on again as I wore the last few days though the temperatures have gone down. I, as so often before, did not think of any other measure to cope with a change than to keep myself soaked. The guests left before midday, but an afternoon which became an evening in the shop followed. I thought my hope was to have a chance to not get a cold if I would not stop too abruptly to drink. Raul dropped in and stayed for a lively while. Rúna offered to go and get more beer (and also brought then wine for herself). Raul, puffing away on his enriched cigarettes, switched over to her wine sparing my beer on which I'm still thriving. We compared recollections. I thought that Raul got in the course of the years into a position not entirely unsimilar to mine. As an artist he has dealt for long with the complex situation of running a life television program, often with an all night long air time. Though Raul can talk of himself as being merely the "koffiejuff" of this program everyone knows who the motor is. And am I not that for Boekie Woekie? And isn't Boekie Woekie an ongoing performance? Ongoing for soon 20 years? As a "koffiejuff" in Holland one takes care that staff and visitors have something in their cups. Anyhow, on the way to the refrigerator, pinned up on the side of a shelf since years, Boekie Woekie keeps the German version of a sentence by Robert Filliou which I showed and translated for Raul during our talk. These lines of verbal gymnastics were not meant to get me any further than to be able to quote Robert. "Kunst ist, was das Leben interessanter als Kunst macht. - Art is what makes life more interesting than art." - I have never heard anyone beat that one.
August 15th, 2004 I should be working on some shop matters, but for that I would have to use the pc in the back room. The pc I write the diary on is in the front of Boekie Woekie, the actual shop room. From here I have a view out onto the sun bathed street with its lightly dressed people on their summer Sunday strolls. I'm having a beer and look more out of the window than that I write. It is as near as I get these days to a summer holiday. Or a few lazy hours on a terrace. I might say luckily my tranquility is hardly disturbed by customers. But now I see and hear Rúna locking her bicycle chain in front of the shop. Things are changing. She brings in the results of her printing - she spend the last few afternoons in our printery from where she couldn't see anything of the nice weather nor of the people enjoying it, she was printing waste paper. This may sound like all she did went wrong, or like a joke. One of the details of Boekie Woekie is however that postcard customers get since many years their cards in envelops we glue ourselves. Originally they were made from misprints of our other printing efforts. Later, when we we were selling more postcards than that we had misprints we began to imitate them. Now we need up to 10000 "misprints" a year. We scramble printing plates which originally had nothing to do with each other and use random inks to print them. Our customers love the results - at least we get lots of that kind of comment. Hetti phoned from Iceland where she is since 10 days with her friend Ina, she had before not answered my call. She had been sitting in the sun on the south end of the house reading a German version of H.K.Laxness "Heimsljós". On sunny summer days who sits at that south end which usually is in the wind shadow of the house shares his place with many many fish flies, and may listen to their buzzing noise. Rúna is warming up some Chili con Carne she made yesterday. I'll ride my bike home tonight. Sturla has fixed it, with spokes and all.
August 11th, 2004 What do I choose to tell in this diary? What becomes topic of those few occasional lines? I think this diary has never been "the diary of a bookshop", or "my" diary. I'm not conscious of ever having made a plan what to tell and what not. It is curious what "makes" it and why. Today, just now before I began to hit the keys I thought of 2 possibilities: I could ponder in writing on an observation I made while peeing last night. Without paying at first attention to what my glance had fastened on I got alarmed when I became aware of a small bug taking off from the top spare roll of toilet paper. Our spare rolls are stuck on a stick which is inserted into a circular wooden platform so that it stands. The stick can hold 5 rolls (it is 50 or so cm high). I became alarmed because I noticed the bug or moth or what it was took off at the same moment that the whole tower of toilet rolls on a stick began to lean, to lean more and then to tumble over. I was puzzled by the physics of this event. Did the bug push itself so forcefully off "the ground" when it jumped off that tower that the tower fell? Or did the bug maybe feel the tower falling before I saw that that was about to happen and did it prefer to be airborne than to go down with it? Would I ever find out? - The other option of a "story" to tell I felt I had just before would have gone about like this: Today I phoned a friend on his mobile phone. He said he was sitting on a bench outside an Esso station in a small village on the shore of a fjord which was densely packed with fog, so densely that he couldn't see for 6 meters. He said he was blowing smoke out (he had found his way to the Esso station to buy cigarettes). While we spoke I began to imagine that his smoke was meant to thin down the fog. - I don't know which of the 2 possibilities would have "made it" to these pages had I not started to be puzzled about just that. With only a tiny prolongation of this awareness: in the case of doubt all sides have to be heard.
August 7th, 2004 Often when a strain of daydreaming ends it does so with me thinking that which just passed through my head should become the subject of a next diary entry. Then when the chance to write has come I almost as often don't remember what it was I wanted to write about. I suppose many people know this frustrating lack of brain power. Probably there are techniques with which one can learn to remember better. I used to carry notebooks around with me for scribbling down such things at the moment that they occurred. Years ago I began to reproduce those note books, thinking I couldn't catch the moment of inspiration better than that.
Voss, Jan Notizen Vom 28. 9. 1990 Bis Zum 13. 12. 1991 Band 1 reproduced notes (drawings and text), volume 1, hard cover, 360 pages, 29,5 21 cm, numbered/111, signed, Amsterdam 1992 EUR 91.-
Voss, Jan Notizen Vom 6. 5. 1990 Bis Zum 24. 9. 1990 Band 2 reproduced notes (drawings and text), volume 2, hard cover, 360 pages, 29,5 21 cm, numbered/111, signed, Amsterdam 1993 EUR 91.-
Voss, Jan Notizen Vom 23. 12. 1991 Bis Zum 21. 7. 1993 Band 3 reproduced notes (drawings and text), volume 3, hard cover, 360 pages, 29,5 21 cm, numbered/111, signed, Amsterdam 1994 EUR 91.-
Voss, Jan Notizen Vom 11. 11. 1989 Bis Zum 5. 5. 1990 Band 4 reproduced notes (drawings and text), volume 4, hard cover, 360 pages, 29,5 21 cm, numbered/111, signed, Amsterdam 1996 EUR 91.-
Voss, Jan Notizen Vom 5. 1. 1988 Bis Zum 7. 11. 1989 Band 5 reproduced notes (drawings and text), volume 5, hard cover, 360 pages, 29,5 21 cm, numbered/111, signed, Amsterdam 1997 EUR 91.-
I think I have given up on this project in spite of the many note books with which I could prolong this series. The caught moments of inspiration don´t seem to be enough to make a desirable book. At least in this case. Handwriting and sketchy drawings and recognizably no editing at all stretch the patience of readers too far I think to have learnt in the process of self-publishing those books. These not illustrated, machine written texts, not scribbled away but - could I say "edited"? - at least written quite slowly because of my selfimposed restriction to a language he did not grow up with have become the next stage in my history of more than 30 years of diary keeping. I hope I have found a way at least some readers enjoy.
July 31st, 2004 It is holiday time and we experience hot days. When we get to the shop (we bike) we need a towel. Actually inside Boekie Woekie it is still bearable, especially when we create a draft by leaving the door open to the backyard. There are fewer people in the streets than normally, half of Amsterdam must be with its feet in the Mediterranean. There are (as always) many foreign visitors to be seen (and heard), but they don't move as much as usually. They sit on the terraces in front of restaurants and bars. Accordingly, the business of Boekie Woekie once again is slow. That is not all that bad - things which on busy days would hardly get a chance to be registered become important. For example this: I said we bike to the shop. Since 2 days that is not true for me. My bike got a flat tyre. Besides fixing the punctuated tube some spokes would better be fixed too. Yesterday Hetti walked my bike to the nearest repairman. He refused to fix it, but wanted to sell her an entire back wheel. Hetti took the bike to the next repairman. He also didn't want to fix it. Now my bike is standing in front of Boekie Woekie on the pavement, not even attractive for the thieves. Rúna is back from Porto. She liked the food and the people. Her reports of the book fair were less enthousiastic.
July 26th, 2004 I rented a car to run a few errands during the weekend. Before returning the car this morning I first had to fill it up with gasoline. When I wanted to pay the gasoline I had to use a few more (Dutch) words than strictly necessary to tell the man at the till which car I wanted to pay for (I hadn't thought of memorizing the tap number). It took him no time to understand me but he told me the amount I owed him in German. The brief transaction which followed was carried out by him in German and by me in Dutch. I have often before in this country been in the situation that my accent was recognized, and then referred to by answering me in German. I always felt some of the Dutch try this in order to let us Germans not forget where we belong. I don't doubt the good reasons many must have for that reminder. Special in the case of this morning however was that the man at the till was black which in Holland usually means that such a someone is from Surinam. Thinking of his probable age (he may have been close to thirty) he could as well be born here to Surinamese parents. Anyhow, I told myself, if I had asked him he might have told me he was just trying to be polite - to make life for a foreigner easier. Then, when I drove off it crossed my mind that I could have asked him whether he was a German. But at the end I couldn't help it that I thought his reason for talking back to me in German was a result of his attempt to assimilate fully the role of being a member of the Dutch nation, by even trying to share its history. I felt a desperation there which made me a little sad.
July 19th, 2004 While we were preparing for Rúna’s trip to Porto tomorrow – she will represent Boekie Woekie there on the occasion of an artists’ book fair which Guy is inviting for on behalf of the Library of the Museum Serralves (see also the NEWS page of this web site) – Hetti saw a blackbird land on the head of one of Ađalheiđur’s ravens which are on our patio. Quick! The web cam! Too late. The blackbird was gone before the camera was found. I begin to understand that and why words are necessary. July 17th, 2004 Wow, what a sudden storm! 7 to 8 hundred of our postcards were flying through the street, west to east, for 80 or more meters. The postcard rack in front of the shop window had been gripped by a sudden gush of wind and thrown to the ground. We were lucky to be able to collect the cards with the help of passers-by and the guys from the night shop across the street before a tremendous rain burst loose. It happened towards the end of an anyhow turbulent day. Juan Pablo had been spending a few more hours working now at a hectic pace on our computers, because tomorrow he’ll have to fly back to Bogota. I know it will take me days to get acquainted with all the new or updated programmes. The latest thing plugged into one of the computers is a web cam. It would have thrilled me to be able to illustrate this, my report of the storm, with pictures the web cam had taken. But, alas, it wasn’t switched on at that moment. July 15th, 2004 Days which brought lots of new features to our computer possibilities have passed, and I'm trying out whether I have understood how to continue my way with the machine. If this new entry will in a few minutes appear on our diary page, I'll be confident to handle it in future. The changes were possible thanks to Juan Pablo from Bogota, Raul´s nephew.
July 1st, 2004 I was on the phone with Tom on Sunday afternoon, while Hetti was tidying up Boekie Woekie after the opening of the night before. Tom had not slept at all and it was early morning for him in Albuquerque. He was in quite an elevated state and I enjoyed his conversation when Fredie came into Boekie Woekie bringing back with him from his trip to Berlin newly released records by Emmett:
Williams, Emmett Poems 1950-2003 "this tiny sampling of my poetic oeuvre is a very mixed bag …" the artist reads some of his poems, LP record with a picture on both sides, Berlin 2004 EUR 19.-
Tom ordered one by phone, I'm happy that Hetti kept her record player. Later in the week Pieter appeared. I had hoped I could persuade him to sell me the Rotaprint R30 he bought several years ago and took with him to his house in the South of France. But Pieter said that he would have to break down walls if he ever wanted to get that machine out of his house again. Since years Pieter reports endless construction efforts - he keeps enlarging his property there. My offset printery is in no good state. I will have to do something about it. Yesterday Raul and his before mentioned nephew, 18 years old Juan Paul, were in BoeWoe. As it happens, the young man is quite a computer wizard. BoeWoe is lucky. Helgi showed up with a poster announcing a party on July 4th at the Gallery where he currently shows. He joined in the pre-party which happened to be going on in BoeWoe. Then unexpectedly Helmut and his wife appeared. The party pre to the party on Sunday took till 5 in the morning. Today Hetti had to open up Boekie Woekie.
June 27th, 2004 Dizy came for a 3 day visit with Katharina and their daughter Clara (6). The 2 females were new to me, but Dizy I recognized very much as the one he always has been since I got to know him in 66. Straight forward, unpretentious and enjoying it. Dizy ran bars in the neighbourhood of the Düsseldorf art academy at the time that I was enlisted there as a student and I lost my innocence in matters of alcohol there. Now he is a musician and has a job as a stage actor. Then (on Tuesday night last week) Jos brought Hetti back, and all the books and works from Lübeck. One of the things Hetti reported was when she closed our temporary shop in the church and when she counted the money in the cashbox she noticed there was not one Euro coin in it from another country than Germany. 50% of the coins in our Amsterdam cashbox usually are not Dutch. That much about Lübeck. The pile of book boxes Jos had brought back together with Hetti were at first put into the Boekie Woekie gallery space but there they could not remain for long, because Boekie Woekie had announced for Saturday the opening of Michael's exhibition and the presentation of his book "Legend".
Gibbs, Michael Legend a selection of previously unpublished texts produced between 1966 and 1984, including the author's first ever concrete poem, language poems, text drawings and other inbetween genres, soft cover, 44 not numbered pages, 21 x 16 cm, numbered/200, Amsterdam 2004 EUR 15.-
This book we conjured up during the last weeks as a combined effort of the artist and Boekie Woekie. Raul and his visiting nephew Juan Paul (?) from Bogota helped to take the boxes into the storage room in the back of BoeWoe. It will be quite a job to put them back into the storage's alphabetical order. Michael's opening of text works brought people together who hadn't met in a long time. I think everybody liked it.
June 18th, 2004 Raul did not wait till all his pictures would have fallen off the Boekie Woekie walls, but took them off by hand when it was time for it. He was busy with that when a seldom guest came, Helmut from Cologne. He was busy with it the next day, when Martha came to say good bye. Two evenings I spend with Michael. We walked around a big table. Since Rúna is in Iceland, I almost daily hear from her on the phone. Now while I write this, she must be in the car with Kristján, driving from our hide out in the North back to Reykjavík - on Sunday her father gets 70. Rúna who has her own place not far from where Kristján's and mine is got as a present from her 30 (31?) year old son Reynir the promise that he will contribute considerably to the maintenance and fixing of that place. Back to Amsterdam and Lübeck. Hetti and Ineke just phoned. Ineke visits Hetti for the weekend. It will not be me who, on Tuesday, will fetch Boekie Woekie and the exhibited works but Jos. I must not forget when I bike home now to take with me the pieces of beef heart I bought for Pietje, our 19 years old cat.
June 16th, 2004 What I began to tell in the last diary entry was this: It was announced for the evening of the second Saturday after the opening of the Dieter Roth Academy exhibition in St.Petri in Lübeck that writers of literature would read from their works to an audience of "a few hundred people" - I had heard a woman employed by the church predict. A big event it would be. And I think one with some tradition. In order to be able to arrange rows of chairs, our exhibition would not be open to the public on that Saturday and the Friday before. The invitation card had already announced that. But during the opening of the DRA exhibition that Björn who is the one of the church had said that Boekie Woekie should be open that evening of the reading, and I did not forget that remark, because it had begun to dawn on me that very few people would come to see our show. The literature reading would be the only occasion where we could expect people with antennas for books to show up. Therefore it was an unexpected blow when Hetti heard that Boekie Woekie could not be open during that evening. The pastor said "don't be angry", a member of a board I had not been aware of existed said our books had anyhow nothing to do with literature, we should understand that, or something similar. I heard this during 2, 3 days from Hetti when I phoned her. I involved Malcolm, who has been the DRA spokesman in our dealings with "the church". He phoned that Björn, who said he would see what he could do. Malcolm expected to be phoned back. After hearing from Malcolm during 2 days that he had not been phoned back (I phoned him several times to inquire) my patience ran out. I faxed a letter to Lübeck saying that I was disappointed to the extend that I would fetch the bookshop as soon as I could. And for that matter would take the displayed items Hetti, Rúna and me contributed to the exhibition back at the same time since a 3rd trip to Lübeck would be out of the question. We had or were about to spend quite a sum of money to add that bookshop to the exhibition (renting vans, paying for accommodation before the beginning of the show and for the the time it lasts). Next morning, Friday, when I opened BoeWoe, there was an answer to my fax, expressing the hope that a solution could be found. I did not yet order the van but expected to hear whether the hope was justified. However the obvious unwillingness of "the church" to consider not only their but also our situation resulted again in stress. At 2pm on Saturday with the reading starting at 7pm I still did not know what the outcome of this hope was. I faxed again. And promptly got the answer that Boekie Woekie could be open to the public that night. Phew. Hetti reported on Sunday that Boekie Woekie had been quite a centre of attraction for the people who had come for the reading.
June 11th, 2004 Eggert has returned to Iceland in a more or less dry state. Martha has come from England with a big heavy suitcase full of books which she is to take with her to Mexico in a few days. Raul seems a bit disappointed that not more of his pictures keep falling off the wall. He likes to stick them back on I think. This sounds like all was okay, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. I'm seriously troubled about our participation in the Dieter Roth Academy exhibition in St.Petri in Lübeck. I feel sorry for Hetti to have to be there. I'm too tired now, but will come with the details soon.
June 8th, 2004 Busy days are behind me. I'll try to recall. Hetti and me started our train trip to Lübeck early last Friday morning. But differently from how it was scheduled we got there with a 2 hours delay because somehow they don't know how to run trains anymore. After 9 hours we arrived in Lübeck. The back and forth car trips from only a few days before had taken 5 hours each. In the church the building up of the exhibition was well advanced, but far from ready. Most of Boekie Woekie's books were still in the boxes we had brought them in. At 7pm, when it was announced that the opening of the exhibition would be, the shop looked okay, though it wasn't. The exhibition was what it was. More could not be done. Björn (the Björn who usually is the Björn in these pages) was the last to get into position. He began at 6pm to paint a still life on a partition wall as his contribution to the exhibition. The sexton, or another church employee came up to him and said he hoped the paint could be washed off again. Björn said he had said to the sexton that it should be considered to sell this piece. The sexton (or one of his colleagues) Björn said had found that an interesting option. Two speeches had been announced on the invitation card, one speech by the other Björn, the Björn of the church, who has been Malcolm's partner in preparing this show, the other speech by me. Björn the other had to cope with reverberation of a serious kind, but somehow he more or less managed to tell the audience (around, I guess, 100 people, one third of them "us") what an acclaimed artist Dieter had been. On my previous visit a few days before he had proposed this: he on Dieter, I on the Dieter Roth Academy. While he spoke it occurred to me that pastors had to cope for centuries with acoustics which would make much of what they said ununderstandable. That may count for many churches - could those pastors have made use of that? Next on stage (in no pulpit, but with a microphone in some sort on a tripod, elevated just one step up of the 3 or 4 to the altar area:) me. I read my first few words and was interrupted and advised to speak more close to the microphone. I continued, thinking I was doing that, speaking more closely to the microphone. What I myself heard of my voice sounded very much okay, but shortly before I had reached the end unrest ensued, it seemed most people had listened for more than 10 minutes without understanding a word. Therefore I want to paste in here the text I had prepared. On 3 occasions I took a little detour from this text in my speech. I changed the manuscript by hand during that prolonged train ride in the morning. I can't include those alterations here because the printed out text with the alterations is still in Lübeck and I don't exactly remember what the alterations were. I wrote in German of course, but to the English only readers I say: don't go away, but scroll down, more is to come.
DRA Lübeck 4.6.04
Zum öffentlich Worte vortragen gehören gute Nerven. Und was merke ich da? Ist es Lampenfieber, das in mir aufkommt? Man sähe es mir hoffentlich nicht an, aber ich würde Lampenfieber natürlich weggespült haben.
Oder ist es der Umstand in einer Kirche sprechen zu sollen? Nein, das kann auch nicht sein. Als Untertertianer hatte ich eine kurze Phase in der ich Pastor werden wollte. Da sehe ich in dieser Gelegenheit bloss die ironische Verwirklichung einer meistens schamvoll verschwiegenen Idee.
Nach dieser geflüsterten Beichte geht es mit normaler Stimme weiter.
Verehrte Anwesende, liebe Leute, dear friends and what ever else you may be for me: es soll mir eine Freude sein, mich namens der Dieter Roth Akademie dafür zu bedanken, dass wir hier in Lübeck diesen Landeplatz haben finden können.
Für die, die uns noch nicht kennen, will ich zudem einwenig über die Dieter Roth Academy erzählen.
Als erster, dem Dank gebührt, muss da einer aus unseren Reihen genannt werden. "Lübeck" ist Rainer Pretzells Idee. Er hat hier früher schon Erfahrungen von der Art gemacht, wie er sie auch uns wünscht.
Dann ist es natürlich die Leitung der St.Petri Kirche und namentlich Herr Engholm. Ihnen gebührt unser herzlicher Dank dafür, dass Sie sich auf uns eingelassen haben.
Jetzt ist Malcolm Green dran, thanks Malcolm, for organizing and coordinating this occasion of the traditionally quite chaotic Dieter Roth Academy events. (Dass ich mich bei ihm dafür bedanke, dass er mir diesen Redeauftritt zugeschoben hat, will ich nicht behaupten, aber dies gibt mir Gelegenheit mich kurz vorzustellen. Ich heisse Jan Voss. Da drüben hängt ein 3-teiliges Bild von mir, und ich bin mit Rúna Thorkelsdóttir und Henriëtte van Egten verantwortlich für diese, dort, Zweigstelle unseres Buchladens für Künstlerbücher den wir in Amsterdam führen, und der Boekie Woekie heisst, dorthinten ist die Zweigstelle. Henriëtte wird für die Dauer der Ausstellung in Lübeck bleiben und den St.Petri Laden geöffnet halten.)
Und natürlich gilt Dank Euch, die Ihr mit Euren Sachen hier hergekommen seid. Thanks to you all for coming with your things to Lübeck! Auch denen, die nicht haben kommen können, aber doch zur Ausstellung beitrugen, ebenfalls Dank.
Und last, aber allerwenigst least, sind wir Ihnen dankbar, Ihnen, den Gästen und Besuchern dieser Ausstellung, dass Sie sich unseren Sachen stellen wollen.
Da man von gewährter Freude auch dankbar wird, gehört hier noch ein herzliches Dankeschön hin. Es gilt Emmett Williams. Über dessen aktive Teilnahme ist die Roth Akademie riesig froh. Thanks Emmett, very much, for coming to Lübeck.
Nun will ich die Roth Akademie kurz denen vorstellen, die sie noch nicht kennen.
Diese Ausstellung, in der Sie sich befinden, ist in dem Fall wohl das erste, was sie von unserer Akademie wahrnehmen. Da müssen Sie unbedingt sofort wissen, dass diese Ausstellung eigentlich ein Nebenprodukt ist. Sie ist das Nebenprodukt der Konferenz, zu der wir uns morgen treffen.
In diesem Licht könnte es Ihnen ein "Warum?" entlocken, wenn Sie bedenken, dass eine Ausstellung teurer ist, und viel komplizierter zu realisieren, als nur eine Konferenz. Warum sollten wir uns das gemeinsame Ausstellen soviel Geld und Mühe kosten lassen, wenn wir eigentlich nur miteinander reden wollen?
Wir treffen uns nicht oft, und wenn wir uns treffen möchten wir das nicht im Verborgenen tun, zudem sind wir vorzeigefreudige Naturen. Und: obwohl sie nur ein Nebenprodukt ist, weist diese Ausstellung doch auf einen der Kerne der Sache, gleich kommt mehr darüber.
Wenn Sie sich hier umsehen, merken Sie bald, dass wir mit unserer Vorzeigefreudigkeit keine Künstlergruppe mit formalen Übereinstimmungen sind. Es sollte Sie nicht überraschen, dass sich Ihnen kein rechter Roter Faden entwickelt. Die, die hier ausstellen haben sich nicht über gemeinsame Parameter, oder eine gewisse Haltung in der Kunst geeinigt.
Wir wollen das, was wir hier machen darum nur einen Erkundungsversuch nennen. In all unsrer Unterschiedlichkeit geht es um das Ausloten von Möglichkeiten für zukünftige Ausstellungen. Motiviert zu unseren Erkundungen fühlen wir uns von Gedanken Dieter Roths zu etwas, was er auf deutsch "Wanderzirkus" nannte und auf englisch "Road Show". (Die Möglichkeit zur schnellen Verballhornung von Road Show zur Roth Show ist uns ein lustiger Nebeneffekt.) Wir erkunden Möglichkeiten für Ausstellungen mit unterhaltendem Charakter an für Kunstausstellungen nicht sehr wahrscheinlichen Orten, wie Turnhallen, Kirchen, Hotels etc. Die Ausstellung anlässlich der Gründungskonferenz der Akademie z.B. fand in einer Basler Druckerei statt.
Die Orte, die der Bilder-Vorzeige-Freude üblicherweise offen stehen, die Galerien und Museen, brauchen wegen uns nicht zu zumachen. Aber aus unserem Verständnis heraus bieten sie nicht immer die adäquaten Voraussetzungen, um mit Bildern bei ihren Beschauern das zu erwecken, was ihre Hersteller von ihnen erwarten.
Die Hauptsache ist also die seit dem Jahr 2000 jährlich stattfindende Konferenz, zu der sich alte Freunde, Mitarbeiter, Kollegen und Familie des morgen vor 6 Jahren gestorbenen Künstlers treffen. Die erste, wie schon gesagt, war in Basel, die 2. in Südungarn, die 3. an der Ostküste Islands, die 4. wieder in Basel, aus Anlass der Eröffnung der ersten Station der Dieter Roth Retrospektive im Schaulager dort. Zu diesen Konferenzen gab es jeweils eine Ausstellung. Einzige Ausnahme im vorigen Jahr. Zum Ereignis der Roth Retrospektive meinten wir nichts hinzufügen zu sollen.
Sie wollen wissen, wie es zur Dieter Roth Akademie kam.
Zu Dieter Roths grossen Skulptur Ausstellungen während seiner letzten Lebensjahre, die er mit seinem Sohn Björn veranstaltete, gehörte jeweils eine Installation, die sein Büro war, und in der er auch tatsächlich während der Dauer der Ausstellung sass und schrieb und wo er ihm Bekannte Besucher empfing. Mit Dieters Tod war diese Installation verwaist. In Gedanken bei der kommenden Retrospektive, gab es Überlegungen zwischen Björn und mir für ein neues Büro, das während Ausstellungen bemannt sein sollte. Für dieses Büro wussten wir sofort den Namen: es würde Dieter Roth Akademie heissen.
Die Vorbereitungen der Roth Retrospektive verzögerten sich. Dagegen nahmen die der Akademie an Fahrt zu und wuchsen sich unter der Hand zu einem vielumfassenden Plan aus. Bei der Gründungskonferenz erzählten Björn, Sigurđur, Kristján und Pétur von Dieters Vorstellungen von einer Akademie, wie sie ihm 2 Jahre vor seinem Tod vorschwebten. Da war Sprache von einer Akademie als einem Lehrinstitut. Dieter habe ein eigenes Gebäude für eine Akademie für verkehrt gehalten, eine Kunstakademie müsse dort sein, wo die an ihr Lehrenden sich aufhalten, in möglichst verschiedenen Welten. Schon im Reisen der Studenten von einem Lehrer zum anderen, und natürlich in der jeweiligen vor Ort vorgefundenen Realität läge das, was sich vermitteln liesse. Wir Gründungskonferenzler stellten uns ein auf einen Strom von auf unsren Sofas übernachten wollenden jungen Leuten. Die hat es bislang aber nur vereinzelt gegeben.
Die auf der Einladungskarte "Freunde" der D.R.A. genannten Mitaussteller sind zum grössten Teil Studenten an den Kunsthochschulen von Hamburg und Reykjavík und dort in den Klassen von Andrea Tippel und Björn Roth, einige sind schon zum 2. Mal dabei.
Das vorhin schon erwähnte Rothsche Ausstellungskonzept, der Wanderzirkus, blieb bei den folgenden Konferenzen weiter im Gespräch. Hinzu kamen andere Aspekte der Akademie. Sie soll jetzt eine Sammelstelle des Wissens bezüglich Dieter Roth sein. Die Verleihung eines Dieter Roth Preises wird diskutiert. Die Akademie hat inzwischen fünf Bücher herausgegeben.
Vielleicht kann ich abkürzend sagen, dass die Mitglieder der Akademie ihre Erinnerung an Dieter Roth als so bedeutend empfinden, dass sie gemeinsam versuchen wollen von ihm ausgegangene Impulse wach zu halten. Wachhalten, daraus folgt Beschreiben und Vermitteln. Dies ist der innere Grund für die Aktivitäten dieser Akademie.
Da die D.R.A. nicht ihre eigenen Pforten öffnen kann, die sie ja nicht haben will, vergewissert sie sich durch Gastspiele dieser Art für ein paar Tage ihrer Existenz. Dabei helfen Sie, liebe Besucher, uns. Als Gegenleistung bieten wir Ihnen dieses Kurzseminar, bzw. diese Gasthörerschaft an.
Sie haben längst gemerkt, dass die Dieter Roth Akademie ein völlig unakademisches Institut ist, jedenfalls wenn man unter akademisch wissenschaftlich versteht. Auch wer akademisch als formal oder blutleer versteht wird sich kaum in der Dieter Roth Akademie zurechtfinden.
Wenn aber jemand den Eindruck bekommen hat, dass er in der D.R.A. was lernen kann, dann liegt er schon besser. Und falls wer lernen wollte wahrheitsgetreu und zugleich erfindungsreich zu sein, wäre dies für die Akademie eine überwältigende Bestätigung ihres Erfolges.
Kurze Zusammenfassung: Die Mitglieder der Dieter Roth Akademie verbindet ein grosser Eindruck. Das ist der, den Dieter Roth auf sie gemacht hat mit seinem poetischen Künstlersein und seiner daraus resultierenden Haltung zu sich selbst, zur Kunst, zur Kunstwelt und zu den anderen Menschen, und von diesem Eindruck haben wir gelernt. Wir gehören zu denen, die die Roth Akademie besuchten, als sie noch nicht so hiess.
Jedes Akademie Mitglied hat natürlich seine eigene Roth-Erfahrung. Die mag teilweise überlappen mit der von anderen, aber kongruënt sind diese Erfahrungen sicher nicht. Während der 360 von den 365 Tagen des Jahres, an denen die Mitglieder einander kaum sehen oder sprechen, macht jeder was er will. Doch haben alle Mitglieder, sozusagen unsichtbar an ihren Türklingeln den Zusatz "Dieter Roth Akademie" stehen. Jeder hat den Anderen nötig, um das Roth Bild zu erweitern und zu vertiefen. Dabei wissen alle von einander, dass keiner den Rahmen zu sprengen vermöchte in den er sich gemeinsam mit den anderen begeben hat. Dieses Wissen hängt mit der Grösse des Bildes zusammen, um das es geht.
Ihre geduldige Aufmerksamkeit war wohltuend. Ich wünsche einen interessanten Rundgang.
Only those with their ears close to the loud speakers could follow my talk. I felt disappointed, I had been speaking, and preparing myself to speak to everyone present. A moment later Agnes took me aside to tell me how I should have done my speech better. Anyhow, that had been that. Than came Emmetts music performance with the children's instruments. (Or is it childrens' instruments? I fear a hard time to look that up, Emmett, Malcolm, Dorothy, Tom please help me.) Emmett ended it with a version of this performance which would have put the Tele-Tubbies to shame. His directing the bye bye choir got me sentimental, I cried a little. (Washed my face, that is, for those who remember a long ago entry to this diary.) There were a lot of beautiful things to be seen and felt in this exhibition, and the mood was good of those involved. A lively party generously supplied with the necessary party ingredients made it one of those unforgettable nights of which nothing is left but that the feeling was good. Was it that night or the next that Hetti, Rúna and me sort of lost the others and went with Annie and Emmett to Ali Baba and continued till 5 in the morning in their place? Anyhow, there was that other day, that of the conference. That was more difficult than the day of the opening of the exhibition. The DRA should be spelled dra I say when I look on that event. And then Sunday, soaked, trying to keep the balance with Rúna and Eggert in the train back to Amsterdam. Hetti would run the shop in Lübeck. Little did I know that on Monday something would happen which almost made Hetti want to run away from the shop in that church. A nut started to shout that day in the corner where our shop is that all this should be burnt and those who made it should be brought to Dachau. - There was also somebody else that day who bought one postcard. I was in charge on Monday of Boekie Woekie in Amsterdam. Raul came to paste back on to the walls those of his pictures which had fallen off from them during the time our shop stayed closed because all 3 of us were in Lübeck (from Friday to Sunday). Michael (our good old Michael) was active on a mission in BW only to be talked more about after it has been completed. While this was going on I heard from Hetti on the phone about the Dachau idiot. I think it was that afternoon that those friends of Rúna who were aware of that she would get 50 the next day came to celebrate in Boekie Woekie with drinks and snacks and good vibrations. Later we ate a Turkish pizza at a place I want to make a little advertising for: the name is Abagonda or Gobanda or something with those vowels. It is on the corner of the prolongation of Hazenstraat (which starts northwards from Elandsgracht) where it meets Rozenzij- or Rozendwarsstraat. Anyhow it is the same street parallel to Rozengracht the branch office of the Stedelijk Museum is on, I think called Bureaux Amsterdam. But since the SM is right now, for those who follow it, only a branch office of itself it makes the bureaux at its best a branch of a branch office. A bit further west on that street, at Agonda or how is it called they make fresh and tasty tasting pizzas. And then: Rúna flew today, on her 50th birthday to her home country Iceland. She has no return ticket but says she will only stay for one month. Raul has arrived for sticking back to the walls those of his pictures of his exhibition which fell off in the meantime. Michael is active. Eggert tries to dry up a little. Eva comes with June. We go to eat at a Thai nearby and June's nappy leaks on Michaels trousers. Eggert needs just a few glasses of schnapps to unsoak himself. I buy myself across the street at the former Lindeman supermarket (now despicable AH) at the last minute a few more Grolsch, but then, alone in BoeWoe I can not get high on them and finally bike home to sleep.
June 3rd, 2004 Rúna, Eggert and me drove yesterday an almost full rented van of 5 cubic meters loading space to Lübeck, unloaded its contents - that what we want to show there - into the church where the exhibition is to take place (see the last entry), and tried to get a first impression of how the exhibition, at least how our parts of the exhibition could be installed. The main concern being how our Boekie Woekie branch office will look. Rainer, Agnes, Erika and Malcolm where already there and busy working on their things. Later half of Iceland arrived - well, 8 people, by train from Copenhagen. And Dadi came with Krassimira. Then a wave of beer in which there was a bit of a leg of lamb swept us away. A brief visit to the church in the morning, a handshake with another Björn than the one this name refers usually to in these pages and his explanations about smoking and off I went on a drive of 530 km back to Amsterdam to return the car. Since then I have been preparing the talk I'm supposed to give tomorrow at the opening in Lübeck. The train which is to take Hetti and me (back) there leaves at 7.13 in the morning. Now it is almost midnight. I think I'm excused, and may go home to catch some sleep now.
May 30th, 2004 Raul's exhibition is now hidden behind towers of cardboard boxes. Boekie Woekie is preparing to be present during the 4th exhibition on the occasion of the 5th conference of the Dieter Roth Academy in the St.Petri church in Lübeck. BW piles up stuff it intends to take there. Raul's stuff on our walls will only become visible again on Tuesday when we have left with our piles in a van. We: that is Rúna, me and Eggert (who came from Iceland to Amsterdam to weld the electrical engine back into the sculptur he exhibited in Boekie Woekie a few years ago and which he wants now to show in Lübeck). Hetti will keep Boekie Woekie open until I'm back sometime on Wednesday. On Friday Hetti and me will go (again) to Lübeck by train to be there for the opening of the exhibition. After the conference on Saturday Hetti will stay on in Lübeck and Rúna and Eggert and me plan to return to Amsterdam. In two and a half weeks time from then the exhibition closes and I'll fetch Hetti and the bookshop. - This all sounds okay, doesn't it? People who know how to organize are at work, aren't they? Don't be fooled, dear reader. The writer has just discovered the reason for all lies. It is too complicated to tell the truth.
May 25th, 2004 I'm writing this surrounded by "Instant & Low Resolution Portraits, Sketches, Studies and Snapshots" by Raul. Raul's opening in Boekie Woekie was on Saturday. Many photographs, drawings and a 12 hour video recording on 4 tapes of a newspaper picture of Simone de Beauvoir plus a book which he and his wife Truus worked on hard to get ready for the exhibition constitute what is on display here. Many of "Raul's people" showed up for the opening. Raul has a history of having a way with some prominent people, prominent in politics, they like him. Normally, ministers of state or lord mayors ignore Boekie Woekie, but in his tow some of this for us rare species occasionally show up. I drank them, and all the others away and as a captain of a ship I stayed on board to wait for the storm to abate. In the early hours I slept a little on an improvised bed in what is our gallery. I was up before ten with a desperation I hadn't been able to sleep away. The desperation was so bad that I had to do something about it. I took a saw and tried to reduce the poison ivy growth which originates on the backside of the Boekie Woekie back house. The poison ivy has spread over the flat roof of the back house and begins to grow its way down on the front side. I had to give up to cut it away. I was itching on my hands and coughing from the dust and was only more desperate. I had no beer, but just a few steps separated me from buying it. It wasn't easy. Then Hetti and Rúna came, after one, with Hanneke and Jos from Zwolle (I had heard through the phone they would come) and they brought some smoked eels. It was amazing what a smoked eel can repair.
May 21st, 2004 We had a great time with Carlheinz, his firm and his family. They provided a stage for our exhibition which couldn't have been better. The stage is an insurance broker's office, an office where I think Carlheinz said 30 people work. The opening was a business party for those who work there I think. For Carlheinz one of the reasons to let this exhibition happen probably was the possibility to meet (potential) customers in a relaxed, - or in an atmosphere differently excited from usual. Beate and Lisa, the wife and one of the daughters of Carlheinz, made an elegant effort to keep all guests happy. And Boekie Woekie which had been looking forward to show pictures without all ado enjoyed to see that the pictures worked. - And I had a special reason for joy - some people I hadn't seen for years showed up. Düsseldorf is in the area where my roots lie.
May 15th, 2004 Now that Hetti, Rúna and me have returned to Amsterdam from Düsseldorf (the mission there is completed and we had a lot of fun) we don't need to restrict the satisfaction of our thirst to tea! - Rereading this opening sentence for the new diary entry I must admit we didn't restrict that satisfaction to tea before we went to Düdo either, and not while we were there. This forces me, with a sigh, to ask the question what I'm talking about? I at least seem to drink alcohol all the time. Recognizing this, it helps that there was this e-mail today:
>jokes on the wall > >folgende inschrift las ich vor 20 jahren an der toilettenwand eines "autonomen kulturzentrums" > >" Haschisch macht gleichgueltig " > >darunter hatte ein anderer geschrieben > > >" ist mir doch egal ". > >biergruesse, >peter > Thank you, Peter. Is it the alcohol which makes me thankful? May 11th, 2004 Besides to entertain with speculative and detour seeking considerations this diary also intends of course to inform its readers about what goes on in the world's ....... bookshop. (The reader may fill in the dotted spot with a superlative form of an adjective of his choice.) - We were working intensely on getting a grip on a body of work which has played for about 8 years a prominent role in Boekie Woekie. A possibly final version of our beer mats, sometimes called beer coasters, is due on the walls of Mikosch and Partner in Düsseldorf, opening the day after tomorrow.
May 5th, 2004 Some, but hardly more than 10 years ago, I noticed a then brand-new inscription on one of the walls of the toilet of the house I inhabit with Hetti since more than 20 years. (When we moved into this house, the walls of this toilet were already covered with inscriptions. We liked that and didn't paint them over (actually if I remember right we liked the whole house). In the years we have lived there the latrine inscriptions only got more dense.) This new inscription I noticed during a dinner party. I recognized the hand of the writer: it was Pieter's and he was among our guests that night. I returned to the table where also he was sitting and told him I had found funny what he had written there. I thought his reaction showed he was a little embarrassed his writing had been noticed so soon or that I found it funny. At least, when I had to pee next time I noticed he had been there again to change his inscription by cleverly overwriting it. It was now almost impossible to read what had stood there first. What stood there now was: "Geen gitaar is niet zo erg dan helemaal geen gitaar". What had stood there first had been: "Geen zin is niet zo erg dan helemaal geen zin". It was in Dutch. I'll try to translate. The inscription made first was an ambiguous one. It could be "No sense is not as bad as no sense at all" or: "No sentence is not as bad as no sentence at all" or: "To not be in the mood isn't as bad as not to be in the mood at all." The "corrected" version, quite unambiguously reads in English: "No guitar is not as bad as no guitar at all". It did puzzle me, I even was a little worried back then that and how Pieter overwrote his inscription. Pieter still comes to Boekie Woekie and my home occasionally. But I have not mentioned to him that the pen he used in his second round of writing fades faster than the pen he used first. On the wall stands again "Geen zin is niet zo erg dan helemaal geen zin". I'm happy about that. But it is the detour via the guitar which doesn't fade from my mind.
April 27th, 2004 The disemboweled computer is a problem. Michael has started to pay attention to this situation, although as a Mac man, much of this is foreign to him too. I can write this on the pc that I emptied by mistake of a lot of useful functions. It luckily performs its tasks necessary for maintaining the Boekie Woekie site. - Something else. - I had a few days recently running around (by car) in our corner of Europe - Düsseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt and back home. Sitting here thinking about how I could relate aspects of that trip I gaze about without focus. I expect to "get an idea what to write". Before an idea comes I notice something which moves in what is indistinct in front of me. This movement forces me to focus. I see it is a tiny beetle, maybe a millimeter and a half long, running around on a piece of paper which hangs 25 cm before my eyes. On that paper are the Alt codes for special, mostly Icelandic letters which aren't on the keyboard. I like this little fellow who runs there and say to him, jaja, you and me we take long detours to avoid those specialists of the German language (that shows how far I was, trying to get an idea). The little fellow is too short of breath to answer, he is just now performing the acrobatics necessary to get himself around the edge to the backside of the paper, and now he is gone. I sigh, and that's my story for today.
April 16th, 2004 I blundered. I had the Norton's Space Wizard practically disembowel my computer. The Unerase Wizard brought a lot back, but Exel and Internet Explorer don't work properly. The purpose of writing this is that I want to test the FTP program. If this entry can be read in a few minutes by those who may open www.boekiewoekie.com (I intend to do it via Netscape) the diary readers I hope won't notice that in the near future another computer will maintain this site. If the FTP fails, there might come a pause before this text can be continued.
April 10th, 2004 Amsterdam is packed with Easter bunnies, lots of them German, many English and from other countries. They seem to move around quite randomly. Those who happen to find themselves in Boekie Woekie usually mumble an excuse - oops, not my warren - and are out again. Some like to sniff around a little. Often they leave after having made quite a mess on the shelves and tables. Very few ever hide any eggs in our till.
April 6th, 2004 Here follows one of the funnier of the twothousandandfour Boekie Woekie details. The following confusion occurred: are the breathing holes of seals their nostrils, their "nasal vents" or their "respiratorial orifices" as it was considered or are they those holes seals keep open in the ceiling of ice above them? That confusion occurred because Rúna had written a brief text in Icelandic based on some mythological story of the Greenlanders, the Inuits. She wanted it, in English, to accompany what is listed as
Thorkelsdóttir, Rúna Untitled ORIGINAL series of small paintings of a dark blue "sky" with "stars", numbered/20, signed, 1988/94 EUR 91.-
in the MULTIPLES section of this web site. In her text the stars are compared to the breathing holes of seals. A fire rages in the holes which the stars really are, to keep them open to maintain a connection, at least for the Inuit people, to a world beyond. The breathing holes, the seals' nostrils or their extensions keep the seals connected to some other side. Contemplating this I was reminded of the last real seal I saw. That was early December 03 from the window of our den (thanks, Elsa, for this, for me new word). I had to get the binoculars to convince myself that it wasn't a bottle I saw there drifting in the sea 7 meters from the shore (the den, or the house I was looking from, isn't further away from the other side of the shore line). I know now it was the idea of a bottle inhaling air which was getting me confused.
March 31st, 2004 A week ago at this time I was drinking Becks beers at JFK between flights. Los Angeles was then just behind me. The Pacific Ocean, into which I had inserted some toes. The tailless cat on the still hot hood of the motor of my beautiful Ford rented from Hertz. The cat Elsa said she and Bill just had had to put asleep. Elsa and her den. But the arrogant dentist. Alexandra's laughter. The Hungarian liking to speak German better than English. The German speaking mother on Venice Beach I overheard saying to her child "wenn das Wasser nicht wäre, wäre da Japan" while her child splashed around in that water. My talk. My local and therefore free of charge calls with Simona who knows she wants to be good to her 87 years old father. My not phoning the only other LA number in my address book. My getting disgusted by what I was offered to watch on my hotel room television. My fantasizing about the porcelain faced lady customers of my dentist. The feeling not to say what those listening were expecting to hear. All that (and more) was then just behind me. And in front of me was the flight into the morning across the Atlantic, the lights of Ireland at daybreak, a Boekie Woekie week with onethousandandone details.
March 29th, 2004 I don't remember whether I mentioned before, and I am to lazy now to check, and it is anyhow better if I mention it here again, that Elsa had invited me to come to the Santa Monica Museum of Art to talk to a public her museum would invite. Subject: Dieter Roth and Boekie Woekie. There were almost 2 weeks between the opening of the retrospective exhibition of Dieter Roth in New York and my talk in California. I took the opportunity to use a few of the extra days to visit Tom in Albuquerque. Tom and me have a history of more than 30 years. The last time I saw him was almost 4 years ago in Switzerland/Holland/Germany. I never before met him in New Mexico where he settled maybe 7 years ago. He has chosen to live on one of the vaster car parks, I sometimes thought when we were driving around in Albuquerque. Cars he said last longer in NM because of no snow/no salt on the roads. Tom took me to Acoma, the Indian settlement on top of a steep rock, also called Sky City. There I heard that until a few decades ago cars could not get up there. Even John Wayne (is the name of the western movie actor spelled like this?) in the 50ties, for the movie he was starring in, had to climb up. But we came from Albuquerque and were driven to the top in a mini bus. Orlando, a local and maybe 45, took us mini bus passengers around on a walking tour through the old village on the table top mountain. We learnt that Ancoma is the place which has been inhabited continuously for a longer period than any other place in North America, namely for 1100 years. And Orlando explained his name. His mother, he said, got a chance to travel and came to Florida. He said he was happy that she did not call him Mickey or Goofy. He knew to make that 2 finger gesture on his cheek, away from his nose: never surrender. Down the road, at route 66, the Indians by special law run gambling halls. Orlando's gesture would look comical here. The Albuquerque restaurant food was one of the other things for the memory box. And the houses too - nothing really tall, hardly anything tallish and most of them ground floor only and with what seemed to me a lot of space granted for improvisation.
March 28th, 2004 I came to New York, earlier this month, to see the 3rd stage of the Dieter Roth retrospective exhibition at the MoMA and at PS1. The MoMA is temporarily housed in Queens. Those things of Dieter too big for the MoMA Björn installed at PS1 - which also is in Queens. There I went first with Hetti and Skúta. I knew we would meet Eggert, Gunnar and Gulla, Björn and Oddur. I got happy seeing the installation of the Garden Sculpture, the Floor, the Flat Scrap, the Marseilles Catalogue pages, the Solo Szenen. The Garden Sculpture functioned better than ever though its library was detached and placed in an adjoining room. The proportions of the big space were just right for this version of Noah's Arc. I got seasick seeing it. After a few beers we followed Björn when he had to go over to the MoMA. Looking around there the adjective which came to my mind was compact. The exhibition of Dieter's older works seemed to me to be compact and with intelligently written, though much too big text labels for those who don't know Dieter. I thought: finally America is giving Dieter a good chance. But I got so seasick that I missed the opening 2 days later. Doctors wanted to be sure I hadn't suffered a stroke and kept me for the opening day in hospital. I thought I would have to call off visiting Tom in Albuquerque and my engagement for a lecture at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. But I got better. That, first of all allowed me to go for another visit to MoMA and PS1, now to say good bye to works which I won't have a chance to soon see again.
March 25th, 2004 Back in Amsterdam since this morning (and in Boekie Woekie) and back from New York (and from Albuquerque and Los Angeles). I would like to call what I experienced on my way too much to write about. It certainly amounts to more than I could tell. But I slept some on the planes, plus a little at home. Okay, let's see how far this gets. The last image I saw 18 days ago in Amsterdam, just before taking off for New York was that of a man in a gray work uniform. The uniform defined him as to belong to the air port cleaning personnel. I was, when I saw him, returning from sparing my air line some drops of kerosene. I had been ridding myself of the weight of what remains, once it is swallowed down, of Heineken. It is a pity one can't get anything better to get rid of on Schiphol. Anyhow I saw the man in the cleaners uniform checking in passing, with 2 of his fingers, the coin return box of one of the public telephones. Was there something to clean? No. It was already clean. Though there were 4 telephones assembled around a pole, only one had a coin return box. The 3 others were card operated phones. The gray man didn't seem to think those phones could collect something worthwhile to clean. Not many years ago all telephones had a coin return box. Poor man, I thought. There is hardly a place left for you to clean. Not mentioning quite a few stories for the sake of this story, the next thing I remember is an emergency visit (the day before yesterday) at a dentist's in Beverly Hills. He had to pull out my last wisdom tooth. As a consequence I have less to clean now too.
March 6th, 2004 It seems definite, it will be New York tomorrow. Hard to believe. I haven't been there for some years. And I have never gone that far for the opening of any exhibition. Actually after last night, I wouldn't have to go, because I dreamt then, that I was at the opening. I saw the exhibition, I remember details of it, I met people in my dream I may meet there in reality, I even took the shuttle bus to PS1, where the other part of the exhibition is going to be shown. To have entered the shuttle bus though is where my dream ends, somehow I didn't arrive at PS1. But in that part of the exhibition which I had seen I had felt very well. I had recognized Dieter's collection of small glass and porcelain figures of human likes, expressing vividly all sorts of emotions. I knew he had taken them home from the knick-knack departments of supermarkets in the rural areas of Iceland or the Chinese quarter of Amsterdam. I knew that in my dream. When I was awake again, I knew I had dreamt.
February 28th, 2004 The tickets for New York were in the mail today. Hetti and me will leave, together with Andrea (of the mink coat story, on Feb.12th, 04 in this diary) in 8 days. Rúna will do Boekie Woekie for one week, then Hetti (and Andrea) will be back in Holland. I'll stay on in the U.S. and get a chance to visit Tom for a few days in New Mexico and will then appear in front of people who will have followed an invitation of the Santa Monica Museum of Art. I'm supposed to talk about Dieter Roth. Elsa, in charge of the museum, ran formerly the Galleries of the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. In that function she invited me some years ago, but not long before this diary was begun, to give a talk there. That talk has been published by the Galleries at the Moore College web site, one can find it under: http://www.thegalleriesatmoore.org/publications/voss.shtml.
February 23rd, 2004 I'm hoping to be soon drunk enough to realize that to continue writing will deliver only crap. That it will be better to bike home. I have been writing all day long - apart from those brief times during which I deleted what I wrote during the much longer times of writing. During a short spell of deleting it crossed my mind that the fact that a trash can manufacturer could get so desperate as to approach us, Boekie Woekie, to buy trash cans from him (see the entry of Feb. 19th, 2004) could result from the fact that trash which used to be disposed off in trash cans nowadays lands in virtual trash cans. Those trash can makers of real trash cans experience of course dire straits! Nobody throws anything substantial away anymore except an occasional banana peel and that by traditional preference not into a trash can but onto the pavement! It was not a cynical approach by a mean joker that we should throw all our merchandise into the garbage and close our shop! - I think I'm learning the lesson: Do trust your own hysteria. Otherwise: Keep a diary of blank pages. One last beernana, to slide on its peel to bed.
February 19th, 2004 Only one business proposal was made today to the most serious shop for books by artists I am aware of (which of course is Boekie Woekie): a manufacturer of trash cans tried to get us interested in his services.
February 13th, 2004 Boekie Woekie is a lot on the phone these days. To the U.S., to Switzerland, to Iceland, to Germany. Boekie Woekie is in the process of tackling the logistics of a trip across the Atlantic to the 3rd and last station of the Dieter Roth Retrospective in New York in less than a month's time.
February 12th, 2004 I'm sitting up to my neck in a beer bath (not really, but so it feels). A tooth aches, and aches now less because of the bath. That tooth used to have a crown but that crown broke off when I was chewing raisins in Iceland a year and a half ago. I became aware of that it had broken off because I bit on the loose crown, thinking at first a stone was among the raisins. Of course I knew after taking the lump out of my mouth and putting it into a match box that this would not be the end of it. I also knew I would skip, as long as possible to visit a dentist. I have turned to beer now but I doubt I can delay visiting the dentist much longer. I wouldn't be surprised if some thought I would often be in pain. Beer drinking and diary writing go for me quite well together. Maybe this diary wants to convey a variety of screams of pain modulated by beer. Could I aspire anything higher than another aspirin? The best medicines are in words. Read those:
diary addition by andrea tippel, berlin, germany 9.1.2004 on my way to a sunday afternoon outing with Renate the 4th of january in this new year i was sitting in the first compartment of the underground n° 1, destination KRUMME LANKE ( remembering Claire Waldorff: koof mer sand und schipp de krumme lanke zu…. ). at the Hohenzollernplatz station a woman about my age or younger in a big mink got in and threw herself in a corner of the bench diagonally opposite me. that would have been o.k. if the big mink would then have exploded on her body, breaking up into innumerable living minks, scattering away in all directions, as it once did on the body of the magician X on a stage as my sister Carola told me. but it did not. so i pointedly did not pay any attention to her but sent telepathic antipathetic lightenings over. though whenever I meet a very old woman in a mink, i imagine her in a raving youth and join her in my fantasy. as arranged Renate got on at Heidelberger Platz. we ate as a precaution her gummibärchen ( coloured gumdrops formed like tiny bears. very famous) because the sun was shining brightly and it is said to decay vitamin D or E which on the other hand gummibärchen contain. we then walked down the Fischerhüttenstrasse to the Krumme Lanke pond, a lake so small that it takes only 45 minutes to walk around. it was cold, about 5 degrees celsius below zero. a stream of people moved in both directions on the path through the pale wood around the pond and we joined those who turned towards the sunny side of the bank. the lake lay under a white plane of ice, lightly covered with snow and glittering untouched in the sun. suddenly I seemed to recognize the very same lady about 8 steps in front of us and just at the moment when I was sure that it was she, the mink fell on its belly down into the dirt. it had stumbled, probably over a root. a little cloud of dust swirled from the frozen path up around it and I dashed ahead, pushed my right hand under its left arm ( it was surprisingly rough ) trying to lift it but in vain because it was confusingly heavy (why was it so heavy? I thought at this moment, the lady was young, must have been a serious drop). now Renate was on the spot and with difficulty we put the mink back on its feet and in it the lady with her distorted face. “everything ok?” “yes thank you” “nothing serious happened?” „no, thanks, i just had an operation, i got two new hips, i have to take care“ „ my goodness, poor you, but you are alright now, arent’you?“ “yes, I’m alright so far” “and you’ll make it alone now?” “yes thank you” “so goodbye and all the best” “ for you too, bye-bye”. we then overtook the dusty and rumpled mink and I told Renate about what had happened not even half an hour ago in the underground.
I find Andrea can soothe pain with words. The Boekie Woekie diary quotes her because in a telephone conversation a few weeks ago the idea came up between her and me that a section of diary notes, or remarks by others, or some sort of guest book, should become one of the clickable possibilities of the main menu of the BW site. As a first entry for that new section she e-mailed the above text. But the new section isn't there yet. Before it thaws, and before mink coats will be forbidden by law, the new clickability may not be installed.
January 31st, 2004 Peter, in a way a colleague from Germany, was in Boekie Woekie today, soaking wet from walking in the rain, and with photographic pictures he had managed to keep dry which he brought me as a gift. Two pictures show Dieter and me, in Düsseldorf on the occasion of the Freunde/Friends/Fruend exhibition being installed. Johannes is also on one of 2 the pictures. Peter was shown these pictures by an Inge, who took them back then as a fellow student of mine at the Art Academy of Düsseldorf. Her name rings a distant bell to me, but I can't remember the person. Peter convinced her I would be very happy to get the pictures, and I am. Two books are still available from Boekie Woekie which appeared on the occasion of the Friends exhibition:
Freunde + Freunde Friends + Fruend by Karl Gerstner, Diter Rot, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins + friends, on the occasion of an exhibition, Bern Düsseldorf 1969 EUR 85.-
and
Iannone, Dorothy The Story Of Bern on the occasion of an exhibition, numbered/500, signed, Düsseldorf 1970 EUR 165.-
I mention them here because I find both books for very different reasons very remarkable.
January 23rd, 2004 Back in Amsterdam since soon 2 weeks. I find Boekie Woekie is a not much frequented place - not much frequented by customers anyhow. I hear we comfort ourselves by calling this lack the Christmas hangover. But I checked how business was in the weeks before Christmas. There really is no reason for a hangover, business was slow then too.
Rúna has returned as well from Iceland, the crew is back on board. Now some water under the keel please.
Guđrún Hrönn from Helsinki and Eggert (another Eggert than the one usually called Eggert in these pages but also) from Reykjavík stayed with us briefly. They were on their way to Maastricht where they studied art more than 20 years ago (and where I have been their occasional teacher). They and others were invited to come back to their school after all those years to be interviewed about the books they then did there. Johan organized that. He is doing research on that bit of the past of this educational institution. During the last few years I took occasionally notice of the peculiar name applied to the (post graduate only) art students of the Jan van Eyck Academy, they are called researchers. They call an art student a researcher. Is detective or scientist a synonym for artist? Johan must have gotten well acquainted with this terminology.
Dieter (another Dieter than the usual Dieter of these pages) called in an e-mail of yesterday for more to read, I quote:
Subject: 16
"... already 16 time ..." already 16 days without diary, we all are waiting! <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>16</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <FONT SIZE="5"><FONT FACE="Times">"... already 16 time ..."<BR> already 16 days without diary, we all are waiting!</FONT></FONT> </BODY> </HTML> Dieter's e-mail helped me to pick up the thread, but I got enthusiastic when Eggert's e-mail came. (It is an e-mail by the very Eggert who usually is the Eggert of this diary). Here it is:
Subject: Gaa gaa ga
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 19:54:35 -0000 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 X-VortexISP-MailScanner-Information: Please contact the ISP for more information X-VortexISP-MailScanner: Found to be clean
Sćll og blessađur.
Ég var ađ tala viđ Kalla á jórunnarstöđum og spurđi hann um hćnurnar. Ţćr verpa eins og brjálćđar. Út og suđur. Ađ međaltali 4 egg á sólarhring. Ţađ er meira en eitt egg pr. hćnu. Ţeim líđur greinilega mjög vel. Ţú ćttir ađ hringja í Kalla og fá lýsingu frá fyrstu hendi. Ég get ekki endurtekiđ ţađ sem Kalli sagđi. Ţađ var eitthvađ međ Gaa gaa ga. --- Eggert <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1276" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Sćll og blessađur.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Ég var ađ tala viđ Kalla á jórunnarstöđum og </FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>spurđi hann um hćnurnar.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Ţćr verpa eins og brjálćđar. Út og suđur.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Ađ međaltali 4 egg á sólarhring. Ţađ er </FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>meira en eitt egg pr. hćnu. </FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Ţeim líđur greinilega mjög vel.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Ţú ćttir ađ hringja í Kalla og fá lýsingu</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>frá fyrstu hendi. Ég get ekki endurtekiđ </FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>ţađ sem Kalli </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>sagđi. Ţađ var eitthvađ </FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>međ Gaa gaa ga.</FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>---<BR></A></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>
That was good news. A relief. The reader remembers my chicken from the exhibition at Alla's Kompan. (Entries: November 20th and December 4th, 2003) They continue their lives at Kalli's and Sigga's farm - and Eggert says they lay eggs like mad. The 3 of them 4 a day! I would call this a happy end.
January 6th, 2004 My time in Iceland comes to an end. Next week at this time I should be back in Amsterdam. 2 months flew by. I prolonged my stay for 2 or so weeks. When I came here I said I intended to be back in Holland before the end of the year. But as I stayed on the hitherto only once before experienced situation (back in 72) occurred that I was ”alone” during the feast days of this season. I enjoyed my Holy Night dinner. I had a few 2 days before boiled delicious Icelandic cold potatoes with my left hand, while continuing to work with my right hand. Too lazy for cooking and nobody disappointed. What a luxury! - I can top this maybe prosaic seeming dinner story if I relate how I became aware that the New Year was there. I had been working at my computer the whole day. The days are very short now (there is some sort of daylight from just before 11 to 3). But I was still busy working when it had been dark outside already for many hours. It was a different kind of diary I was working on, which meant I frequently had to write dates of days of what now is last year – and those who also work on computers know one only needs to write the number of the day and the number of the month and then the computer completes the date by adding the year automatically. There then came that moment when I thought something was wrong. A bit later I scrolled up on my page and saw that I had missed it said 2004 instead of 2003 already 16 times!
December 30th, 2003 I'm writing this diary in the English language, not in the language I'm born into, German. I tell myself I’m fairly capable of English and since the internet is a world-wide publication platform, I may expect to reach more readers of English, than of German text. But how would it be if my real reason to write English is to have an acceptable excuse for my mistakes, something I wouldn't have if I wrote in German?
December 24th, 2003 Rúna is in Reykjavík since 10 days, staying with her son and his family. Reynir, that is her son, got thirty the other day and for that occasion, an accordion. When Rúna phones, or I her, there has now been at times a background of noises which only a homesickness compressor can produce. ”Heimwehkompressor” was a word Curt used for this thing many years ago. Curt is home now. Home, if I quote how Stephan called it where his mother went to, when she had died. Ludwig also has left. If they continue like this I’ll end up with a big address book, with all the names blackened. Writing that makes me think of a scene I became witness of in County Donegal, in Ireland. I had gone there, around 1990, to visit Hetti who was taking care for a few weeks of the ”Cliff House” which her friend Joanne and what was he called again, her husband, had bought. But at the now of that time they were away from it for a while. First morning after I got there Hetti sent me to the shop, for breakfast. A walk of maybe 2 or 3 km one way, ”in that direction. You’ll see it, it is opposite a monastery”. The shopkeeper, an old woman, was just helping a couple with what they where buying. The customers must have been tourists too, because I overheard the old woman say ”No, no, there are no old people here! When I came here, 65 years ago, there were lots of old people here. But they all have died, they all have died.” I assume that if I come to her shop another time, she’ll be telling the same story.
December 21st, 2003 A few weeks ago I walked with Hetti to the centre of Akureyri from where we had left the car to be repaired. Not many pedestrians would walk the road we were on. It’s in an industrial area. However, the road, busy with car traffic, had one sidewalk. Walking that we came to a spot were some tools were lying on the asphalt. Quite a heavy hammer, something like a crowbar and a red and white plastic road work marker (I don’t have a proper name for this thing, not even in German, can’t look it up in the dictionary but trust one knows what I mean. The shape of a Walt Disney witch hat). There was a chalk line and there were a few loose asphalt pieces, broken out of the pavement surface. Somebody had just started to work, and would be back in a minute to continue his job, that’s how it looked. I remember this well because it coincided with Hetti counting our steps. We had deliberately not phoned Alla to ask her to fetch us from the car repair shop, because of a newspaper article about the benefits of walking. You’ll probably stay okay, if you take 10’000 steps a day, it had said there. We had come to onethousandonehundredeighteen (or so) when we saw what I described above. To interrupt the counting by pointing to what we saw there on the ground would have meant the end of the counting. And we would never have known how many steps too little we take every day to stay okay. Therefore we passed that spot without remark. Actually I think later we never mentioned it. Hetti counted steps to twothousandsomething, and then gave up. We anyhow knew we never would stay okay. Then this whole thing was forgotten. And comes back like this: I once more drive the car to the same repair place, a few days ago. Hetti is in Holland by now. The seatbelt for the back seat (not for me but for the vehicle inspection). The repair man says be back in an hour. I go for a walk. Everything is now under a layer of snow. But the red/white road work marker is still sticking out. The snow only hides the foot (or if you want the brim) of this witch head. And yes, I feel with my shoe, the hammer is there, the crowbar too. Road work ahead, to be resumed when springtime comes.
December 20th, 2003 Kristján phoned today, wanted to know how I was. Upon my asking, I heard it was Friday today (yesterday. I’m writing after midnight). That means I’ll have to get out of here and to the liquor store tomorrow (or rather today) before it closes for the weekend on Saturday at 4 o’clock. My days here are very comfortable. I had lost track of time. It could have been any day. I forgot to tell K. that I saw at the book/stationary shop in the town nearby, where they sell computer stuff too, as a proof for the great performance of a printer, a photographic image of the small boat harbour, with prominently in the foreground, newly painted and slightly changed, the boat we gave up on. (See the entry of June 17th, 2001.) I should have asked for the picture, to keep it as an ironic souvenir. (That boat we finally sold for much less than we had bought it for. The new owners, contrary to us, obviously knew how to deal with the engine troubles.)
December 7th, 2003 I took Hetti to the bus today which goes to Reykjavík. She is to fly back tomorrow to Holland. Overnight she will stay with Solveig. Solveig’s father has just died, he is not buried yet. He was from a generation of Icelanders who seemed to me to be patient and thoughtful. Two days ago finally Hetti’s driving license matter came to a good end – I’ll pick up from the office her 2nd and now permanently valid license, before I leave for Holland. When that will be is not decided yet, in 2 or 3 weeks or so, I think.
I sat down to write this entry with on my mind something more about my visit last weekend to Seyđisfjörđur. The time before last weekend that I had been there was in May 2002 when attending the Dieter Roth Academy conference (read the entry of May 26th, 2002). Something ”big” was then going on in Seyđisfjörđur. We heard a new quay was being built for the new ferry which would be a gigantic ship and was at that time under construction in Lübeck. Seyđisfjörđur is the port of call for a ferry which operates since some 25 years between Denmark and Iceland during the summer months. (I would have a few stories to tell about the time Hetti and me undertook that voyage 23 years ago.) The ever growing ferries of this line bring those Italian, French, German all-terrain cars to Iceland whose owners – their number must be growing - need a far fetched justification to have bought them and therefore dream about Icelandic desert roads – read the entry of August 9th, 2002. Now this quay is ready. It looks like it will not be an easy lesson to learn to appreciate its existence. What made Seyđisfjörđur serenely beautiful, its houses around the pool by the mouth of the river surrounded by those awesome mountains of more than a thousand meters in height has become now the backdrop of a parking lot for a thousand cars.
December 4th, 2003 My exhibition at Kompan Gallery of Ađalheiđur is over. We were taking down the urinals and stuffed the hay from the floor, mixed with feathers and shit, into a plastic sack – I began this work but had to stop, because my nose began to tickle. I took that for the warning signs of an approaching hay fever attack. Hetti continued stuffing the sack. Closer inspection brought into light that the painted concrete floor had not been acid-resistant. There must be some acid in chicken shit. Alla thought the thick chicken stench would not go away soon. She would buy joss sticks to make the upcoming use of Kompan, as a shop for self made Christmas accessories and other art works by herself and Jón, acceptable for the customers. The chickens by now were back in the cardboard box they had already traveled in for 400 km, 3 weeks ago. Only one tenth of the length of their first trip was waiting for them now. Sigga and Kalli from up in the valley will give them a new home in the hope they will eventually resume their egg-laying. That they had namely stopped the day after they had become art hens. Chicken-wise people had declared that to be the result of a culture shock. The hens never sat (on their eggs) in the urinals. To suggest that image I had to buy eggs to put them on the hay in the urinals as if the hens had laid them there. I had thought when I put the eggs there it was funny how much art and an ”as if” situation still go together. Inspecting Kompan further we found small splashes of blood low on the walls. Alla had reported an increased liveliness of the animals (in spite of their egg laying strike). They were spreading their wings, more jumping than flying, they rolled in the hay – and they hit at each other with their beaks. In the featherless patches of one of them were fresh wounds. The image I had intended to reconstruct had been a different one. Hens breeding peacefully in a rather unusual place. This was my first exhibition in some years and different in a number of aspects from what I have shown, and how I have shown, my things before. Certainly there never were any bloodstains on the walls of my earlier exhibitions. What a person with too much imagination might possibly have seen as a bloodstain would have, if looked at from nearer by, been the marking of a work sold.
December 3rd, 2003 Hetti, Eggert and me, and Jón, Ađalheiđur and Brák, their 7 years old daughter, went to the opening of an exhibition in Seyđisfjörđur in 2 cars on Saturday. Yesterday, Monday, we returned to our fjord. It was Fredie’s exhibition. Fredie is often mentioned in this diary as a visitor to Boekie Woekie in Amsterdam. The exhibition took place in the building called Skaftfell. Björn and his wife and children had come too, and of course Pétur and Garđar and other local residents with familiar, and many with unfamiliar faces were there. Predictably a dive into a long row of alcoholic beverages was taken by some. A girl was singing known songs beautifully in what would have been the morning hours of Sunday if the mornings were not so very, very late at this time of the year. A guy was told by a lady he had been struggling with, to stay were he was, and were she had gotten him, namely under the table. A few writers on a promotional tour for their new books had been reading from their works. I had conversations with two of them. It was snowing thick flakes when we took the few steps to the house we had been assigned to. On Sunday we paid a visit to Eyţór. He put marinated herrings and brennivín on the table and would have wanted us to stay for dinner, but we were invited to the house of Pétur and Ţora. Their child, Avanti Ósk, and Brák, tried to take my socks off while I was taking a nap. Later Eyţór intercepted Eggert, Hetti and me when we were on the way to our beds. More brennivín and more singing. Eggert and Eyţór began to sing, but they improvised. Their singing sounded as if they could not talk normally anymore, as if they had to sing, they were so emotional. On Monday afternoon we crossed the highland to get back. A short distance from where the road to Vopnafjörđur branches of, a herd of 60 or 70 reindeer (but does one call a group of animals a herd, though it is not accompagnied by a shepherd?) were busy to look with a front hoof for something edible under the snow, and crossed the road freely from the one to the other side. Eggert explained their being at ease with the hunting season to be over. I never before had seen these animals from so close by. Their movement when running looks very funny. For the later part of the way, when it was dark again, I was in danger of falling asleep behind the wheel. Not good, and not at all on a slippery road. Eggert had actually slept during part of the way back. That sleep did him good. Once back in the house he very decidedly went at fixing my computer. Successfully so, now both the printer and my back-up system work again. Relieved I phoned Rúna in Amsterdam. She had been to Pieter and Marianne and spoke happily about their hours together. I then slept for ten hours.
November 23rd, 2003 I remember I refused until 1991 to ever have my desk topped by a computer. Then I gave in. And since then I even have become a bit of a web man. By being busy with my website diary within the website of Boekie Woekie my understanding of websites grows. This makes me want to have my own website. The diary follows a simple linear rule: when I write something new, it always appears on top of what there already is. In that imagined website of my own, branches could grow out from all 4 sides of each page, and more than one. A treelike structure would emerge. The site would be alike what I feel the internet is. Just as with this diary, the most recently added piece would be the portal to the whole site. Spontaneous publishing. In a way similar to the side entrances to offset printing Boekie Woekie found some 20 years ago.
November 22nd, 2003 I dreamt I knew that what I saw had taken its shape and colours and sounded as it did, though it really was pizza dough.
November 20th, 2003 In Iceland again, since 10 days. We (Hetti is with me) got the car legal and onto the road again and drove north on the 3rd day after our arrival. Eggert came with us, and three living hens and a 40 kilo sack of chicken fodder. We had bought the hens from a chicken farmer near Reykjavík for ISKR 2000.- each. The farmer had said we could get cheaper ones, but they would not be as beautiful. Those we got were ugly enough with their big featherless patches. We did not mention to the farmer we bought them for art purposes. All this because Ađalheiđur in Akureyri had invited me to put up an exhibition in what she calls Kompan, a small room inside her and her husband’s studio. (His name is Jón. I first saw him at the opening of an exhibition I had in Akureyri in July of 1979 together with Hetti, Eli and Kristján. Jón sat in the beginning separated a little from the crowd and was reading Nietzsche on the steps of the stairwell to the gallery. Then the crowd joined him, as it were. There were big windows to the north and to the east, as it were. The stairs had been bright from the midnight sun pouring in from the northern window, and from what seemed an endless supply of Chinese red wine which was stored on the stairs.) I had asked Alla, short for Ađalheiđur, to somehow get hold of 3 urinals. She had succeeded, and with the help of Eggert they were put up on the walls of Kompan. My installation intended to recreate the men’s room of a defunct freezing plant I once happened to come across. When I opened its door, white hens were sitting in the urinals, I presumed on their eggs, in the bright light of a strong bulb. Alla, Jón and their friends took my installation and the red wine Alla served gracefully. Only Ţröstur with a glass in his hand said something with a question mark about live animals in art. Once the party was over (late last Sunday) normality wanted to establish itself. But we found that a few things in the house do not work. The computer does not recognize the zip drive anymore. The knob to regulate the size of the flames on our gas stove is broken, we can not turn down the gas. To get that okay again, plus Hetti practicing driving, is what keeps us busy now. November 9th, 2003 Off to Iceland tomorrow!
November 6th, 2003 This time I'm just back from Vienna. I had gone there because Felicitas had invited me to present myself to students of the art academy. For her sadly, she could not be with us, but had to stay for a few days in hospital. Having left Vienna on an airplane yesterday afternoon, having changed from plane to train in Düsseldorf, I come closer to the story I really want to tell. My story takes place in Emmerich. Emmerich, for ages, has been the border stop for trains going to Holland on the German side. Locomotives were exchanged here. But Emmerich is not a stop anymore for those modern trains as I was on. They skip to stop at Emmerich. However, for a reason unknown to me, this time my train stopped at Emmerich rail station. I sat sufficiently supplied with Radeberger beer in what is left in those modern trains of dining cars. I had been writing, or listening in writing pauses to three funny Dutchmen at the table across the aisle. I didn't think the halt of the train to be of any importance, until there was a knock on my window. Like from a key, or coin, or ring on the pane. I was surprised and looked up at what could have caused the sound, but at first could not see what it was. It was night outside, most of the surface of the window reflected the interior of the dining car. Details of the dark station outside were difficult to distinguish. But then I saw moving lips in the dark! They were lips in the face of a black woman. The black woman's face expressed her wish to board the train. I knew she saw me more easily than I could see her. I made a gesture of not knowing how to help her. Her reply was not a reply to my gesture. She showed she had given up, the train had started to move. For me she slit out of the window.
October 29th, 2003 I went to London the other day, to the Small Publishers Fair. It took place in Conway Hall, at Red Lion Square. I enjoyed this mini book fair, especially after BoeWoe skipped the recent big fair in Frankfurt. That which was left of a night of many pints, I spent on and under a blanket improvised by Simon and Erica alongside their hotel room bed. The hotel knew nothing of it, and since I was there at the breakfast table, I even nibbled away a slice of toast on the expenses of the house. If I have got it right Conway Hall is the base of the Ethical Society. The hall consists mainly of a stage and an auditorium. Above the stage was to be read something like "to thine self be true", which I only noticed on the second day I was there. After pint-I-don't-remember-the-how- maniest, that motto, imagined to hover over actors, seemed funny.
October 27th, 2003 3 years ago I began this diary. It follows after a break of 15 years, a period during which I kept no diary. Before that I did keep a daily diary from about 1970 to 1985. That was of course a time when writing and publishing were not dreamt about as simultaneously possible. I wrote that early diary with 0,2 mm Rotring pens into agendas, or empty books I had made myself. Nobody ever read them, me included. But they still exist. I don't know why I kept a diary then, and I'm surprised that I do it now. What thrills me nowadays is maybe that the diary is directly published.
October 20th, 2003 "Dieter Roth Time" number 2 was opened in Cologne last Friday, the 2nd leg of the Roth Retrospective. I remember I was shocked when I first heard, a bit more than a year ago, that these 3 words had been decided on as the title for this enterprise. Dieter's time is put ad acta with those 3 words, as if his work wouldn't bear consequences for now and the future. Anyhow, Rúna and I went to Cologne (Hetti took care of BoeWoe in Amsterdam). We attended the opening and saw the exhibition. Björn had taken care of drinks at Dieter's bar. Monika gave us a place to sleep, and all was good. Many refreshing situations with smart people. We stayed till Sunday, but only in the train home I felt I had drunk enough. My habit of drinking large quantities may have a number of reasons. As far as I remember the reason in this case was that I wanted to forget the exhibition. It is always wonderful for me to see Dieter Roth's pictures, therefore I dislike it when they are not displayed to their advantage.
October 15th, 2003 I'm trying to drink not too much beer, but enough to not feel too much of the effects of the overdose I had last night. About 2 weeks ago, Garđar Rúnar and his partner Arnbjörg where in Amsterdam on the occasion of the concert the Rolling Stones gave here. They had brought us a leg of lamb. A leg of lamb is a feast, and the feast was last night. Hetti and Rúna had invited Ţórunn. Ţórunn came with another young woman, a friend of hers from The Hague, and likewise Icelandic. Later 2 young men also from Ţórunn's horizon, joined us - one of which told he had come to the continent from Iceland to watch the soccer match Iceland versus Germany, the other day, in Hamburg. Maybe because I felt some insignificance of reasons to travel great distances I got enticed and carried away. I took on the guests in a competition of arguments about their and my views of the future of Iceland. They had soon spotted me as a colonialist. It became a hot discussion. I don't think I was entirely fair. But those Reykjavík people didn't even know of the existence of Möđrudalur. They don't turn vehemently enough against a government which floods large parts of the East of the country to generate electricity for making aluminum. A whole fjord will be unhinged under the pretext that something good is done for the economy. The thought lies very near that the members of the governing party mean their own economy and not the one of the country. Today I have to conclude that the pressure in Reykjavík is great. There the hope to continue to live is not fed by the believe that the rock in the North Atlantic will grant the necessary livelihood to those who sit on it without that they interfere in far reaching ways. The fulfillment of the hope to continue to live is rather expected to be found abroad or from tourists, or from foreign investors, or from a life in Hollywood, or from actors who pretend for tourists that they live the life of locals. Those options would be for those with a longer breath. And aluminum factories for those who can't get out of Iceland quick enough. And a lot which I don't remember. A hot discussion, and a lot of beer.
October 6th, 2003 Lots of things are going on simultaneously, as of course always. Hail, rain, sunshine and thunder. Rúna, only back from Barcelona last night where she spent the weekend in the company of all those who work in her son's company in Reykjavík (they are more than 20, and most of them had been there with their partners), Rúna was just vacuum cleaning Boekie Woekie, now she closes another computer. Kristján, on a weeks visit from Iceland to Amsterdam has just left - we'll see him and his brother Sigurdur later tonight. We are invited to eat "speklapjes met boerenkool" (curly kale with a side of fat bacon) at Sigurdur's home. Kristján and me compared half shyly notes on the state of the blood vessels around our hearts. "Speklapjes" are said to be especially good for clogging them with cholesterol. The brothers, especially Kristján delights in traditional food. Hetti is in a meeting with her two sisters, but will join us soon. I have asked whether there will be snaps after dinner, to help digest the stuff, but there won't be, since "one anyhow would only get drunk from it". That is a new tone from Kristján. Today for the first time we kept the shop door closed and put the heat on. Summer is over. And tomorrow begins in Frankfurt this year's Book Fair - without us for the first time since 1987. We skipped to register for the Book Fair in March because we estimated the 4 months engagement on the occasion of the Roth Retrospective in Basel would exhaust our energy. Back then, in March, we still saw as possible our participation in the second leg of the Retrospective in Cologne. If that had turned out to be the case the Book Fair would for sure have been too much for us, especially also because we wouldn't find the time to produce new books. After all the showing of new books is the purpose of the fair. Now it is no new books, no Book Fair, and no Cologne.
September 27th, 2003 I'm too busy to even think of this diary. But it happens that I wish I would pay more attention to it. I'll give that a try now. The Dutch have a saying which goes "He took too much hay on his hay fork - hij heeft teveel hooi op zijn fork genomen". They say that when they want to express that someone attempted to deliver more than it turned out he was able to. I know that life, me living mine, is by far more than I could describe in this diary context. Here I note down random fragments of what I become aware of. The straw which stings me now and makes me write is usually not the straw which stung me when I wrote the former entry. I'm afraid the Dutch saying may apply to me because the last, the September 8th entry calls for a few additional words. I was in Cologne the other day where Björn, Gunnar, Eggert and Oddur were in an advanced state busy to once more erect Dieter's Garden Sculpture. I saw the space where the exhibition will be held. Of the 7000 square meters in Basel only about 1/10 is left in Cologne. Whether this situation will work as a platform to let Dieter Roth's star rise further or whether it is calculated to continue the relatively obscured way of how he is perceived - I can't know the answer but I can't overcome my suspicions. However when I saw in Cologne how Björn, his near 20 years old son Oddur, Eggert and Gunnar, the Garden Sculpture specialists, where happily working, and developing ideas how to present this and the Floor, big sculptures in unseen before postures, I got ashamed of my fears.
September 8th, 2003 The end of the first staging of the Dieter Roth Retrospective is in sight. Next Sunday (the 14th) is the last day one can visit it. I'll go to Basel on the 11th, next Thursday, to prepare our getting the stuff back home. Meanwhile our hope to be present with Boekie Woekie at the next station of the Dieter Roth Retrospective, in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, beginning in October, has been destroyed, we will not be there. This gives us time to do other things. To ponder a little, for example. The director of that Cologne museum had been visiting the Roth Retrospective in Basel in June, when Hetti and I were there and had also strolled into our shop. We had greeted and talked for a moment but then his telephone had rung. He had stepped into the elevator with his phone at his ear and was gone. The words I remember he spoke during this brief encounter were that "all this must become much less" - dies alles muss stark reduziert werden. He had made a sweeping gesture with one arm. The news now are that the plan is to reduce the really broad Dieter Roth Retrospective (I almost wrote Redrotspective) as it is still to be seen in Basel. In Cologne they want to show only the years Dieter sort of lived in the Rhineland. I can't say I'm surprised. My esteem of this director who no doubt is deeply involved in the arts, has long been troubled by a suspicion. His ability to see what really is great in art may well exist, but his ability to express that first ability seems to me hampered by something. As a director he seems to have to make sure he is in a superior position. And that, to me, he seems to think he can achieve by reducing DR! Less of Dieter Roth is better than more. The artist's concept would not sustain that. My suspicion is the director might feel that the life work of DR is a 1000 times more meaningful than what ever else he has shown. And that therefore now when he shows it, he has to reduce it. Alive, Dieter was hard to get at. How it is with the dead one remains to be seen.
August 28th, 2003 I'll go to Düsseldorf and Cologne tomorrow - Robert Filliou's exhibition in Düsseldorf is the immediate reason. Aldo, Monika and me will meet to walk around among Robert's things in what was once the old Ehrenhof. There the exhibition takes place now. At my time in Düsseldorf, the 2nd half of the sixties and through the seventies, in the Ehrenhof then, the yearly Winter Exhibitions were held, hundreds of local artists contributed, the diversity of works was great fun. Maybe these exhibitions still go on, I don't know, but the Ehrenhof complex of buildings by the Rhine I heard has undergone thorough renewal. I write about what I think will come and mix it with history bits because I can't think of anything that happened the last few days which I would want to tie together in a few sentences. Well, Joost has come by. Joost has avoided us for some years, so the visit he payed us now was a special visit. Reportedly he stayed away because he wanted to avoid to have to drink beer with us. Therefore when I saw him come in I said, it was save for him to do so, I had no beer. Too bad he said and that he really wanted one, and he turned on his heel to get two from the shop across the street. He really had had to come, he is a friend of Fredie's. I fetched a few more beers after the first two, but not many, two for each I think. Joost was in troubles with his mobile phone, but when the troubles were sorted out he was in a hurry to leave. While fumbling around with his phone, and in-between sips, Joost was intensely busy to express how close we all have come (we: the Western World, and the rest of the world with us) to a collapse of all our systems. Not only that of telephony. The build up of lies he said will soon not hold anymore. And once it will break it will serve us right when we go down with the tidal wave it will set free. I saw Joost as a man excitedly speaking truth. His claim was he could see through that enormous pile of lies which keeps us spell bound. But Robert's tool box with its two tools, that of innocence and that of imagination, was far away in Düsseldorf. It seemed not compatible with the picture of the sledge hammer Joost painted.
August 26th, 2003 Malcolm came last Friday for a weekend visit from Heidelberg. He brought with him more copies of
(Roth, Dieter) Die Letzte Lesung about 45 minutes VIDEO TAPE VHS of the reading of his texts D.R. gave in Heidelberg on 6.12.96, with a brief text by M.Green, (Heidelberg Amsterdam 2003) EUR 30.-
which Malcolm and Boekie Woekie publish together. Then we talked and drank and ate. The night came and finally we slept. I half woke up by a call of nature which I would have answered without fully waking up, but being half awake was enough to hear another call. When I opened the door of the room I had slept in, and because the kitchen door was open, I felt a warmth and a smell and then I heard water running, and all that was most unusual. That brought me to my senses. Instead of taking the 2 steps more or less in my sleep to the toilet, I hurried to the kitchen sink. From 5 steps away I could see the water running. Then I heard the gas burning - we heat the houses here and get our hot water by burning gas. When I was close enough I saw a very unlikely sight. In the sink, under the stream of hot water pouring down, the wireless hand set of the telephone was standing. I closed the tap and went to pee - luckily no telephone in the toilet bowl. The smell of burned gas and the heat meant that the water had been running for hours over the telephone. Later that day neither I nor Malcolm or Rúna have been able to explain this situation. There are other telephones in the house which still work (3 now of the 4 extensions), except that numbers with a 5 in them can not be dialed anymore from one of them. It is the telephone in the basement where our printery is. Owen gave it to us when he moved back from Amsterdam to Edinburgh soon 10 years ago.
August 15th, 2003 Last Saturday Boekie Woekie opened Fredie's exhibition. I was the only one of the 3 BoeWoes present at the occasion. Only few guests came. The heat and the holidays were probably the reason for most to stay away. Hetti traveled at that time on her train to Basel, to take over the responsibility for our temporary shop there from Rúna. Rúna has returned to Amsterdam in the meantime and stays with me, since her flat is used by Ívar and Bryndís and their 2 little girls. Ívar was 9 years old when his parents, and he with them, moved in 1978 from Amsterdam back to Iceland, and has only 4 times in those 25 years visited Holland, and each time only briefly, but he kept a close to perfect Dutch, at least for my (German) ears. Ívar's parents are my friends Kristján and Solveig. Kristján, Ívar, and Rúna's son Reynir and me have bought 2 years ago a boat which we had to sell with quite a loss soon afterwards - I think I reported about the events in this diary. We have never given up hope to find after all the appropriate vessel for our nautical ambitions, but we haven't gotten much further. When we talk about it, as it now happened with Ívar, we are almost a little shy.
August 1st, 2003 Today my mother would have become 95, but she died a few weeks more than 20 years ago. We had quite a focused relation since I was her only child and my father, her husband, had died already back in 56, 27 years before her. August 1st is therefore a date I notice. - I would like to know today, if this diary is going to continue for another 3 years, whether I then, in 3 years time, will make a point of the 50th anniversary of my father's death. Speculations into the future are of course not the usual subject of diaries, but today I thought these thoughts, and now that I am writing them down, I think them again in a way. Something which is maybe to come in 3 years time is becoming now already a piece of history. After a puzzled moment I say: in those cases where I try to grasp queries of this sort, I usually can't. But I am fairly foot sure when I walk my way without being concerned with the (for me) unfathomable. And then, after being happy for another moment in which it seemed that the solution to problems could be to forget them, there is another problem: forget what? The solved solution.
July 30th, 2003 Michael walked into BoeWoe today, he had read the recent diary entries, and didn't think it was necessary to worry about the length of time it takes this page to open. Fredie, who like Michael has appeared in this diary every now and then, was present in the shop when Michael came. He was copying the invitation flyers for his coming Boekie Woekie exhibition. I was bookkeeping and thinking about a diary entry I have somewhere in my sleeve about the implications of the fact that most books in Boekie Woekie are here on consignment. We talked for a while, Fredie who had slept badly felt a pressure behind his eyes and went home tired, Michael had to make it to the library, I spoke as everyday to Rúna in Basel, heard when phoning Hetti that her printing was going well - though I had discovered a serious defect in our offset machine only yesterday - and forgot to think more about my diary subject. Now, at 23:30, the bookkeeping of the month of March is finally done. The exercise in thoughtfulness I had hoped for must be for an other day.
July 27th, 2003 I worry about the length of what I have been writing here. I see the text of this diary of nearly 3 years as a point to worry about in regard to how long it takes an internet connected computer to open it. Telephone bill conscious readers might not want to wait before they can begin to read. Should I ask Michael to split up this diary into separately clickable sections?
July 21st, 2003 About the weatherstick once more. (Further down I think, it is mentioned as hanging on the fence of the tiny patio/backyard of BoeWoe.) Hetti and me disputed what would cause its reaction. It is erect when the sun shines and looks limp when it rains. I thought I could show that a glass of water would make it go limp too, but I couldn't because it didn't. Hetti had not liked this demystifying idea and that I tested it, though the result relieved her. A glass of beer later she had an idea for a series of photographs, of the weatherstick, taken with a huge time lapse, maybe one shot a day. She looked forward to when viewed with the speed of movie succession the stick would most likely look like going up and down madly. I saw something in that too.
July 16th, 2003 A year ago I mentioned in this diary changes which had taken place in regard to our web site. Those changes were changed again recently, in early May, I think. Michael is once more the one who made that possible. Among other changes he added a photographic picture, which is almost a movie, since it shows Hetti when one scrolls through it, in 2 places. There was an e-mail by Owen yesterday who had visited our web site and seen the picture but had looked in vain for an introduction to who the Boekie Woekie people are. (He knows us, but feels our web-site should have a page with a picture of each of us three, and our cvs.) The regular reader (I still doubt he exists) of this diary knows our names as Hetti, Jan and Rúna. It is clear that Jan is writing, and he has made his age known, that he is a German and some more biographical details. Hetti, which stands for Henriëtte, is Dutch. She turned 55 recently. Rúna, really Guđrún, Icelandic, is 49. On pictures we usually look good, impossible to distinguish from other good lookers. A page as Owen has suggested could be fun to make. For irony's sake I'll consider to ask Michael to put it into our site for us. I say for irony's sake because I feel it is ironical how I represent me and us and Boekie Woekie in this diary. To elaborate on that idea: Is Boekie Woekie a business, or is it a chatting club? Why don't I publish our bookkeeping, - for whom those whimsical words?
July 10th, 2003 I am in Amsterdam again. To have gone to, and come back from Basel was like turning the first 2 pages of an alphabet book twice: from A to B and back again. Never making it to Z(ürich), though I always intended to. I had made for the last weekend I was in B an appointment with Marlene who lives and works in Zürich, but I couldn't get myself to go there. That's why I also missed Dieter's print show at a big gallery in Zürich. It was probably the B of beer which kept me in Basel. I had already advanced, on Friday and Saturday into the direction of Z and gotten as far as the C, the C of colloquium. A number of people, invited by the Schaulager, were giving then speeches with insights into their ideas about Dieter Roth. This step from B to C I had soon found difficult. There is a German poet from after the first big war of the last century, Ringelnatz by name, whose poem about the 2 ants which decide to travel to Australia comes to my mind. The ants wisely as the poem says give up their plan while they walk on Hamburg's Elbchaussee because their feet ache. The Elbchaussee leads right into Hamburg's harbour. Once the ants would have boarded the ship to Z(australia to remind of my picture) they could have put their troubled feet at rest. However the relatively short distance to that ship was to long for them. As a wise ant (to stay in the picture of Ringelnatz) I had to quit the rest of my trip to Z. In an attempt to step out of the picture I'm stuck in, with the intention to say something about the Dieter Roth colloquium, or really symposium, as it was called: I don't think I was the only ant which gave up before ever getting anywhere.
June 29th, 2003 3 weeks since I wrote last, I'm surprised how fast they passed. I'm almost at the end of my shift to take care of Boekie Woekie at the Schaulager. Rúna is coming in a few days to take over from me. The main thing happening were the Basel Art Fair days. They were very busy. Hetti had come from Amsterdam to help me through the expected madness and we functioned well as a team explaining to the public where the toilets are (in Amsterdam it occasionally seems our main job is to point out where the Anne Frank House is) - but in between we did sell books and cards and had many conversations which we enjoyed. On top of it I have stopped to swear. My health at least offers no acute reasons for it any longer.
June 8th, 2003 My foot is less painful, I limp less. But I have added to the few recent minor ailments a tearing swollen red eye which secrets at night so that I have to pull it open in the morning with my fingers. The good old meat sack may have difficulties to cope with the difference between the artificially climatized exhibition space and the heat in the world outside. This idea however is hardly good for practical use: who would change the heat outside, the climate inside or my reaction possibilities? - At least this idea has made me mention the exhibition, and I hope it brings me away from what I might feel is the matter with me, to what I can say the matter is with the exhibition. I'm afraid the lower floor lacks to show sufficiently Dieter's intentions. The powerful accumulations as DR has shown them in his own installations are not matched - intentionally I would think. (The available space in the Schaulager would have allowed a large scale denseness of intertwining sculptures.) To those who have neither seen Holderbank, Vienna nor Marseille it must remain quite unclear what Dieter Roth wanted us to see and feel. It concerns the work of the artist of whom it is known that he was a man of many means. It is the work from a period which all earlier periods amount to, the work of his last stage and therefore his most accomplished work. Most visitors to this lower floor wouldn't say they recognize that they are wading through shit resulting from mankind's unrelenting drift to start all sorts of processes, would they? (If they would, it would probably not be without a little irony, since the floor one walks on seems spick and span.) But walking around in Dieter´s self installed exhibitions made the idea quite clear that one is anyhow wading through cultural waste (if that is a good enough translation of his German word "Kulturschrott"). Omitting to recreate that sensation could unbalance the paradox in which Dieter Roth has placed his works.
June 5th, 2003 I'm back in Dieter's studio, and I'm alone. Björn has 3 days ago returned to Iceland with his family. It is hot in Basel and one recent night I slept with the windows open enjoying while falling asleep, the light draught. I have to pay now a price for that joy. It got me a pain in my right foot which I don't only feel when I set a step with it, but which is permanently annoying. If my recent indisposition had occurred together with this new handicap the exhibition and shop public would have potentially been in for some awkward scenes. But now in lack of heat (from for example a hot water bottle) I seek refuge in saying words like fuck and god damn it and other words of curse when no one is near. The director and her attaché came by, we exchanged a few friendly words, but I forgot to remind them that today 5 years ago Dieter died, and they didn't mention it to me either. I did though mention this to someone I got to know 30 years ago and with whom I entered into a sort of friendship for some years, which has decidedly come to an end long ago. He seemed taken by surprise when he saw me but couldn't but come over and shake my hand and ask how I was. I pointed to my foot and said "rheumatism" and remarked what anniversary it was which made him hesitate and then say "that's just by coincidence". I thought that showed he felt to be on the defensive, but who knows maybe I over interpret.
June 1st, 2003 My most recent days are somewhat shaded by being sick with what overcame Hetti just before she left last Monday. It also took her some days, I know from phone calls, to get better. I'm taking pills, and just hope I won't have to run away from the shop at inappropriate moments.
May 28th, 2003 The Schaulager is best reached by tram. Coming from Erika's who is my host since before the weekend (and was during the weekend the host too of Rúna and Hetti) I have to change trams once to get to Schaulager. I'm amazed about the number of lines, the frequency of service, the length of the trains. Basel isn't really a big city but all this tram traffic lets it seem to be a very busy place. On my ride my glance gets caught by a spray can inscription on the wall of a small building, part of which houses the newspaper stand, at tram stop Aeschenplatz. It goes: Welcome to the edge of civilization where war is the only declaration of fuckin love.
May 27th, 2003 The storm abates. Hetti and Rúna left yesterday with the train. During the last minutes before departure Hetti got sick ű not a comfortable start for a journey of nine hours. Also the other visitors left one after the other. Kristján, Siggi, Andrea, Bernd and me kept the longest the glasses in our hands, until also they took off .(Rereading the last sentence: did I want to say the glasses took off? Since that can not have been so, maybe I wanted to write: the glasses took us off, or them. But I know I really wanted to write that I was the last one from that group of 5 holding my glass in my hand. Whether I wanted to say that I still knew were I was I don't remember.) Kristján and Siggi had invited Hetti and Rúna (all four heading for Amsterdam, but the men by plane) for that night to Kristjáns favorite Dutch dinner: speklapjes, but seen Hetti's condition when leaving I doubted that her dinner would go through with the 3 others. - I forget to report that several new Dieter Roth Academy books are out: Rainer brought finally the Pécs report on the exhibitions there, with many photographs. Eggert's effort, the book for which I mainly collected the material, and which he put together, the report of last year's Seydisfjördur conference, plus many contributions by staff members got ready just in time. And Boekie Woekie's photo book about the DRA exhibition last year in Iceland, though we listed that already late last April in our stock list. Then Uwe has a book out about Dieter in Stuttgart including a text by Björn. There is the Schaulager catalogue for the retrospective. - Today I took for the first time care of Boekie Woekie Basel. It went well. Most of the Schaulager visitors recognize the Boekie Woekie installation as a shop, which is for us of course most important. The shop is in the area were Dieter's art is exhibited, much of the art has the don't-come-too-near-chains in front of it (if Dieter would see that)! Some people ask whether they may touch the books. One asked whether this was Dieter Roth's library? - There is a lot of background noise here. Exposed to it for a month or so may become a strain on the nerves. The temperature and humidity of the place are totally controlled, good for the art as the leaflets of the house say, but also for me?
May 25th, 2003 Unable to be at Schaulager at 10, therefore thankful that Hetti and Rúna went. When I arrived in the afternoon, it was very crowded. The first page of our sales booklet was almost filled with reports of transactions, cards and books against Swiss Franks or Euros. (Later we noticed that things had happened in confusion, customers had been asked to pay in Euros instead of Franks or the other way round, or the transaction was written down without making clear what the currency had been.) The 4th Dieter Roth Academy conference, which for months had been scheduled to take place in the afternoon could not begin before 7pm. The tapes needed for Björn's tape recorder couldn't be found. I had been on a last minute taxi errant to Dieter's other studio, to look for tapes there. When I came back without them, Erika was standing in front of the house crying. I asked why, and heard that she had said something wrong to Edith, and Edith had walked out. She wasn't too far away yet, so I ran after her, she too was crying, and not to be persuaded to return to the conference table. The first Academy tears, as far as I know. Luckily Malcolm had a recording tool with him. I hope it did its job, because now the conference began in earnest. One unfinished topic of last year's conference had been the Dieter Roth award - now we talked once more about the procedure, and then held the lottery to find the person we would approach with the request to accept the price. Klein Moritz picked the name, not out of Bernd's hat who had forgotten it, but out of Malcolm's cap. The outcome is kept secret for the time being. I'll keep secret too what happened for the rest of the evening and the night. Or shall I keep secret that I don't really remember a thing?
May 24th, 2003 Opening day, the lenders were invited for a preview which began at 11am. Boekie Woekie was not ready installing the shop, but we could make it look like we were. The lenders were invited for a performance of Edith's film, the Schaulager closed until the evening. Hetti and I went to fetch Rúna from the train. There had been many faces all through the day, amongst them quite a few I knew, but I loose track whom I saw, I'll just mention I was happy to see Ira and Barbara. The evening was made special by a dinner at the Kunsthalle Restaurant: 450 people were invited, Björn knew. A last drink we had at Erwin's backroom, where 3 years ago the Dieter Roth Academy was founded. At 4 or 5 in the morning we had the very last last drink.
May 22nd, 2003 One table was added to the shop furniture by our Icelandic carpenter and his team, and it hadn't been in its place for long when the director came and said that this table made the store too much protrude into the big space, and that she had not been consulted. I said it was needed, she didn't insist that it would be removed. I was a little puzzled at this, but saw that the bookshop was taking shape, just the panels at the narrow end of our niche were needed, and they were promised to be brought. Those panels I want to lean against the wall with a few horizontally attached slats so that books and records can be placed on them without falling off. In the history of the itinerant Boekie Woekie stores this will be a new feature. The panels didn't arrive until late on Friday. And no electricity for the pc yet. But a first screening of the movie Edith had been working on for the three or so last years had been announced, and that was to shorten the waiting time for what was still missing in the Schaulager. I was quite curious to see the movie. The project of her documentary had been a topic of many conversations in my circle of people who have outlasted Dieter. The topic had been dealt with in high expectations as well as in the fear that such a posthumous portrait would possibly not work. But I was, once in the movie house, too drunk to really watch it, couldn't keep my mind on it, found this and that, but nothing coherent stayed with me. The voices of those with whom I walked away from the cinema were mixed. Too much about Dieter being a drinker some found, others said it was a beautiful movie.
May 20th, 2003 The books went through the customs without ever being looked at, not even were they glimpsed at by those feared because how their profession is called: custom officers! They were content with looking at and stamping that fat stack of Din A4 papers we had brought with from Holland, stamped there already by their Dutch colleagues. When we were through with the books, it began to worry inside me that since it had been easy to get the books into Switzerland, the thick end (as the Germans say: "das dicke Ende") is likely to come when we will, in about four months time, try to leave again. To the Schaulager - Dieter's exhibition on two huge floors is as good as ready. The ground floor is really the upper floor and shows an abundance of works of all periods of Dieter's life, and is breathtakingly impressive. Luckily I ran at this moment of high excitement into the director, and I think I convincingly intonated my praise. From the balcony of the ground floor one looks either up into a trickily designed air shaft if one wants to call it that, or one looks down onto the floor of the basement. There the "Garden Sculpture", and the "Grosses Ringgebilde" look like a child's toys on the vast space. The sculptures are placed quite far away from each other, and appear disentangled, which to my knowledge they did never do before. From that view point also that corner is visible in the distance where our store situation will be. Björn and Gunnar had placed 3 tables there. They had been kept since Marseille in 1997 together with that piece of furniture, much drawn and painted on, which had served in Marseille as a shop counter. It all looked quite much smaller than I had expected. Too few tables to lay down the books anyhow. Helgi helped unpacking the car. Hetti began to put the books on the tables. A beginning is made.
May 19th, 2003 Rúna will keep Boekie Woekie Amsterdam open until she takes the train on Saturday to join us in Basel, whereto Hetti and me left this morning in a Mercedes van after some time and money taking obstacles, to be called custom formalities. The firm which provided the first temporary export clearance was situated on the cargo side of the Amsterdam airport. It was surrounded by meadows, the sun was shining, the pollen was flying, I began to sneeze. Later it began to rain, and I could again forget about the first attack of hay fever of this season. Because of the delayed start Hetti, Helgi (who had agreed to drive the van back to the Amsterdam rental station) and me and some 2500 books arrived late in Basel. We left the books in the car. We went into that house where Dieter had his last living and working space, and where 3 years ago the Dieter Roth Academy was founded. There in the basement, we joined those who were frame making: Gunnar, Björn, Magnús Reynir, Gunnar's son Garđar, his wife Gulla, his mother Unnur (Unnur and Gulla working more in the sandwich/coffe/beer department of the frame making efforts). The Ishamar HF from Mosfellsbaer in Iceland has put down one of its feet in this big basement and opened a temporary workshop, building frames for the upcoming Dieter Roth exhibitions in Basel and Zürich. This is similar to what Boekie Woekie intends to do in the Schaulager, the newly to open museum/art collection storage space, which will open on Saturday the 24th of May with the first staging of the Dieter Roth Retrospective. We intend to open a branch office as part of the retrospective. I'll copy (or rewrite) my diary notes which I now write by hand once the pc we brought with us is installed. Then I'll send them by e-mail to Amsterdam, so that they can be published there.
May 18th, 2003 We are packed. I'm sitting amidst more than 60 cardboard boxes full of books. All books are neatly listed for the customs. Tomorrow at 8 in the morning I'll go with Helgi to fetch the car to drive the books with him and Hetti to Basel to install a branch shop of Boekie Woekie in the Schaulager of Basel on the occasion of the first staging of the Dieter Roth retrospective. Boekie Woekie will be there as part of the DR exhibition. The opening on May 24th will at the same time be the first opening of the Schaulager. I don't think I have mentioned this plan in this diary. I was probably afraid to have to report the collapse of this plan - after the recent collapse of the plans regarding my Dieter Roth Reader my capacity of admitting set backs may have suffered a set back. There were days only a week ago, when the cardboard boxes were already piling up, when I thought the plan might not go through - it seemed for a while futile to get for Hetti, Rúna and me a working permit. The forms which needed to be filled in were somehow not made for Boekie Woekie. But that is settled. The firms which are to guide us through the customs sound confident on the phone. It be. Boekie Woekie goes to Basel. Hetti, Rúna and me intend to take shifts of a bit more than one month each - Dieter's Retrospective is to last to the middle of September. Computer wise we are not fully equipped there - but I have anyhow not spoiled my readers with too frequent entries during the last weeks. Until next time - whenever that will be.
May 5th, 2003 I had a phone call yesterday by a person I knew when I was a child. She said she was in Amsterdam and announced her visit. She is a now 64 years old daughter of a father which I remember my mother respected a lot, a school teacher who was locked up by the Nazis like my mother for being regarded as dangerous. They were thought of as communists. Her father is dead since 40, and my mother since 20 years. My guest has lived from my 3rd to my 11th year with her brother and her parents around the corner from where I lived with my parents. The age difference of 6 years took care that as kids we lived in rather separate worlds. But we more than knew of each other. When she came into the shop today I didn't immediately recognize her, but her present picture soon fused with the one I had in my memory, she was of course Eva. She stayed with me for maybe 3 hours. We did not try to find out whether we have ever met again since 1956, when my days in that corner of Duisburg ended because I had to move to a boarding school. Here in Boekie Woekie Eva did most of the talking, and I heard many words and names and was reminded of circumstances which I hadn't thought of in years, and maybe would have never again thought of. I see her brother who lives near Frankfurt usually once a year at the book fair, but we never indulge in memories, probably because the fair is such a hectic affair and one focusses on what is new. It was only after Eva had left that I realized she, and her brother Gert, are the living people I have known the longest in my life, since about 55 years.
April 24th, 2003 I told again the story today of how it came that Boekie Woekie was begun - more than 17 years ago. I wouldn't know how many times I have told it before. But I noticed that my inbuilt record player made a new noise this time. I hadn't heard it say at earlier occasions that Boekie Woekie was seeking a balance of presenting artists' books and at the same time not overexposing them to the spotlight of public attention. The sound the record had hitherto made was more that BW was seeking simply to be a platform on which those books were present. But now I heard my words say something different. That it was part of the BW task to prevent a too much of attention. I heard that different sound while I was making it and probably got a bit afraid: a faulty record player or a new scratch on the record! Anyhow I hurried to deliver a short speech which I hoped would be understood as sane reasoning by the people in front of me. In retrospect, now, a few hours later, I find my quick fix attempt quite interesting: Too much attention kills. It provokes awe. Awe isolates what it deals with, suffocates it and puts something else in the place of it. The object is replaced by itself plus the awe factor. That mechanism, I went on had worked as the marketing story of what has been called art. It has increased the sturdiness of the nails from which this art would dangle. Then I pointed to our book shelves, and how some of them bend upwards as if the books standing on them were helium filled balloons. I pointed at the weatherstick Simon and Erica came with when they were visiting in January, as an ideal gadget to hang art works on. I said that living art does not need the awe factor, that books anyhow want to be read and not admired. I talked like a book, but I didn't know whether I was read.
April 18th, 2003 The first person after me who came today into Boekie Woekie was also a German, he one of the 850'000 expected for the Easter weekend, while I of course have been here before and intend to stay on. I recognized him as a German not because of what or how he said what he said, he said namely nothing at all, but because of his face. It was the face of a famous German television personality. It was the face of the man who is the nestor of all German talk shows. He came in to buy a card. As a German I am inclined to look at German tv. Thanks to modern times it belongs to the possibilities in Amsterdam to watch German tv. Just a few days ago I had noticed my first customer talk to Johannes from Wuppertal and his wife, the presidential couple of the Federal Republic of Germany. Now the nestor stood there, with the card by Hetti showing Pietje our cat in his hand. Obviously he wanted to pay for it. It flashed through my mind to address him in German but I said in Dutch "One card? That is 80 cents please." He held out his other hand with a few coins in it but said nothing. There was a one Euro coin there. I took that and also the card from his other hand, saying again in Dutch, "You want an envelope?" and "Here are 20 cents back." When the talk master had left Boekie Woekie without a word, this little scene made me more keenly aware of something I had felt to know all along. At least I think I express here for the first time that Germans, anyhow the older ones, abroad, are somehow likely to be automatically speechless. They somehow don't like to be recognized as Germans. Do I with my English diary differ so very much from that group?
April 17th, 2003 It was time again for my electric heat pad the other day. Hlynur did give me this electric device when my back had gone lumbago in Iceland a few years ago. I have had reason to use it on several occasions since then each year: it helps to relax the muscle cramp which makes all my movements painful. The night after I was hit by the most recent cramp I slept on it after having put it on "3", the hottest it can get. I wouldn't have believed the results would be possible. They remind me of the situation when the police stopped me for speeding with my Lada last summer. They doubted their measurement: Ladas the police thought couldn't reach 117 km. I didn't think one could grill oneself on an electric heat pad, but one can. The backache is now more or less gone, but I still have big blisters all over the small of my back.
April 10th, 2003 On the way back from Basel to Holland two days ago I had to change trains and found a seat in the "board bistro" next to a woman I estimated to be quite a bit older than myself, easily seventy. I had asked if that seat was vacant and then fetched myself a beer. When I was sitting down she remarked "Ah, das gute Radeberger", - the good Radeberger brand of beer. I was quick enough to reply that, yes, Radeberger has always been a good reason for taking a ride on the train. It is a East German brand, and also nowadays not easily found in the west of the country, except in trains. One also ordered Radeberger in those trains which connected former West Berlin with former West Germany. That was in a time when a "board bistro" was still called a "Speisewagen", or dining car. It was a nationalized company which used to operated those dining cars, and Radeberger must have been nationalized as well. Anyhow, it surly helped to make many a trip to and fro Berlin a special time and kept the believe up that there would be something to agree to if one day the east Germans would take over us in the other part. Now for good with all of us in the west I have to mention what else the woman next to me said, in order to get a little more juice out of this story than this drop of nostalgic memory. We were approaching Cologne. I had fetched one or two beers more by then. She had been reading a pocket book with some sort of American Indian ornaments on the cover. The (English) title referred to some "wonder woman". Then a pretty girl sitting opposite the aisle got up, turned around and by that showed her backside. Upon which my neighbour looking up from her book, said quite audibly: "Was für ein schöner Hintern, don't you think!", - what a nice ass. She was right, but this time I was not quick minded enough to reply. Later I thought I could have said that a nice ass has been a good cushion on many a train ride. But I was happy that I had said nothing. How comes that I do now? I will wait if I get an afterthought to that question.
March 24th, 2003 I lately did not feel much of an urge to recapitulate events. Those recent days have had a rare quality. It was one which made me want to close my eyes on them. A first symptom of things going wrong can be read in the first 3 sentences of the last entry of 20 days ago. The parcel with my work since August last year, the manuscript of the Dieter Roth reader, got stuck at the customs in Bangkok. My publisher, who was there at the time to prepare 2 other books, plus mine for printing said he was presented with a bill of 600 pound sterling if he wanted to get my manuscript handed over to him. He refused to pay. The sending back process took the world wide operating parcel service which I think prides itself to deliver nearly anywhere on this globe within 48 hours, 13 days. I had begun to seriously take into account that the manuscript would be declared lost. But many phone calls later, on March 19th it was brought back. The same day I forwarded the manuscript to London, but with an other parcel service than Federal Express. The parcel got to my publisher within a day. - Now the moment has come in this story that, when I mention my publisher, I have to write "my publisher". The next thing namely which was to be heard from "my publisher" was that he refused to publish my book. We, "my publisher" and me, know each other through Dieter. First we met in Stuttgart almost 30 years ago. Dieter had put a book of mine on their printing and publishing schedule. I felt through the years there was reason to respect "my publisher" for what his contribution had been to a series of books by Dieter. He never gave me any reason to think he thought much of me. However another book of mine was printed and co-published by him, many years later, and not anymore under the auspices of Dieter. Dieter had then broken up with "my publisher" already for years. When Boekie Woekie started to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair some 15 years ago, we settled with our booth without thinking twice near the booth of "my publisher". For a few years we nearly fused, for the fun of it we traded (during book fair days only) under the name UNITED UNTIED, together with him and a number of other small publishers. With this brief historical overview I hope to have sketched the backdrop in front of which I feel awfully disappointed, worse: betrayed. "My publisher" had taken me aside in the fall of 2001 and proposed that he would like to publish the book I had begun to advocate shortly after Dieter had died: a DR anthology, a reader, or, German, eine Fibel, ein Lesebuch. He persuaded me: 10'000 Marks and carte blanche, no interference from his, the publisher's side with the manuscript. I would put the manuscript together and write a foreword and deliver the whole thing before the end of 2002. His part would be to try to find a co-publisher in the literary field to get the book also into the literary bookshops. "My publisher" does not get his books into the literary book stores since he distributes via a (visual) art book chain of shops. The first let down occurred during the book fair 2002. "My publisher" regarded reluctantly the ring file I had brought with as the result of my work from August and September. The 80 pages of transcribed handwriting were from diary pages, Dieter had published himself as Copy Books and were not taken from books he, "my publisher" had published. A little later coming back from Porto, from the occasion of the opening of the Dieter Roth / Richard Hamilton exhibition, Björn, stopped over in Amsterdam on his way to Iceland, and told me he was more than surprised when he heard "my publisher" who had gone to Porto too, say to him loudly and so that others who know who I am had to hear it too, that I had shown him nix, nothing, a couple of days back at the book fair. He found it nix that I had read about 3'000 pages of Dieter's handwritten diaries (I belief I am the only person who ever has done that), and as I said transcribed some 80 of them for the reader. When about to tackle the task of the reader I had thought Dieter's diaries and other texts published as they were, handwritten, were my biggest challenge. Dieter published them himself in editions of usually 12 copies only. I know most of the owners, they keep them as trophies, but they hardly would read them. "My publisher" had asked me earlier (still in August) to send him the cover image for "our" reader. Then he disregarded what we had sent (Björn who had passed by my hideout in Iceland and I had made a series of photographs of all the books I was working with). Instead "my publisher" had himself made a cover. He explained this with the imminent deadline for a flyer for all the new Dieter Roth books "my publisher" was, and partly is still in the process of making. Our pictures he said were delayed in the mail, but luckily he had made his own cover because once our pictures had arrived it was clear that they were not good at all. His cover, as it was printed in the flyer, shows volume 1 - 20 of Dieter Roth's collected works - all of course published by "my publisher". By no means was I going to draw from all these books, simply because most of them are picture and not text books. I saw in "my publisher's" choice that he expected me to represent mainly the Dieter Roth as he had been known until about 1979. It felt like I was asked to cut short, if not cut out, that stretch of 18 years during which the poet succeeded in overcoming his gift to appear to others as just wonderfully gifted or to be a genius as he was spoken of by some. Dieter acquired in this phase of his life a technique with which he could redefine the state he found himself in. He learnt how to accomplish what he had worked on for long: to noticeably contrast his flying high by expressing believably his misery. With that he entered the state of a true poet. This technique helped him to let himself appear in the eyes of others, but also in his own eyes, as a self determined, and not as a happy go lucky man of genius. That he did not refrain from inventing his new reality by boldly putting at disposal his reputation as the successful art world charmer, that he did not stay harmless, but challenged, both himself, and all others, that he carried his honesty that far and was able to melt together all ingredients with the result of an existence showing him both tormented and ecstatic, rational and intuitive, - for the sake of brevity: that he decided to live the paradox, is what I felt I would have had to omit if I restricted my Dieter Roth reader more or less to what he had published until he, let's say got 50 in 1980. (Though many of his early writings contain more than the roots of the later achievements.) Anyhow "my publisher" who has been Dieter's publisher and whose name is Hansjörg, was not at all happy with my manuscript. First it was nix, than it was my foreword. He criticized the length of my sentences, but would not have the book printed because I claimed that Dieter had told me and others many times that he made his pictures in order to get the money to have his books printed. Hansjörg claimed he had never received a single Mark and demanded that I would leave out that paragraph. Luckily Beat whom I had told about this calamity pointed out in this situation that Hansjörg had already quoted Dieter (in several of the interviews of the Dieter Roth interview book recently published by Hansjörg) as saying what I had written in my foreword - even including sums he had paid to Hansjörg. With no co-publisher in sight, with Hansjörg being more than reluctant to support me as his editor, I have felt lousy for several months, when my thoughts turned to this subject. Hansjörg explains this last refusal of my manuscript with that he finds it too confusing. Instead of blaming me (to deliver something confusing) I think it is time that he sees that he is fairly confused. His rejection comes 2 months before what was the scheduled day of publication, the date of the opening of the retrospective Dieter Roth exhibition on the 24th of May in Basel. It comes 5 weeks after Hansjörg agreed firmly to publish the book, with a definite yes to Björn, after the row because of the foreword. I tell my readers I still feel lousy, but at least I feel free to admit it now.
March 4th, 2003 My manuscript has been sent to the printers in the far away country 5 days ago. I engaged a firm for that which promises to deliver world wide within the shortest possible time, but the manuscript has not arrived at its destination yet. I feel I could squeeze some angry words out of that. But I have something better. Two books we had ordered were delivered to us, the one is the English version of the other, I shall refer to this English version. One finds it listed on this site like this:
Perrée, Rob Cover To Cover The Artist's Book In Perspective on the occasion of an exhibition, as well a historic overview as a closer look at artist's books from the collection Frits Becht, many photographs, also available in Dutch, Rotterdam 2002 EUR 26.-
It is a book I disliked at first sight. One can't open it well. It is bound so tightly, one has to force the book open to read the right ends of the lines on the left pages and the beginnings of the lines on the left of the right pages because the right margins of the left pages and the left margins of the right pages are much too narrow, whereas the outer margins of the left and the right pages are much too wide (three times the inner margins). There are more lay out aspects I think make the opposite of sense, but I want to come to the core of my personal rejection of this book. I have met its author in Boekie Woekie several months ago, when he was preparing for this book. He talked a bit about his task, he bought I think 2 books of secondary literature, later he sort of interviewed Hettie by phone in this context and I answered a list of questions from Iceland he had sent by e-mail. I remembered that I had seen his name before: he contributed a text to the book on the occasion of the exhibition to commemorate the work of Ulises who then had recently died. Ulises (he is mentioned elsewhere in this diary) ran the first shop for books by artists on this side of the Atlantic as far as I know. He opened it probably around, possibly before the time that "Printed Matter" began in New York. And it was a great place. Ulises had called his shop "Other Books an So". It was a one man enterprise, at the same time loved and co-inspired by involved people around it. It did not understand itself as a prolongation piece for more worshipping of what already was being worshipped in the arts. I felt it then to be genuinely new. It is Rob's comparison of "Other Books..." with "Boekie Woekie,..." which I can not leave without comment. Therefore I quote now from his book: "In 1975 ...Ulises Carrión established 'Other Books and So'. ... (It) was intended to be a centre where all kinds of attention could be focussed on independent publications by artists." He speaks of the many events taking place in Other Books and writes "'becoming acquainted with' was equivalent of being 'enthusiastically informed about' these alternative art media. ... In 1978, Ulises Carrión closed "Other Books". It was no longer financially feasible, and it appeared impossible to convince government institutions to help support it." In the 2nd next paragraph it is the turn of our "Boekie Woekie, books by artists": "Boekie Woekie was established in 1986, and would seem the natural successor to Other Books and So. ..., but it has never succeeded in generating the energy of its predecessor. ... because it conforms to the rigid principle of independently published artists' books, it does not reach a new public, or does so only rarely." Rob does not seem to take into account that there is a considerably longer stretch of time between 1986 and 2003 (and we aren't finished yet) than there was between 1975 and 1978. The dosage of energy which we are able to generate might be more in tune with the title Rob gave to the chapter which I have quoted from: A Persistent Presence The Dutch Artist's Book. If Rob had wanted to convey understanding of his subject, he missed a chance here. He seems to me to romanticize the past by showing disregard for the presence. He might have pointed out that BoeWoe refused from its beginning to apply for any subsidies, stipends, financial support from government or other institutions or firms. If the generating of energy of our predecessor could be brought to a halt by the denial of subsidies, it is maybe worthwhile to know that for many years now 2 people are living from the gains of what is sold in Boekie Woekie - and that lots of artists can count on a contribution to their income through our "never succeeding in generating the energy of our predecessor." That Rob than has the nerve to say he knows why we "do not or only rarely reach a new public" puts the stink on the shit he passes around on his ill designed platter. If we were to follow the inherent advice of this know all, namely to not "conform the rigid principle of independently published artists' books" we would rob our understanding of the term "books by artists" of its very core. BoeWoe would first of all loose its self-esteem and then surely its energy if it were to follow Rob's advice. Stocking mainly books by those artists who can trust to be published anyhow because those who publish them know they will make money we can't see as our task. We have with Boekie Woekie established and maintained a platform we are proud of. It shows and sells a wide range of books by artists - even by a few famous ones, even some which were not independently published, but very many by not famous artists who have published independently and even against the advice of the know alls. - I had expected to find Boekie Woekie mentioned in Rob's book. I looked it up in the index. The rest of the book I haven't read (yet), except a bit in the last chapter: A Collage Preview The Future of the Artist's Book. I found quite sensible sentences there. I think Rob just wanted to clout us one - but why? To make us clout him one?
February 23rd, 2003 It is 20 to 8 in the evening, these days I'm finishing my work on the Dieter Roth reader. The manuscript has to be send to the printers in Thailand soon. But at the moment I can not go on. The obstacle is a Boekie Woekie full of beer drinking people: Helgi, Magga, Jos, Gunnhildur, Rúna and last not least me. Correction: Gunnhildur drinks water. But we sit here and talk, and it becomes difficult for me to concentrate on the manuscript. My general intention is to do things really in need to be done. If the opportunity to work on the reader is not there, is it then not maybe time for a new entry to the Boekie Woekie diary? Giving this a moment of thought I feel a challenge: I want to write this new diary entry as the secretary of what I hear of what is going on around me. I think it is exciting to instantaneously publish what I catch of what is reaching my ear. - But alas, while writing the introduction lines above for what I intend to do, those, whose words I prepared to quote decided to leave. I'm now the only one left, the only one I can quote. That is the situation out of which this diary has been written all along, I can therefore better return to the work on my reader.
February 17th, 2003 I perceived with my hearing the other day a remark by an occasional reader of this diary that I should watch out to not reveal too much. I acted like I had not heard it. But I have, I'm making that clear here. However I don't know what to make of it. The easy way out would be to search refuge in old knowledge: to claim that to reveal is to conceal. That is always true, of course. But turning something into a paradox does not necessarily satisfy the maze of the mind. Some real thinking work might do better. Am I too honest? Too loose mouthed? Could I possibly give away something which would be to someone's disadvantage? Am I not the carrier of innocence I think I am? Or could I damage myself - by opening my mouth more widely (through publishing here a fraction of my flow of thoughts) than that it may befit me? - The maze of the mind should be happy to have something to figure out. "Ample food for stupid thought" - coming to mind is good old Robert, saving me out of this.
February 11th, 2003 There are several options for stories to tell of what I was involved with or noticed since the last diary entry. I was again in Switzerland, I'm under dead line pressure to deliver the Dieter Roth reader manuscript to be printed in Bangkok. Luckily that is not Baghdad. But I think I should be more explicit about a few seconds I experienced some days ago looking out of the Boekie Woekie shop window into the street. From the right, or from west going east, passed a person, a man, hard to say how old, pushing a modern looking wheelchair. He was pushing the wheelchair in which he should have been sitting himself to be pushed by a helper. The man was terribly crippled. He moved on with steps so painfully awkward! On the seat of his wheelchair there was a bulging garbage sack. I could of course not see what really was in it, but it was the type of sack the Dutch deposit their garbage in.
February 4th, 2003 My first girl friend, back from teen age times, got 59 today. On the phone because of the occasion we ended up taking a preview of a review of our lives. She expressed satisfaction with hers. She would not wish to be any younger. She is a teacher for problematic children, and states proudly she feels that she is still in tune with them. During more than 30 years of school teaching she did not ask for a "promotion" into the administration of school teaching but had her job in front of the class, and wants to continue it. I was happy for her to be able to say this.
January 29th, 2003 These are days of turbulence and friction. I went to a meeting in Basel which made me sick for a day and a half. When sick, one can die or get better. Now again in Boekie Woekie I have reemerged to the surface, if the word recover means that. Sick, almost dead and buried, but back again. Words are anyhow the best plasters - a comfort. But of course they are the best wound makers too.
January 15th, 2003 Andrea has opened an exhibition of pages of her latest book in Boekie Woekie. The book is described under BOOKS/T as follows:
Tippel, Andrea The Thin King colour laser copies of 117 drawings, partly improved by hand, numbered/5, signed, selfpublished, Berlin 2000 EUR 681.-
There are some more books by her listed under BOOKS/T. She came for the hanging of the pictures and the opening of her show from Germany and stayed with us from Friday to Sunday. We had more guests recently - Monika from Cologne, Simon and Erica from Ireland. Monika, an old friend, had sent out, as New Year greetings to all her friends and business relations hundreds of our picture postcards - a set of 5 or 6 cards to each of the recipients. (The cards are listed on this site under PRINTS in this way:
Boekie Woekie Picture Postcards by BW & friends, PICTURE POSTCARDs presently available around 150 different cards in editions of up to 200 copies, Amsterdam since 1986 EUR 0,80 size 10,5 x 15cm, or EUR 1,60 double this size)
Recently Moritz made a deal with us and is going to link images of some of our cards to his site. If you want to see them now already, you can do so at: www.drivedrive.com/products/boekiewoekie where on can also turn the cards around with a click, and there is even the real shopping cart for ordering them... Monika reported that she had had quite a few favorable responses to her mailing. She impressed me by having 2 digital cameras with her. I got another attack of fantasies about images on this site. Simon and Erica brought us a woodman's weatherstick. Once it is hung up outside one will observe it points upwards when it is dry, and down when it is humid. In order to make space for Andrea, the exhibition shown before in Boekie Woekie needed to be taken down. An invitation flyer had announced that exhibition as a "A Cozy Afternoon". It had shown works by 23 different people. The youngest was June. Her parents, Michael and Eva, exhibited her hand print (or handshake, the Dutch "handdruk" does not allow to know which). June will turn 1 year old shortly before I, the oldest participant will get 58 in April. Rúna, the main curator had included 3 works of mine. 1 of the 3 works bears a certain resemblance to the weatherstick when the weather is dry, and to our picture postcards too, at least to those in the 2 mills standing on the pavement in front of the shop as long as the rain does not get at them. Writing this I feel I wish I would not have to make all those words. If I could scan in at least a few quickly made polaroids and publish them it would automatically shorten the text. But as so often, the pleasure of turning deficiency into virtue consists of a lot of work. It be. Here comes a story, describing pictures, events and emotions and complete with a moral at the end and a price tag. While sitting at the computer I'm sitting on now, a couple of months ago, I heard something fall into the tiny backyard behind me. It turned out to be a toy a small child would drag around like a dog on a leash. Pink plastic, more looking like a cat than a dog, and no leash, but a ring for tying one on. Yellow wheels and a tail towering boldly above the end of the back. I took it into BoeWoe to return it to (the parents of) the owner. It was clear it had fallen off one of the balconies of the apartments above, and there is a couple with a baby up there, but I neither know their name, nor on what floor they live. I would see them come in or go out of the house. Before that happened I found out that the head of the pink cat could be turned. With the head backwards the cat became a different being, its entire suggestion of anatomy changed. It looked like a young boy now, young because old boys would have lost their gymnastic abilities needed to perform a crab as this small plastic thing was showing. Pelvis and shoulders on equal high, the tail in this position an erection towering boldly at the right spot! The former cat, now boy, looking at himself in selfadmiration and anticipation. I could not withhold myself and drew with a permanent marker a few black lines to enhance this new appearance of the toy which had the side effect that it became unreturnable. I think I have led the reader far enough to feel my nostalgia. The work with the title prototype of former self was not sold. On an attached tag it is signed (guess by whom) and the right for further use of the image is reserved. But this original, the prototype, you would not want to miss, would you. It is still available for EUR 400.- from Boekie Woekie. (T+F: +31-(0)20-6390507, e-mail: boewoe@xs4all.nl)
Monika, Erica, Andrea, Simon, they all have left again - allowing me to find this bit of time for what anyhow always were my favorite gymnastics.
January 5th, 2003 Am currently currentless. Just enough to wish you all the best for the New Year. I almost would not have gotten the idea to see this entry as a possibility to say thanks to all of you who read this and who have accompanied us through the year now past. There was a moment between I wrote those thanks after all in the last sentence and then looked whether I wasn't forgetting maybe to write something more when I became like hypnotized by, or was forced briefly to belief in the saying which went through my mind (how came it did?) that claims that hunger comes while eating. It motivated me to get up, or should I say it made me nervous and I got up and walked from the pc in the back of Boekie Woekie to the shop window through which I looked out into the night or more precisely into Berenstraat void of people, street lantern lit, wet. There were flickering reflections of lantern light in some drops hanging from my bike which reminded me on a) to feel relief to see the bike was still there (and not stolen) and b) on how the day had begun with a tiny snowfall rendering the peculiar sensation of a view of a world in black and white and c) how black and gray everything now was. On Mondays before noon the trash is picked up in this street, and duly, and less than a meter from my bike, the melancholy causing, typical black trash sacks of city nights lay piled up on the pavement visible by their dim shine. I wasn't hit by the extra sad absurdity of what I had just seen until after I had taken a few steps back into the direction of the pc where I thought I would now end this entry after the first 3, brief sentences with which it begins. But then I hurried back to my chair and began to fulfill the prediction of the above saying about getting hungry. I had to write the story of what I really had seen! I had seen the second giving out of Christmas presents, or seen a reverse picture of Christmas! The picture of giving presents in colorful parcels under the flickering reflections of candle light beams in the lametta of Christmas kitsch trees was repeated in that still life, only to live into the morning hours just in front of the door. The trash sacks had been grouped like presents around a discarded fir. Dimly shining trash sacks and a fir tree, soon to become a present to the ash making process.
December 21st, 2002 I'm re-reading what I wrote a week ago. I mention there some of the glasses with drinks which then came my way. Other readers of the lines of last week, I think would most likely assume the drinks are part of a constant undercurrent or of a current which surfaces only exceptionally. Such an assumption would be right. I feel I need that current to know that I'm swimming against it.
December 14th, 2002 Am in Amsterdam again, but without sleep since the last entry written about 24 hours ago, and then my day was already 8 or 9 hours old. While I was writing it last night Halldór, Gunnar's friend and colleague, walked into Björn's Studio, which adjoins Gunnar's carpentry as readers of this diary may remember from my descriptions of the third Dieter Roth Academy Exhibition early in May of this year. Halldór offered to take me to the airport in the morning. The airline takes off to European destinations at an early hour, one has to get up before 5 to get there in time. Halldór was being very very nice. I asked him to then also take Sigurdur and Ari whom I knew were booked on the same flight as me. Then I drove to town to pay a late visit to a party which another Halldór was giving, one who recently had returned from exhibiting in Japan via Amsterdam, and I had heard on the phone from Rúna, with whom he had stayed during his stop over, in my hideout about the stories he had had to tell from there. Kristján and Solveig were among the party guests, snaps and beer were there but we didn't shake hands, and Siggi (Sigurdur) came too. Siggi and I left shortly after midnight with the first guests, thinking of the early hour we would have to rise. I had a set of keys to Solveig's apartment in my pocket, where I would catch an eyeful of sleep. However, when at her house door, I could not open it. I had to give up trying and walked back to what was left of the party. At 3 those who had stayed on were in the mood to go to the Piano Bar where one dances to music played very loudly. I thought it was becoming a night as so often before when I took off from this country - a night with no sleep at all. But Solveig felt a kind of compassion with me, and she made the taxi to Piano Bar take us to her house first and wait until she had opened the doors and only then she went on to the disco. So I was laying down for 2 hours, but couldn't sleep. After 4 Solveig was back, and at 5 Halldór was there. He hadn't driven the car for 200 meters when he was stopped by the police to control his blood alcohol - which he luckily did not have. We fetched Siggi, and Ari, and after 55 km said good bye to Halldór, underwent the weapon control, and bought food for Christmas dinners (raw and smoked leg of lamb) and since then - I have been drinking many beers. First while waiting, then while flying, and now in Boekie Woekie while writing this. In a little while I intent to have a few more at the gallery of Kees and Thora, where Ari will show the portrait film he made of Sigurdur. Sigurdur is by the way taking his legs of lamb to China, where he is visiting his wife Ineke who is running "her" Chinese-European Cultural Center, or exhibition space. I shall go to look at the film together with Hetti and her sister Ditte who has recently moved to Amsterdam, after living for decades in the States, and Rúna and Ineke (another one than the former) who now are sitting here too with a glass, will go there as well.
December 13th, 2002 Until now nobody complained about my calling the capital of Iceland the car park for the international airport. And tomorrow after leaving my beautiful Lada behind, and after take off, I'll be out of reach for those who might find this description degrading, and if I return one day I hope they have forgotten, or better still, forgiven, that I employed those words for their lively city.
December 9th, 2002 It is 2 in the morning. I have just closed the D.R. files. The main thing later today is to buy anti freeze for the water system of my part of this house. On Tuesday, tomorrow, I want to go South as they call a trip in this country with the destination Reyjavík. Reyjavík is the parking lot for Keflavík International Airport. (I hope my Reykjavík friends won't read this last sentence before I have left the country from KEF to AMS on Saturday.)
December 1st, 2002 I'm coming to the end of my days here. In a week or so I'll return to Holland. I missed an opening of an exhibition yesterday in Boekie Woekie. The telephone reports speak of it as a happy affair. I'm still not ready with my work. Shall I blame it on the cheeping of the excavators which were digging ditches for hot water pipes for the heating of the nearby houses during many of the days of the last few weeks? Excavators cheep like birds when moving around in reverse gear, and they did a lot of that. I can't blame it on them, I wouldn't think of blaming it on the cheeping of real birds. I'm still not ready because it is just so much which D.R. wrote.
November 25th, 2002 D.R. is keeping me busy. As a young poet he evokes in me an image of a brainy romantic discoverer, with his early Ideograms, and into the 60ties, with his Der Ich, man, ein Jemand und ich in Basel am Rhein for example. This changes with the Notizbuch 1966. He doesn't want so much to show anymore the cuts he makes with the sharp edge of his brain, or he is making his brain cuts inside a cloud he simultaneously produces. Or maybe: he is now cutting his cloud. Anyhow, I hear the swish of a knife but I see a cloud. (Appropriately for this cloud cutting picture, there are his various little cloud books, but the Scheisse series of books, as well as the 70ties with the Weinen series, and the Bastelnovellen belong here too.} He has become a romantic cloud cutter who writes a fictional report from the foreign parts in his own inside, he, D.R., the Swiss in the foreign territories which are inside of him. And after training hard the writing of a diary in the seventies, he renders in the 80ties and 90ties a realistic and, yes, romantic survey and monitoring of his inner and outer landscapes. 5 minutes have passed, I made a note in a different context, and reading the upper part find: Okay, so D.R. may have developed somehow like this. But interested in myself now I realize I have violated the rules for wise monkeys: I saw something (I say an image is evoked in me) and I hear (heard the knife swish in the fog) and I speak about it.
November 16th, 2002 The sun has just come up over the mountains where they are about 600 meters high on the other side of the fjord, to the southeast of where I am. It is just before eleven, I'm having a second coffee. I ate some oat meal with a little banana and raisins, had my cod liver oil and pills (against too high blood pressure, too high cholesterol level and to prevent blood clods) and while I was writing the first sentence and a half of this new diary bit, begun only partly because I feel the time lapses between the entries are too long, thinking about how and what to write to explain my true motive, the telephone rang, first Amsterdam, then London came on the line. Rúna had opened Boekie Woekie and I got the Dutch weather report. Hetti briefed me on what is going on at the London Artists' Book Fair, whereto she went to hold up the Boekie Woekie flag with many of our books and in the hope of finding interest for them. The fair happens as an initiative of Simon and with the help of Martin, in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall, if I have it right. - But about my true motive to start the work of the day with diary writing: it delays the return to the work on the Dieter Roth reader for a little while. I left that work late last night, after being carried away for hours writing a section of my accompanying text for that book. I'm now a bit tense. I hope when I see it again, in a few moments, I can still like it. On second thought, I see a chance to let the excitement grow for a bit longer. Isn't it Saturday, aren't the shops, half an hour drive from here, closing early, but don't I need some refrigerator filling? I think I do.
November 6th, 2002 For the first few months of our lives we very well know how to communicate with others. Then we let ourselves be lured into the language those others have in common, which for us, being newly born and therefore the new men, is the language of the old men, the language of former times. It may take us many years before we realize that we made a mistake adopting the old language. Like old, half broken tools it doesn't really work, we have to be prepared to engage in tiring discussions, and then still may not get what we want. Before we know it, we have become the old men, and if we don't soon by means of sighing maybe, or cursing or crying regain early lost possibilities we run the chance of never having a lasagna again which is understood.
October 31st, 2002 And again in Iceland, in the north, in the snow, after 1 month on the continent (3 weeks in Amsterdam, 1 week in Frankfurt). It was the annual Frankfurt Book Fair and Boekie Woekie's traditional presence there which made me interrupt my work on the Dieter Roth reader. It is the evening of my third day here. Hetti just phoned from home, she has an unexpected visitor: Aldo, overnight in Amsterdam. He is on a 2-day-business trip. They are having a beer together with Pétur who for the last few days has finished off with what far going general decay had left of the kitchen workbench/sink of Hetti and me. This big piece of furniture had visibly lost during the last few months its structural consistency. That probably happened because it had been exposed to permanent wetness for how shall one know how many decades. Being mainly made from chipboard badly disguised as plastic it would be sensitive to such a treatment. Earlier today I heard on the phone, Pétur had finished installing the replacement, and now that they had just put out as trash on the pavement the debris of the demolished, former kitchen workbench, when Aldo arrived. I spoke after Hetti also with Aldo. Various subjects, we came to speak of the observation that we found funny that the recent Moscow theater production got more media covering than most likely any stage play ever, and that gave us the shivers. That the involvement of the audience could make one think of modern theater of the sixties sent down at least my back another shiver wave - and made me let a chuckle get out of my throat. We quit this spooky subject quickly, and Aldo began to report what at that moment Hetti and Pétur were doing: painting green the doors of the new kitchen workbench. The old one had had a green front too. And the new one is also from plastified chipboard. Therefore the chances are that for quite a few decades Hetti's and my kitchen workbench will get no more media coverage.
October 15th, 2002 The intervals between the entries to this diary have during the last 3 month gotten much longer than they used to be for the 2 years I kept, and instantaneously published it on the internet. I think it is because there is an acceleration of what happens around me which occupies most of my time. Only rarely short opportunities occur which allow a bit of pondering upon what went on. Now I feel one of those moments has come. I see a possibility to ponder by listing the names of other "actors" of the "play" of the last 18 days (since the last entry) as it went on "on my stage". As far as I can remember (it is midnight, and I want to be quick in order to get some sleep, and the actors were many) there were (in real life and in my vicinity): dear Hetti and Rúna, Magga, Fredie, Pietje the cat and almost person, Guido, Michael, Eric, Aldo, Barbara, Pablo, Hansjörg, Malcolm, Walther, another Michael, Johannes, Phillip (or is this name in his case spelled Philipp?), Marc, Sharon, Paulina, and yet another Michael, Bernd, Karin, Dorian, Werner, Gerhard, Emmett, Ann and luckily also Simon who saved me from getting too drunk because in his presence I somehow can laugh off what otherwise would drag me down. Of course in comparison to all those who were not there, those who were are not so many. But it felt like the stage was permanently very crowded. Thanks to all for this joyful time, and for now, Good Night.
September 27th, 2002 Am back in Boekie Woekie, with the unfinished Dieter Roth reader manuscript with me and much work ahead for the three of us in the next 10 days to feel ready to go to the Frankfurt Book fair. The main bookwork we want to present, a catalogue of more than 800 colour drawings on beer mats, or coasters, as they are called in America, or Bierdeckel where I come from, or viltjes, where we are the greatest consumers of what stands on them still needs to get its text part printed, the whole edition (small, only 13 copies, but each copy in 5 volumes) needs to be bound, the slip cases to be made. A publishers list for Roth's Verlag, Seedy CDs, Vossforlag and good old Boekie Woekie needs still to be put together and printed and bound. The trip to Frankfurt needs to be organized. I stop to write because I have other things to do.
September 4th, 2002 I let my return flight to Amsterdam yesterday fly without me. The 4 weeks I have been in Iceland now have passed very quickly especially seeing what I accomplished during this period in regard to the Dieter Roth reader. Longer than another 3 weeks more I can't stay. I'll have to cut this diary short. August 29th, 2002 Michael has been, and fixed what had gone wrong.
August 26th, 2002 I'm living in a period of days with something like a long swing to them. Maybe I'm in some sort of time tunnel between what was and what is to come. Images flash by. An image of washed up drift wood on a lonely shore. It was a drive of 30 km (and 30 back) through a landscape out of the ordinary. Kristján and Solveig were in the one Lada, Brandur and me in the other. Unbridged rivers needed to be crossed in this uninhabited valley to get to lots of sea salted tree trunks as washed up reminders (reminding me) of the pens of great poets. An Italian hiker had not returned from this area a while ago (more than 2 weeks). We were not alone on the track, big jeeps of rescue teams were there too, the teams searching for the man. Brandur remembered someone he said wrote an appreciated biography. He had lived in 2 places in this fjord, early last century. The book is appreciated for its writing: unbeautifying, matter of fact. We saw no remains of the ruins of houses there, but one can still see where they once stood by the grass being greener there, from the shit as Brandur knew. That, after a visit to Dóri's opening of an art exhibition at what Niels operates in our vicinity, on the other side of our fjord. Dóri showed in a chessboard like arrangement 2 walls of white plates(-to-eat-from) with on them drops of lava. He has a history of melting drops out of lava lumps with a welding torch. The drops run cold in most irregular forms. Alternately sheets of paper with print outs of letters from many alphabets were put up on the walls. Round and rectangular and agreed on as to be meaningful and the others not. Another image that flashes by is that of the tiny spider running around on the sheet of paper I'm then writing on, a spider small like a dot. When it came to a ball-point pen line I just had made, I saw it couldn't cross it. I imagined a horrible stench coming from the river of ink of my pen molesting the nose of the tiny spider. It ran a little way along the shore of my line, and than away from it. I could not suppress the temptation to research this phenomenon a bit closer, though the experiment may have felt a tormenting experience for the tiny spider: I followed it close on its heels with my pen, cutting its way off, if it attempted to dart sideways, me and the animal creating in this way quite a special drawing. I remember I found it fascinating to think what it implies when the steering of the pen in ones hand is not directly controlled by the one whose hand holds the pen. For a while the tiny spider overpowered my authority.
August 25th, 2002 I'm sad or disappointed that the last few entries to this diary page have appeared to be messily published, now since about 2 weeks. The first mistake was made when posting them (we made the text public in a too early version). Secondly, another mistake was made attempting to correct mistake No.1, it only became worse. For the time being we can't add to or change at all our web site. We need Michael.
August 14th, 2002 It is a quarter to 3 in the morning, I have stopped for now to transcribe from those texts DR has published in handwritten form. I'm working on the before mentioned Dieter Roth reader, now seriously.
August 9th, 2002 The last time I crossed the uninhabited Icelandic highlands was on my first visit to this country in 1971, from north to south via the Sprengisand route. I drove then, also early in August, together with Emil in Dieter's Russian 4 wheel drive mini bus. The crossing resulted in a repertoire of stories ready to be called for. The point of most of the stories from that time long ago is how it felt to be alone on the vast highlands. The contrast to the 400 km now from south to north, via the Kjölur route and with Magnús next to me couldn't be sharper. It felt like joining the slowly moving promenade of luxurious cross country vehicles with a variety of international license numbers on a winding catwalk. Not the vastness of the desert was breathtaking but the tools to conquer it. If in another 30 years time I'm going to cross the highlands again I predict crowds of spectators will line the track to applaud the parade.
August 4th, 2002 I had come to Basel for a meeting with people and was lucky that that coincided with an event which Brigitta, whom I know for 30 years, and Eva had organized to take place in Zurich last night. They had invited for it with a postcard of which the one side showed a reproduction of a painting by me from more than 20 years ago. The painting is called "Der Aussteiger". The other side of the card said that Peter K. ("K" being the abbreviation of the 2nd of his first names) would be reading from his "Katalog von Allem", plus that there would be good food and drinks. It was a happy coincidence that allowed me to attend this event. I hadn't spent a night in Zurich for some years. P.K. was reading words I liked - he has found them for detailed observations and detailed reactions to his observations. I felt sort of safe in the presence of the brightness of the words. Teddy and Mario where also there. They took me in their car to the place I would sleep at the other end of town. I saw my hosts for the night only for an hour at breakfast, then I had to leave for Amsterdam, where from tomorrow it is to Iceland once again.
July 29th, 2002 I was challenged by a visitor to BW to give my view of what currently happens in the field of artists' books. I found it appropriate to say that as far as I could oversee it, I hadn't recently been impressed too much. I almost would have continued saying BW reminded me quite much of a full waste paper basket, but luckily I got another idea before uttering that sentence which of course would have been unjust to the efforts and achievements of many good men and women. The idea which saved me was that I remembered in time that our shop does not want to show a beautified picture of what is going on in any field. Our understanding of beauty demands that. Something beautiful is something which can show the complexity of what is real, we would say. (I say it now, but if I check this with Hetti and Rúna tomorrow I trust they'll endorse what I say here.) Or: isn't reality beautiful and art which is beautified, kitsch? Wouldn't we kitschify the field of artists' books if we selected the books according to any of their qualities? If nothing else makes them beautiful then at least their variety does. My challenger got to hear all this and more, and then said quite dryly: "Are you sure?"
July 26th, 2002 During the soon 2 years of an (almost) instantaneously published diary I have a number of times quoted in this diary the description of a book (or of maybe some other kind of item) from the stock list pages of this web site. I think that it was what I was writing which made me think of the books of which I then quoted the descriptions. This quoting has not once resulted in an order, though I think I added occasionally something like: order now! Luckily the stock list itself makes people order occasionally. I remark this because it puzzles me and I drift off into speculations. Holland one hears saw times with taxes on curtains - if you didn't need to hide so easily, you were cheaper off, one hears. If that story is true, publishing pays or at least, it reduces spending. - I feel I get once again into too complicated matters, I rather stay puzzled, which probably means with some puzzle pieces missing.
July 24th, 2002 I suddenly saw something which I had had a good chance to see for years, but didn't. The very moment I noticed what I saw, I was struck with how funnily meaningful it was. I'm speaking about 3 metal lids to some underground system of pipes, probably, or access to valves, maybe, of the water system, I suppose. The lids are in the pavement, just in front of the door of Boekie Woekie where I like to stand when the weather is nice and when the work situation allows it (or when my being nervous demands it). The lids are placed almost in a row and are from cast iron (I believe), they show a surface of about 12 by 12 cm, and there is a distinct w in each of them: www. The world wide web spelled its name long before it was known as such! It dates from before computers could communicate. - As an afterthought, I should learn how to illustrate this www-site with pictures.
July 23rd, 2002 That's how short-lived worries can be - Michael was back in town on Saturday, fixed what had gone wrong with our web site on Sunday, and on Monday it could be entered again through its boekiewoekie.com door. Thanks, Michael. At the same time our Amsterdam forms the background for the beginning of the honeymoon of Karl and Margrét. Congratulations and good wishes to them. And I have bought an airplane ticket to Iceland. I'll leave in 2 weeks to now in earnest assemble from the books by Dieter which are there the material for "my" Dieter Roth reader. I must have spoken here about my project before - there are no books with texts by DR obtainable for prices people who like to read have accepted to pay for books. All of DR's many books have prices according to their quality as objects of art. This obscures in a way the view on their author. My hope is that I can contribute to change this.
July 18th, 2002 I am worried since a few days about our web site - when attempting to open it in what has become the usual way (i.e. typing the address www.boekiewoekie.com) there appears on the screen instead of our logo-like, bird-like head with the hairs standing on end and with a book in the hand, as the first page of our site, something totally alien! If typing the old address (www.xs4all.nl/~boewoe) the site opens up fine. Then I more or less by mistake didn't dump this morning an e-mail of the type I usually don't look at - and it proofed to be from the company we have one and a half year paid money to for the web address which now doesn't function anymore. Amongst all sorts of other rubbish there come many e-mails which I think I have learnt to recognize as to belong to a type that if I read them, I'll be asked to upgrade something I didn't know I had, and maybe don't have. The e-mail I read this morning shortly after arriving in Boekie Woekie a little before midday contained sort of an apology of the sender for having lost details linking our site to their service, and instructions what to submit to them in order to fix it. I tried to do what they asked for, but the result is another disappointment. Now, when I open our site I via the boekiewoekie.com address, I get a blank screen. The company gives in their e-mail the telephone number of its help desk, but I couldn't gather the courage yet to ring them. I feel my acquaintance with computer and internet terminology might not be sufficient. And just now Michael is traveling abroad.
July 12th, 2002 Hetti has returned from Iceland, the complete Boekie Woekie crew is back on board, and we can enjoy again together the bobbing up and down of our shopship. Motor and winds are failing us namely, the majority of the users of the letter b puts this letter at this time of the year for us into the wrong context. Instead of b-eer and b-ooks it will be for the summer months, b-eer and b-each. We have learnt that the number of swimmers from the shore which will make it to us have, for practical reasons, no money with them, and also usually they don't trust themselves to swim back to shore with books which are after all from paper, and for which it rather would be better to stay dry. Though we could row to the next pier, find a cart with broad tyres, load the books on the cart, rent a horse, and have it pull the cart up and down the beach, and have us as coachmen when approaching the beach dwellers and sunbathers, and the mono- or bi-kini inhabitors, shout something like "ARTISTS' BOOKS, BEAUTIFUL BOOKS BY AARTIISTS!!!", we won't do that, it would be too much trouble. We are too lazy for it and it is only that the bobbing is real and gives our minds the opportunity to think of it as an opportunity. (In case someone gets confused, our bobbing really takes place in Berenstraat 16 in Amsterdam - from where it would only be 25 km to the beach. Horses drawings carts conquer on hard ground stressless I'm told around 10 km per hour. Leaving Amsterdam at 8 in the morning and aiming at being back at 8 in the evening would render 7 hours for many shouts of "ARTISTS' BOOKS, BEAUTIFUL BOOKS BY AARTIISTS!!!")
July 9th, 2002 I had written a piece for this diary when I left Boekie Woekie to bike home last night, which was rather this morning. I remember I wanted to read it again before publishing it, but when I opened the computer today, 9 hours ago, it was lost. I must have while I wrote it become too drunk to think of saving it. But the entry was made with much attention and of an unusual kind: I was expressing my admiration for a work of art. I think I seldomly do that. I'll try (partly from scattered bits and pieces of what I found after all with the search function in the start menu of my pc) to reconstruct what I wrote: Helgi phoned the other day, and asked if I wouldn't want to come to look at what he was exhibiting as part of his final art school examinations. He is about to graduate from the local academy. The academy is named after a man who is called by the Dutch with the word for "reeds". There is a building bearing his name and this building houses so to say a field in which each year grows a new generation of those slender high plants as I want to call the students here. Each reed plant is bent a bit under its heavy head, or maybe sways in the wind a little in order to show its elasticity. The plants root in shallow water. Here Helgi was registered for some years to become a reed look alike, but has chosen not to. He really sticks out. I feel the influence of the challenge to say for once something encouraging in this diary, but I'll put it this way: I can't praise the ability of Helgi to hide in the reed fields. Somehow I couldn't see any reed where he was. I saw a complex, inspiring work of art, which for me by far surpassed any student level. It was a real pleasure and I was happy to have had the opportunity to experience its presence.
July 6th, 2002 Much has recently changed for the visitor of the Boekie Woekie web site. The main menu is no longer what it was. Michael removed 2 of the possibilities to click on, and added 3 new ones. I'll work on developing the new possibilities. The ones which were discarded, the "search" and the "gallery", had proven to be insufficient. "Search" did not really deliver, "gallery" was too difficult to maintain. The 3 new clickabilities aim at displaying the lists of publications of Roths' Verlag, Rainer Verlag and Boekie Woekie. We hope on the one hand to serve our clients better by offering those lists. The publications of Roths' Verlag and Rainer Verlag and of course those of ourselves have always been central to what Boekie Woekie wanted to stand for. Since Dieter Roth and Rainer Pretzell have both entrusted us with the exclusive representation of their publishing efforts to allow access to lists as complete as possible seems only natural on the site.
June 28th, 2002 At the end of this shop keeping day I don't know how many thoughts appeared in my shopkeeper's head and how many have vanished again. I remember though thinking today a few times, that I should not forget what I thought - it could be good for this diary. But now, in the process of writing, what I thought before turns out as something else. Okay, nevertheless there is a story and this is how it goes: one of those diary reminders came when I noticed that people in the street were stopping and looking. They were looking in my direction - well, almost. I was looking out of the shop window at them. Their faces, in the sun bathed street, were looking as I said almost back at me, but up a little, like they were too shy or maybe naughty to look straight at me. This allowed the shop keeper to feel like an artist: like someone who is traditionally speculated about as if it would be difficult to see him clearly in his assumed remoteness. While I still interpreted the way they looked it dawned on me that it really was not our shop window, and certainly not me they were interested in. It was the cat probably of the people living above engaging in some window acrobatics which had caught their attention. After this confusing beginning that thought machine hurried to do better and produced explanations why shops need windows. Of course they are there for the shop keepers to have a good view of who and what goes on out there, in the street. Furthermore the shop windows certainly can serve the passer-by as a mirror. He can straighten tie, lipstick or hair seeing his reflection. The window is like a mirror for the one outside, because he who looks into it expects to know what he'll see. The shop windows are transparent from the shopkeepers' point of view, because they would like to think they know who is interested enough in their stuff to look at it lying in the window. In exceptional cases the window can help a shopkeeper to get an idea of how tiny his enterprise is when for example mounted police steer their horses over the pavement (because e.g. a truck unloads and blocks the lane). In that case the shopkeeper may see a police boot moving, hanging down from the upper edge of the shop window frame, with another boot appearing behind the other side of a bit of a horse's belly which also hangs into the picture, behind the first boot! The fun machine reminds in this context of an instant when Malcolm who then was visiting, was alert enough to grab a camera and take a picture of the Boekie Woekie shop window from the shop's inside when the window worked so to say as a bill board for the country's biggest, albeit not best brewer. A huge truck of this company was passing, with the company's name spelled big all over the side of it. What a shop window filler that was! (I wouldn't know where to look for that photograph now, and anyhow this is a written, and not a picture diary, and only in writing the name of this brewer can be avoided.) The Boekie Woekie shop window is about 3 meters 50 long and 1 meter 60 high. The world is big but it seems to come in more or less fitting pieces. June 26th, 2002 I'm in a mood which likes to find the words which point at the difference between Boekie Woekie, books by artists, and other enterprises which promote artists' books. I have to compare them to us. - Our "books by artists" are of course a double-decker: the books we offer here are made by artists, and we who claim that, we are artists. That holds like a double, actually triple, stitched seam. (Triple because the artists say they are artists, we say they are artists, and we say we are artists ourselves.) But since we are so secured, I think, those other enterprises need their partners too. I feel mostly they grasp for some art history as a partner. (They won't stock books by artists which haven't had the blessings of at least some current "art history".) An art history which at least is well enough advertised and therefore can produce something fashionable/sellable. Anyhow, quite a few besserwisser are ready to advise. We are occasionally put into that role of besserwissers too, when it befits to include our voice. I'm getting bored to think of it and will stop now. Moody things are boring. (boring = stuck) June 20th, 2002 I have no idea what to write. That box full of words is there somewhere of course. And the regulations of how one is to chain those words are in reach. But I lack the idea of what I would want to paraphrase. Can that be a problem? If so, can it be solved? Should it be solved? Is a white sheet of paper not better than one with typographical stains? Dirty paper! A matter for librarians to hold in trust a lot of it. Poor people! I feel like reading books with blank pages. There Boekie Woekie, books by artists, comes in handy, because we have for sale, thanks to Cornelia who makes them, something we call
(empty book) by BW, various sizes, differently many pages EUR 4.- to EUR 11,50
June 16th, 2002 Fredie and Fritzi came for a visit to BoeWoe. Fredie, Fritzi's father, is never short of a story. This time he said that when they were entering BoeWoe, Amsterdam's mayor had just been looking at our picture postcards out on the pavement in the display mills in front of the shop window.
Boekie Woekie Picture Postcards by BW & friends, PICTURE POSTCARDs presently available around 150 different cards in editions of up to 200 copies, Amsterdam since 1986 EUR 0,80 size 10,5 x 15cm, or EUR 1,60 double this size
And that the mayor had held a telescopic umbrella squeezed under his arm, though rain was hardly to be expected. We briefly speculated whether as mayor one might feel the need to show the insignia of power, if only in this subdued way of wielding the scepter. When we went to verify, the mayor was gone, of course. Fritzi, 10, hadn't followed our interest in the subject, but soon caught our attention by repeatedly standing on her head. She used a bit of our gallery wall to balance herself with her feet, and I suggested she could stay there for the next month as part of the exhibition.
June 13th, 2002 There is little business here, but a lot to do. Both owners of this business establishment, Rúna and Hetti, are far away. I, their handyman almost live now in the shop - I cook here for myself, and think about sleeping here too. I have been working for the shop all day, and now, since I'm still here in the evening (it is 11pm) and the shop has been closed for 3 hours, in this surplus of time I got of course an idea. (Because what else is an idea if not the nucleus for new, more time?*) The idea isn't far fetched, at the heart of it is this diary. I shall publish this ongoing diary, together with documents of the history of Boekie Woekie which the diary covers, as a book! ----- * for new, more time which no-one may ever have. Not all ideas unfold.
June 11th, 2002 Hetti flew to Iceland today, it is her turn now. It is nice weather there, and a grill party is planned outside the building where the DRA exhibition still is on. Pétur and Gunnar were on their way to get the food when Hetti phoned, just now. Before her call came there was one from Documenta, also a woman, with a nice voice. She asked for 5 books by Dieter. But for the rest the day was slow - little business. If there hadn't come a photographer to take pictures for a tourist guide to be published in California this day would be among those I would put on the scale if I wanted to argue that BoeWoe is a lost case, and that we should stop with it. - However, to publish such a negative thought instantaneously charges this day with a mental challenge - and doesn't that make everything good afterall?
June 8th, 2002 I'm back in Boekie Woekie, books by artists, Amsterdam. I haven't been here for a while (one month). It seems a great place, I like it. Since I feel surprised that my absence may have lasted only for one month I allow myself this bit of second thoughts: One hears about those guys who fly about. If they return it is usually called outer space from where they return. And if they have been away only for a month, but they find they are many years overdue paying their parking ticket at the airport, and their grandchildren don't seem to know them and vice versa, Einstein may start to clear his throat. Luckily when I left I didn't leave any car at the airport, and no children to present me with the bla bla from any grandchildren. It made the return less troublesome.
June 3rd, 2002 I forgot to mention in the entry to this diary of May 26th that the opening of the DRA exhibition which among other things I talk about on that day, has been video taped and photographed, and that this has been put onto the internet. Here is the address: www.simnet.is/bjornroth. It was Hildur, the neighbor who had the skill of doing that.
June 1st, 2002 Iceland is a great country for Central Europeans to catch colds. (Everyone knows it's good for salmon catching, but I'm speaking about colds (which are no misspelled cods).) It can maybe be explained. There is an abundance here of natural phenomenon. They act on us Central European optimists as a call for the sleeves to be rolled up, and the readiness to tackle the tasks. Put the boat into the sea, here we go! We Cen.Europos haven't generally put boats into the sea for long, we play at home rather on the pc keyboard. And I have heard the advice to wear gloves while doing that. Rolled up sleeves, pulled off sweaters, put aside, beer sweat while shoveling stones to fill up the puddle in the road in front of the door. And a breeze from Greenland, then and a juicy cold. There is here a variety of brands (Softis, Lommeletters, Uniks) paper hankies in the supermarket shelves. It seems to show there is enough business. Maybe even a native can catch a cold here, even out of the cold blue air. Anyhow I got one shortly after I had arrived, 3 weeks ago. It is still with me, and I made an observation, which I want to put into words. I have this cold, it is a drag, I blow my nose for several days and I'm disgusted by what I blow out, and I blow and I blow. The green part of what I blow out gets less and less, the watery part gets more and more. My nose begins to tickle. My eyes start to itch. I know the symptoms very well, but the season for me to allergicly react to grass pollen does in this part of the world not come before in about one month. My nose, and that is my observation, has thoughts of its own. I think it thinks that it is hay fever time again. After a long sleep it wakes up. It does not mind my, the nose owner's, or, okay, it does not mind our cold (the cold of me and my nose). It just minds my blowing it, as in the heydays of the fever. And then this nose of mine happily delivers, opens the faucets for the watery slime, without any pollen around, but as if there was pollen around. If the reader hears those bells ring which the dogs of Mr. Pavlov heard I have conveyed my observation well.
May 29th, 2002 There are today for the 2nd day in a row fighter planes flying towards the inland over our fjord. I have never heard or seen them here before. Trained to think they are flying to defend I can't help thinking what they might think they are defending. Not the birds, do they, so that they can lay their eggs in peace? They don't frighten the high tide so that it recedes for the low tide? The more silly the question the more polemic it seems to be.
May 26th, 2002 Eventful days have passed. I think 17 Icelandic people of the Dieter Roth Academy, staff and students, together with 20 who had like me come flying over the ocean put up the exhibition I anticipated in my last entry to this diary 21 days ago. The opening attracted a great crowd of some hundreds of people, maybe 4 to 5 hundred. Before it was so far I had to work for a day with concentration in order to install a mini Boekie Woekie, focussing on books by Dieter and colleagues from the Dieter Roth Academy, plus books by Icelandic artists. I made a price list on Björn's pc and marked all the near 250 books in Icelandic Krónur. For that I needed 250 beers. My work was nothing in comparison to what Gunnar and Björn and their people had achieved. (See the May 5th entry.) Next day came a 6 hours drive. I joined those in 2 cars who went in sunny weather to Dieter Roth's grave on the west coast of Iceland. The day after that came the long haul to the east coast, my 2nd time to Seyđisfjörđur this year, this time I traveled with Rúna. (Hetti is taking care of Boekie Woekie Amsterdam.) The weather was getting more and more autumn- and then winter-like the more east we got, more so than 2 months ago. In the highland desert of the east, on a route with very little traffic, approaching Möđrudalur, one of us who traveled in his cross-country vehicle together with one of the students of the DRA, crashed into 2 cars which had collided there before. When he came over a hilltop stepping onto the brakes didn't make his car stop on this stretch of icy dirt road. When I came near the spot I was warned by another car that had positioned itself for that purpose and I could slow very much down and pass the scene of horror safely. Knowing that several cars full with friends and colleagues where on their way ahead of us, Rúna and me were afraid to see any of them involved in this. The car with the torn off front wheel looked luckily totally unfamiliar. But the one 10 meters or more out off the road in the mud to the left, with the spare tire attached to the back door wouldn't that be Kristján's Kia? No, I determined, it could not be what I did not want it to be: I knew that on the canvas cover of the spare tire the brand name of the car was printed in big letters, and the canvas cover we saw there was just brown, and the color of the car did luckily not match the dark gray of my memory. We felt relieved. Later however, when we heard the truth, we felt embarrassed and bewildered that we could be fooled by the layer of splashes of dirt from the road to believe in our wishful thinking. Luckily no one in this accident was seriously injured, but Kristján lost his car in it. Still later, it came to me that what had happened could be seen as something coming true since in a way it was predicted in the poster and print for the founding conference of the Dieter Roth Academy. The link I mean is to an image I have used as my part for that poster. There is a drawing of a road leading into the distant depth of the picture, and by the side of it in the foreground stands a traffic sign saying "Roth Work Ahead".
Roth Work Ahead original offset print (46 x 64 cm) by Björn Roth and Jan Voss (the poster for the Dieter Roth Academy founding conference and exhibition in Basel May 2000 without the informative text), signed by both, EUR 90.-
I certainly, 2 years ago, did not think of suggesting any Roth or Road work of the kind which staff and students of the DRA got a practical lesson in on their way to Seyđisfjörđur. The phonetic likeness of how the name "Roth" is pronounced in German and "road" in English has before been noticed. At the Dieter and Björn Roth exhibition of big sculptures at the Wiener Secession early in 1995 (and Boekie Woekie operating a branch office for a couple of months there) we laughed about Dieter's term "Wanderzirkus" for this exhibition. We knew he had translated it back from the English "road show". Another DR pun of a similar kind, dating back more than 30 years, when asked which pictures he liked most: Die mit viel rot (or Rot(h)) darin. (Those with a lot of red.) Seyđisfjörđur was our chosen place for the Academy conference, here Dieter used the term "Dieter Roth Academy" and described what he had in mind with it as far as we know for the first time in the summer of 1995. I think under the impression of the perils of the day, but also since it has become clear that considerable work can be involved with it, Björn asked those present whether they wanted the DRA to continue, no one supported the idea to stop. Bernd suggested that the meetings would not necessarily have to happen each year, or that maybe only some of us meet, that the meetings would not have to go along with an exhibition each time, that the DRA pot could be put occasionally on a smaller flame. Then he took his hat and left. He was to be driven over the Fjarđarheiđi pass road to Egilstađir to catch his plane to Reykjavík and Berlin. At both meetings subsequent to the founding conference not everyone was present who had come to the first, and at the first not all were present who have come since then. It is one of the wanted features of the DRA that its structural lines as well as its outlines are not stringently described. That Bernd had not left his hat behind was regretted, because it delayed the decision on the next point. I had namely suggested that the DRA could start to award a prize in Dieter's name. And the hat would have been so handy to throw in a piece of paper with a proposal by each of us with the name of a possible prize winner. Klein Moritz from Vienna, the son of Renate and Dominik, would without doubt have pulled the best name out of the hat. But maybe some were also relieved to gain some more time before deciding whom they would want to propose as their choice to become the first prize winner. Dieter has collected so many awards himself, that it might be appropriate to continue with prices though of course on a new level. Whether there should be money connected to the price, or just an invitation to the next conference, or whether the winner might be named a member (of honor) of the academy was not discussed fully. The discussion of what to do with the exhibition: sell, maybe sell as a whole, and in case of selling, is the DRA to get a share?, let to the conclusion, that we would not want to expect from the DRA to become our sales agent for art works, but that we would rather pay a yearly amount into an account still to open, in order to fund the return costs of works from exhibitions, for example. Rainer suggested (again) to institute a body of honorable members of the academy, who could have this status by paying for the academy. However the thin line between doing what we want to do and doing what we are expected to do, some feared would then not be clearly recognizable anymore. For the next publication, to be gathered from material which came and will come about in the preparation for and during this round of meeting in the name of the DRA, plus material we hope is in the make on the writing desks of some further people who knew Dieter, we appointed unanimously Klein Moritz and Eggert. A DRA interactive web site was envisaged. Finally the where-to-meet-next question brought about a number of possibilities, but no decision. Beat after the conference regretted that we had not concentrated more on Dieter himself, by listening to his recorded music or reading from his books. The next day saw us all split up. Several cars went along the south back to Reykjavík, 2 took the northern route again. The winter had taken on a bit milder looks, and when we reached Eyjafjörđur, the sun was shining. I needed a few days to drink myself down from the intense binge the DRA days had among other things meant for me. Then there was a relapse, Rúna opened an exhibition of her "paperflowers" at the "Kompan" Gallery Ađalheiđur is operating in her studio.
Thorkelsdóttir, Rúna Paperflowers ORIGINAL offset carried quite far, with contributions by several other artists, numbered/100, signed, Amsterdam 1996, out of print
Since the book is sold out, but single pages are left, Rúna wallpapered the space with them, and Ađalheiđur has a surplus of pages to sell. (Rúna has made before impressive exhibitions with this wallpapering idea.) Anyhow, the friends from the town which likes to call itself "the town of the midnight sun" came out to our place, which made me the second next day take the hard measure of not drinking anything at all. A phase in which I still am, now, 7 days later. May 5th, 2002 The opening of the third conference and exhibition of the Dieter Roth Academy is coming closer - and as the reader of the entry of Feb. 25th knows, it is going to take place in Iceland. The friends there are busy to fix for the exhibition of staff and students of the DRA the adjoining spaces of Ishamar, the carpenter's workshop of Gunnar, and the studio of Björn. Fix in this case means to build to 2 flights of stairs, temporary walls in front of existing walls of a length of about 150 meters, build a walkable floor in the until now unused attic, fix the roof so that the art works have a chance to stay dry and build about 200 picture frames. The opening is on the 10th of May, the conference will be in Seyđisfjörđur after the next weekend. It is going to be a meeting of some 35 people, of which I think 10 are Icelandic living in Iceland, the others come from abroad. Today Rúna was the first to board a plane for this occasion. The day after tomorrow I will go, Beat and Erika and 3 students of Andrea will arrive at about the same time with a flight from Copenhagen. The DRA is organizing a transport service to the exhibition spaces in Mosfellsbaer near Reykjavík for those who come from abroad. Dieter posthumously triggers off quite an event - and I'm proud to point out that there is no public money involved (except that the Hamburg Academy of Art helped to pay the tickets for the students of Andrea). May 3rd, 2002 I have an idea for a new work! The thrill of tapping this kind of fresh brain juice is hard to compare with other sensations. I think it makes me realize something which must be at the bottom of what makes artists like to be artists, the superior feeling of having an idea. I know of myself to have been often in that lucky situation of having an idea, but lately - I mean the last 15 years or so - I paid attention more to the functioning of an idea, to that idea which is called Boekie Woekie. I seldomly have applied in those years my getting-an-idea techniques. And I have even started to look down on this short lived sensation with thoughts like "it is only another idea". Chance wanted that I just read a poem in a boek I want to add to the stock of Boekie Woekie, a poem by Peter Huckauf, which ends with the lines "bedenke aber dass grosses zu tun nur allmählich gelingt und das kleine immer sehr leicht für sich allein erscheint" (consider that great things take time to succeed and that what is small easily appears to be on its own). I thought that fits. Now, a little later I think how relativ this is. What is great, what small? Is something great because a lot of time and effort has been invested? Small because the inspiration came by itself and was so to say for free? Isn't it simply neither one of this, nothing great, nothing small, and if it is anything at all, isn't it shadow-boxing?
April 26th, 2002 Stephan stayed with us for 2 days. He and me were among those who passed the entrance examinations to the Art Academy of Düsseldorf 36 years ago. Some years later some then young artists got the label "Düsseldorfer Szene", we somehow were seen as belonging to that group. Stephan has a few times before visited us in Amsterdam, and also in Iceland, there he was maybe 15 years ago. But for the last three years about we only spoke occasionally on the phone. He had abandoned his art vagrancy in order to take care of his mother, which meant that he had to be ready for her for 22 of the 24 hours of each day. She has gone home as he puts it, early in February. He was in an extended moment of poetic concentration able to verbalize how he sees his picture making. He spoke of a darkroom and of fluid layers. The day before yesterday he left for the airport to meet old friends arriving from Japan to go to install with them an exhibition in France. He's back on the road. I wish him good luck, I like him. The morning after Stephan had left, more old friends arrived. Hans Peter, Maja, and their daughter Anouk from Zürich. And now I expect the phone to ring to tell me that Björn has arrived from Basel. For later tonight, Hanneke and Jos have announced their visit. I expect all tempering of thirst to be forgotten in the later part of this evening.
April 21st, 2002 Back in Amsterdam since 24 hours, from a week in Frankfurt. There I was framing with the help of Gunnar, Rúna and Jackson a series of 365 offset prints an insurance company has bought via Boekie Woekie from me. Since each of the 365 sheets of paper is printed on on both sides the frames have 2 glass plates, so that they can be hung up either way. Gunnar produced them at his firm Ishamar near Reykjavík, and send them by air freight to Frankfurt. The glass was bought in Frankfurt, the weight of the 730 plus some plates we were told was close to 2 tons. The frames came in 2 crates, Gunnar had made. We were opening the crates in the hall where goods are received for this gigantic office complex. A man who worked there emerged asking whether we would have use for the 2 crates after we would have emptied them. He said he was in his spare time a beekeeper, and needed to send his honey pump for repair. The wood of the crates would come in handy. For a moment I thought my knowledge of modern art was being tested, but he didn't look the type for such a joke. When we had emptied the crates on Friday he came with 3 jars of "his" honey as his thanks for the crates. He told us that as of German descent he had come 20 years ago from Romania. I was happy that at least the packaging of the frames of my art had been appreciated, because another man from the same receiving-the-goods department revealed his dislike of the art buying of the company he is working for. The company bought recently much much more art than my 365 double sided prints. He said they are 12 now working in this internal post station, but that 10 of them were due to be fired. Jackson, our sometimes helper was from Congo, studying informatics in Frankfurt. He was now at the verge of his exams, after which in May he would go back to see his wife, 2 small children, and the rest of the family (24 brothers and sisters) for the first time in 6 years. He said he noticed racism in Frankfurt much less than where he had lived before in Germany but I saw how he was looked at in the restaurant were we took our lunch. At the end a man from Iran drove Gunnar, Rúna and me in his taxi to the station. He had not been able to go home for 23 years. That emerged after on the car radio a demonstration, due because of the date being the birthday of Adolf Hitler had been talked about. But today is the next day and the birthday of Dieter Roth and and I write this as a demonstration because of that.
April 13th, 2002 The noise of a helicopter, standing for a long time still in the air above the city center was to be heard this afternoon on top of all the other noises a city makes. The police was watching demonstrators from the air, demonstrators expressing their being upset about what's going on in Palestine and Israel. As a German born at the end of April 1945 from parents who by not much more than luck had survived the previous 12 years (not as Jews, but the one as a communist and the other as a soldier) I got in my youth a substantial portion of awareness of how complicated the subject was for my parents. When I was 5, I think, the man who became my uncle Ernst and his wife, aunt Hilde, returned from Israel to West Germany and, they with their 2 children, often came to visit us. Their children were born in Israel. In the early 30 ties "uncle Ernst", I learnt much later, had been my mothers' lover. They were sentenced separately already in 1933 or 34 because of their involvement with the KPD. He had to serve 2 years, I think, in the work camp Börgermoor. His luck then was that those who had sentenced him had not realized that he was Jewish. He was released and fled, to Israel. He recited from memory, sitting in our living room, unforgettable for me (I may have been 10 by then) a poem of a certain Heine, Heinrich. The poem contained the lines: "Krapulinsky und Waschlapsky, Polen aus der Polakei, fochten tapfer und entkamen Moskowiter Tyrannei" ...they make it to Paris and there at the end of a meal in a restaurant: "und da keiner wollte leiden, dass der andre für ihn zahle, zahlte keiner von den beiden." (I can't now, were I write this check whether I quote the spelling right, and I will not attempt to render those lines in English.) Uncle Ernst enjoyed reciting this poem. I don't know of course if he felt, back then in 55 or so, that the lines which engraved themselves in my memory described for him the situation in the part of the world he had been living in for more than 10 years. For me those lines offer now that possibility. The right of refugees to eat without paying for it seems to me at the core. - When I had written the first few lines of this diary entry I had run out of beer and went across the street to get 2 more bottles. They are people from Egypt there who work in that shop. The customer in front of me in the queue before the cash desk turned around and called when he had paid and was about to leave to the guy who was making the sandwiches "hey, de mazzel!". I don't know, mazzel is maybe also an Egyptian word. But we are in Amsterdam, and to ponder on a situation so far away means firing long shots. Long shots need good marksmen. If it only was clay pigeon shooting! - Now, a moment later, I think: for me, here, this wish is granted. How could I anyhow get with my ponderings at more than clay pigeons, clay pigeons which I have cast myself up into the air! That helps to make my shots not all that long.
April 8th, 2002 I sometimes change the entries to this diary when I read them again though they may have been made public for some days. I don't want to withhold from my readers the hint that they may find the changes more revealing than the actual text. Reading the first published version, they may want to compare it to a possibly changed version, published later. I plan to publish this diary also in a printed format. But this publishing will not include the possibility to call back in order to alter contents from one day to the other. That then will be, for some time being, the final form. But the fun is to be had before definitiveness takes over, I find.
April 5th, 2002 Björg was getting 50 yesterday, her husband ţór invited on the occasion for a dinner at a Spanish restaurant in the middle of what they call here the red light district. We enjoyed ourselves, but we weren't tired when we left the restaurant. To continue the quest for joy and follow the others, I had to go and unlock my bicycle from the railings of the near canal bridge. It was around 11pm, and the streets, or rather alleys, were packed with people who like me, I thought, had packed full their bellies. As I saw it, they were on their constitutional (the dictionary says that that is the English word for "Verdauungsspaziergang"). The thrill of what is disreputable seems to help to melt the stomachs' contents. The women in their windows I imagine bill this after dinner hour to the tourist board, or union of restaurant owners. The men walk arm in arm with their women. They are not now doing what they possibly are doing here at other hours. A pause for the regular business in this quarter. While I am unlocking my bike I hear a guy standing next to me (me bending to unlock the bike) say "Viagra". A word spoken into the noise of a crowd is as audible as a whisper is during a period of silence. It belongs to the red light district that disreputable transactions are proposed, for example the buying of all sorts of drugs or stolen bicycles. But Viagra I hadn't heard before. I asked the speaker whether he meant I should get him some. He didn't respond, but the guy next to him said that he had just been speaking to himself.
April 3rd, 2002 I'm looking for a lighter tone. To find that, I'll have to avoid words like autopsy. But as I think that, I also think how, when I use words with a horrifying reference, I feel I am over the top of the worst of what those words stand for. It seems a complicated subject though. Am I relieving myself from the weight of what the words I use stand for by using them, and am I tricking you, their reader, to carry the weight I was supposed to carry? The use of words is complicated, unless of course one takes it lightly. I must be one of those who take the use of words lightly, otherwise I wouldn't leave so many behind (see, for instance, below). Or do I have to unload an exceptional lot because for a weight-lifter of the vocabulary my muscles are too week?
March 29th, 2002 Finally the Amsterdam days begin to feel again as I remember them. Boekie Woekie as our platform for relaxed visits of customers and friends and the work of three people carried out in near silence, when none but us is in the shop. No outbursts of complaints are mentioned. I don't remember whether somewhere in the earlier entries to this diary I have written about the brass sign at our shop door reading "Dieter Roth Academy" - there is such a sign. Boekie Woekie is by this definition a place of learning (including learning to teach). At first I wanted the last sentence to go like this: BW is by this definition a place of teaching and learning. But then Robert Filliou's book came to my mind. I'll paste our description of it underneath this line, since the book is available from us:
Filliou, Robert Lehren Und Lernen Als Auffuehrungskuenste / Teaching And Learning As Performing Arts together with J. Cage, G. Brecht, D. Iannone, A. Kaprow, Marcelle, D. Rot, B. Patterson, Vera, Bjössi, K. Rot, J. Beuys, and the reader if he wishes, Köln New York 1970 EUR 80.-
or in the later French version
Filliou, Robert Einseigner Et Apprendere, Arts Vivants par Robert Filliou et le lecteur, s'il le désire avec la participation de J. Cage, G. Brecht, D. Iannone, A. Kaprow, Marcelle, D. Rot, B. Patterson, Vera, Bjössi, K. Rot, J. Beuys, et une post-face de A. Moeglin-Delcroix, Paris Bruxelles 1998 EUR 36.-
What I was trying above to get at was something like this: also without the DRA brass sign at its door, BW was already an academy - a place of exchange (and by exchange, you know it, I don't mean now that of money for books). The not so secret reason for the existence of BW has always been the joy to be able to offer the opportunity to men learned, as well as to those learning, and without distinguishing much between them, to meet and compare notes. If the brass sign at the door in that sense is an invitation card for coming in, those who do come in should not be mistaken, they are welcome to those who are already inside as artists' material is welcome to artists. (They may become, for example material for this diary.) The more so since we gave our academy Dieter's name, the artist we have come to respect the most. What we saw in him as his most outstanding ability was just that: in his Real Dieter Roth Academy just about everything was artist's material. The idea that whatever line between art and life he could detect needed to be erased, made him spent his energy for decades. He used up a big lump of eraser gum to move really and freely in life and art, and when that dreadful autopsy claimed his heart was weighing more than 2 kilos I thought that's where the eraser had recollected.
March 24th, 2002 We were continuing the party, with different party personnel, back in Amsterdam. Boekie Woekie opened yesterday the exhibition of Klaus Müller. I still have a bump on my forehead, from when I fell from my bike which was more than 6 weeks ago.
March 21st, 2002 The painting got into a state which I liked - for the German readers, it has this title: 2 Eier im Schnee. I took it off the stretcher and rolled it up to be able to transport it by car. It will be my contribution to the Dieter Roth Academy exhibition in May in Mosfellsbaer. On the way to leave Iceland, I brought it to Gunnar who will reframe it for me. With him, Hlynur, Eggert, Kristján Solveig and finally, this morning with ţórđur, Hetti and me partied our way to the airport. Now it is 4 o'clock in the afternoon and I'm just back in Amsterdam and Boekie Woekie, where the computer is which allows me to change our web site. The entries to this diary from Feb. 25th on can finally be published - if I still know how to carry out the necessary steps.
March 17th, 2002 I have stretched a big canvas for a painting probably 2 years ago, and improvised an easel for it, but since then I haven't done much more than to pencil sketch the picture I intend for it. It is a picture of which I know if I release it, those who know about my work will rank it among my main works, anyhow of those works which play in the genre of painted pictures. I gave this picture a push during the last days, before going to Seyđisfjörđur, thinking it would be practical if I would not have to bring a work from Holland for the Dieter Roth Academy exhibition (planned for May) in Iceland. At first I was happy with that push, but then I ran the picture aground on a selfcreated beach. The material I needed to get it afloat again was white acrylic paint. I think I used too much of yellow recently. But white is harder to get than yellow. For yellow there is a state run shop guaranteeing to supply it. For white one has to turn to the artistes material shop. I did that, they didn't have it. To want to buy white towards the end of the winter when everyone has been painting snowscapes since months! Luckily Ađalheiđur could help out.
March 16th, 2002 A night, and one day, and that days night, and the next days morning in Seyđisfjörđur. Hetti drove us to Egilstađir, where we picked Gunnar up at the airport. Gunnar had come from Reykjavík. It had been his idea to go and see Björn, to sharpen the plans we made 3 weeks ago regarding the coming Dieter Roth Academy meeting and exhibition which Björn and me have announced in a circular to take place in less than 2 months. The only white on the road we saw was on Fjarđarheiđi. I witnessed that I thought the words "to go down into Seyđisfjörđur is like going up into heaven". Already on the steep way down into the Seyđisfjörđur Valley the road became yellow, and it stayed yellow, even while we went out on the water of the greyblue fjord under a blue sky on Hilmar's boat. Björn, teaching art here a group of students of the Reykjavík art academy for 2 weeks, had asked Hilmar to go with him and them on this short vacation. Björn invited us to come also. I brought the beer. Haven't I been a student of his father! Dieter also taught what he was good at, and often how to paint the road yellow. Björn is good at hunting seabirds. Dieter's classes took place at the "Ohme Jupp". Though in Düsseldorf, and by no means halfway to Norway, they were in their way quite far out from the coast. Luckily Hetti, Björn and Gunnar have learnt similar lessons.
March 12th, 2002 Jón, Ađalheiđur, Brág and Guđbrandur came from the south and Haraldur and Kolbrún and their kids from the north for what became a party lasting for 2 days. If one counts the recovery of the spilled strength into it, it took twice as long. Jón I saw first in the summer of 1979, then he was sitting reading in a book which had the word "Nietzsche" on its cover on the stairs which lead to the gallery in which Erlingur, Kristán, Hetti and me were opening an exhibition. The staircase had big windows towards the north, and the light from a sun just above the horizon poured in. And it poured in what a relative of Erlingur had provided us with: a box of 24 bottles of Chinese red wine. In the distance we noticed a peculiar outline. Some buildings sticking out into the fjord. The locals spoke of it as a ghost town, a former Klondike. What we saw then is were I'm sitting now. Much natural, and if this distinction can be made, much artificial energy has been build up and spilled around here.
March 8th, 2002 Hetti's first real drive on her own to get some beers from the state run shop in the smaller of the two places in the vicinity were it is possible to buy alcoholic drinks, north of here. I avoided to go with her to the car, but saw when she left that she had forgotten to put on the lights (obligatory here). I ran out of the house to make her aware of it before she would be out of sight, but slipped and fell on the ice for the second time I'm here. Hetti was of course gone when I was back on my feet. When she came back to the house an hour and a half later, she told the police had stopped her, and that the officer had been nice and had reached into the car to switch the lights on for her. No fine, he had just laughed.
March 5th, 2002 Am sitting at the pc, working for Boekie Woekie, or reading in Dieter's books and photocopying pages from them which I consider for the D.R.reader I'm compiling. Solveig and Kristján came for the weekend. Solveig hasn't been to this house and this area during the winter period for 20 years, when Kristján and she moved to Reykjavík from here. Hetti has come together with them and stays on with me, main task to practice her car driving abilities. But now she is busy with the BoeWoe bookkeeping. From her window one overlooks the fjord, and I've been called over by her many times to see what there is to see. A rubber dinghy being put into the sea, tide and wind flocking the shoreline with lumps of ice, a kind of bird we don't recognize. Agnar has helped with his blow torch or flame thrower, I don't know which, to get the water to run. Rúna runs Boekie Woekie in the far away Amsterdam, telephone, fax and e-mail keep us in tune.
February 28th, 2002 I'm in my house in Iceland, finally, since Sunday evening. It was minus 10 degrees on the Celsius scale when I started the housewarming efforts. Outside it has been cold since then, but calm, even sunny winter weather. Inside it was cozy 24 hours after I had switched the electricity on. But I haven't been able so far to get the water to run. Luckily outside there is no lack of snow. Yesterday Edith and Steffen stopped by on their way to Seyđisfjörđur, filming wintry Iceland for the Dieter documentary, Edith is working on. I had told Edith some months ago, either in Amsterdam or Basel, that I had recently bought, together with Kristján, Ívar and Reynir, a new boat. (See further down for more about it.) She wanted Steffen to follow me with the camera while I would walk to it. Once there, I would say why I think that Dieter liked it in Iceland. She was surprised to hear that we had sold the boat again. Obviously she didn't know or remember that the new boat's engine had not been reliable. But luckily for the planned shot our old boat Bliki would render in its state of decay a likewise good backdrop for what she wanted to hear from me. Why Dieter had liked it in Iceland. The batteries for the camera were okay, Steffen had to get his gloves. I mentioned, since I would be filmed coming out of the door of my house that there has someone (an actor) been filmed coming out of it before, close to twenty years ago, showing him grasping the railing of the landing (in faked distress). In that movie, Land og Synir, (land and sons) which I happened to see at Bruno's home in Zurich on the telly, - and Edith, you are from Zurich, don't you know Bruno? -, in that movie my house was used as the hospital in which the father of the hero of a social drama, placed around 1930, who appeared out on my landing, had just died. While he was standing there holding the railing with his shoulders trembling, the white shadow of a nurse appeared behind him. But here, in the now of yesterday, I set my feet, watched by the eye of the camera, decidedly on the few but thickly snow-covered steps of the outdoor stairs and then walk briskly in the direction of the graveyard for boats. Steffen, with the camera, is in front or behind of me, films me from the side, and I'm walking like I can not wait to declare why Dieter Roth has liked it in Iceland. Luckily its not only Edith and Steffen who take care that a documentary is not a movie. The director of the real reality movie lets me slip after a few strides on the ice and fall on my elbow. No damage done. Later back in the house Steffen rewinds what he has recorded, to see how that scene looks. I also look at it. He doesn't follow me falling, I just glide out of his picture. I remember me, seeing this, saying "looks like I disappear into a hole in Iceland". Anyhow, readers and writers alike are stuck with metaphors. That's all, folks. More merry and who knows thoughtful melodies tomorrow, otherwise soon, I hope.
February 25th, 2002 Gunnar and his and my friends paid for me more than 3000.- Guilders worth in car repair and want this to be a gift for my 5 recent and 5 to come birthdays. My model '94 Lada looks like a 2003 model, like a dreamcar. In the winter, in the snow, you can't see it. It is so white. In the spring you won't be able to see it either, it will have gotten as rust so brown (and as the crust of the newly ploughed earth). On my way north I spent a few days with my Dieter Roth Academy colleagues preparing the meeting for this year, which is intended to happen here in Iceland. That is where I am right now.
February 19th, 2002 The attentive reader of these pages must have noticed that after the 1st and 2nd of December no more mentioning is made of our offset printing. Since some days: Happy news! The machine works again. Now lots of new postcards are being printed. We were running out of them. Hetti had finally reached Meenheer Lippes, gentle old man with a life long offset experience. When he came to check what was wrong, he at first seemed a bit puzzled and fixed a few minor defects, but then he measured the circumference of the rollers, and found one worn off a bit (worn off less than 1 mm). The machine worked well again after he had replaced one of the rollers with the corresponding one from the almost identical machine Boekie Woekie formerly used for printing and which we had to abandon years ago. Many hurrahs for Meenheer Lippes! The core of our self understanding as artists running a bookstore had been at stake. Because before we ran the bookstore, each of us ran a press. And to run a bookstore but no longer a press would have meant to have to redefine our identity as artists. Actually we are doing that redefinition as a permanent process, but aiming at including and not at excluding.
February 18th, 2002 Finally I have a ticket in my pocket. On Thursday to Iceland! Hetti is to come there one week after me. Gunnar is activating the Lada. Boekie Woekie will be in Rúna's hands, I am to work on the Dieter Roth reader. Here in Amsterdam, I see my face in the mirror in the mornings. It has been funnily colorful for days now, much yellow and violet. I hope I'll resemble, in the eyes of the passport controller, the image which is given of me in my passport picture. If the controller thinks I'm not the one the picture shows, I'll tell him it is the achievement of someone whose wish it is to apply for a role in the next alien movie. Thus I am prepared for an audition in Iceland: Edith and Steffen will visit me there. I think they want to drive around the country on bumpy roads to collect material for their Dieter Roth documentary. If my bump then will still be substantial enough I'll pull out of it something special, for them to record.
February 15th, 2002 Jan, one of the two Hoedekoois, helped BoeWoe once again. He drove with his car the boxes we had filled with books we feel certain not to have customers for immediately to our storage space. I came along of course, with the keys, and because of carrying, and to have a moment of exchange with someone I know for more than 20 years. Cornelia, the other half of the Hoedekoois, had been earlier to BoeWoe bringing many empty books. The empty books she makes are listed under the letter E, here in this site:
(empty book) by BW, various sizes, differently many pages, from EUR 4.- to EUR 11,50
Cornelia delivers to us empty books (books with blank pages). In her mind seems to me is a book of which the pages are not at all blank. Somehow she manages though to create a kind of white blur which could look like more space to write on. She had asked me about the Dieter Roth reader, which I have set out to prepare soon four years ago, shortly after Dieter had died. I told her I still didn't know, summing up what implications are there to hinder me. Later, in the car, Jan asked about the Dieter Roth reader too. I thought Cornelia had briefed him, but that he wanted to hear the sensitive parts from me. Anyhow, as a result of those two verbal engagements, both friends encouraged me to consider to self publish this book.
February 11th, 2002 I was reading aloud a poem by Dieter today, Hetti recorded it with her video camera. The poem was "mein auge ist ein mund" - "my eye is a mouth", a beautiful poem. I think the Moore Galleries in Philadelphia, USA, made an English translation of it, maybe those who read this diary and are without access to German can get it from them (or those who do read German can find the poem in vol.13 of Dieter Roth's collected works). It was a strange reading. Hetti would have liked to film only my left eye of which the upper and lower lid were so red and swollen, that they looked like lips. In the first shot she did only film my eye as I moved the lids a little - as much as my shiner would allow me to. From outside the picture frame like the voice of a ventriloquist ideally my voice would have come, reciting the poem and that would have been it. But as I did not know the text of Dieter's poem by heart, I really had to use my eyes to read it, and to read I need glasses, and who ever saw a mouth wearing spectacles. Therefore in the first shot I open and close my eyelids as if I speak. In the second shot I read the poem with my glasses on, from vol.13, and the camera shows me holding the book, wearing my glasses, and shows my forehead which is quite bruised. I fell namely off my bike and on my head last Saturday night, returning from the opening of a group show I participate in. (Readers with a long memory recall me mentioning being invited by Fredie to show with others under the title "Waldeinsamkeit". That title was changed to the Dutch word "boslucht". Other interesting stories may have to continue to sleep in that forest. It is half past one. I want to go - to sleep.)
February 6th, 2002 Am back with the feeling I should try to write about an aspect of Boekie Woekie which possibly even devoted readers of this page may not yet have put as knowledge underneath their feet. That feeling is enhanced (or maybe even triggered off) by a friendly line on a postcard I received from Los Angeles today. The sender must have visited us in reality because his postcard says that this diary is as crazy as our shop is. - I call the line on the card friendly, because its writer ends it with "but I like it", meaning no doubt "I like the craziness of shop and diary". Someone likes our and my craziness! I like that! We have, though there is some "but", achieved to be liked - amazing! 15 years ago, when BoeWoe was begun, I think I remember what we wanted was to be liked for our craziness. If only by ourselves of course. So much the better if others join in! If this continues however (that we are liked by more and more), in a distant future that is, once when everybody will like us, I foresee a problem of diagnosis. Who will declare us to be crazy then?
February 4th, 2002 Happy birthday to those to whom this wish fits. My day was a day of relief, things I have been busy with for weeks were taken off me. The beer recently gulped down, begins to taste again. My benevolent readers allow me to excuse myself.
January 27th, 2002 All those recent whimsical considerations made me forget to mention the parties. Michael had his birthday - I think 2 weeks ago. I brought him a brick onto which I had smeared some cement (and because the cement wouldn't hold, I had later to glue the cement down to the brick with Pattex): a multiple of mine which goes under the name of "the bildding". Since it just doesn't want to sell I have to invent ways of getting rid of it. Henriëtte and her man, Eva who is Michael's wife, and the wife of a gentleman farmer from Finsterwolde, who has a gallery there and showed last summer works of Michael, David and Neill, Michael's sons, a crate of beer on the balcony "just for me", and enough for everybody else were there. We enjoyed ourselves. Biking home late (a longer way than I'm used to bike when returning home from Boekie Woekie) I experienced no pain in my chest. An exceptional ride for half a year now. Then Barbara came to Amsterdam, from Chicago, we met last weekend. Rúna invited us to her place, which by now she has turned back into "her place", having had to improvise, live out of boxes, and actually leave it for months, while it was under reconstruction last year. Michael, Eva, and her daughter Lonneke were there too. An Icelandic leg of lamb had come down from the Polar Circle on its own, just to be devoured by us, and how the crate of beer had landed on the balcony, I just don't remember, because I was so exhausted from getting it up the stairs. Barbara is Ira's wife, the friend of Dieter I mentioned recently (on Jan.12th). She had accompanied Chicago museum art on its way to be shown here at the Van Gogh Museum. After I had been to the balcony a lot, and when the taxi was waiting, and when Lonneke had signed the drawing Barbara would accompany back to Chicago, we kissed good bye. Somehow Barbara passed at that moment the message on to me that I was too sentimental in regard to Dieter. The next day I think Peter popped up with another crate of beer, in Boekie Woekie. On street level one doesn't have balconies. Luckily Peter didn't bring his crate with him from Cologne, but bought it here. His story was namely that his car had broken down on its way to Amsterdam. One would not want to picture anyone having to hitchhike with a crate of beer (and god knows what other stuff). Now, yesterday, it was Paul. He had done his business, and came to catch his breath, I thought. He was to leave on a plane to Edinburgh a few hours later. The weather situation had all day been bad, planes were flying lowly over the city center, which they only are allowed to do if there is no other option. Amsterdam's architecture is an ingredient of its attraction for tourists. It is a baroque city. Maybe its authorities would like to be persuaded to let Amsterdam join Disneyland, but they knew they had to set the rule that roaring jets are too much. Don't make the houses tremble. Our Paul, sleep- and food less for record length, wanted to swallow something before he would embark on this turbulent looking mission of going home. He asked me to come along, and we soon faced a steak. Being people with a knife and fork routine, that was no problem (though as an airsickness pill Paul maybe should have swallowed the steak uncut). Mentioning the word "problem" though, repeated glances at wristwatches became necessary, when a northern Norwegian happy homo and his friend, a lovely young woman, suggested they would sit with us and did. He very soon after sitting down tore the protective plastic off an immaculate white canvas-on-a-strecher, he said he had bought together with other artist material to send home to a friend, and went to bother the people on the next table to get some leftovers of salad dressing to start the picture. It sadly didn't become much of a picture, though I signed it. Paul had to split, I had to open up the shop for him to grab his belongings. I suppose he is in Edinburgh now. If not it would have been on the radio.
January 25th, 2002 I think what I began to tell 2 days ago needs to be continued, if it is supposed to make sense. But do I suppose it to? I don't quite know myself. I had an idea of what I wanted to say - that the Rhine runs down as a transporting vehicle for all which needs to be forgotten or forgiven (in Switzerland, Germany and Holland). I should have mentioned that it was in Hamburg, when I saw the big ships on the Elbe and they hadn't come downstream, but upstream of course, potentially returning the cargo of all which had been flushed down the Rhine. But why I began to speculate 2 days ago about this other than that I felt it somehow remarkable, I don't know (any longer).
January 23rd, 2002 The rhinewards oriented Germans say that there is anyhow much water running down the Rhine. So do I, I am a Rhinelander. I have lived there during my 25 first years. We mean with it: all is forgiven, even forgotten. But it was on the river Elbe that I saw the big ships. That was when I was eleven.
January 16th, 2002 Today a brief note only, one about an "m". Towards the end of the last entry of Jan. the 12th, one can read now the word "somber". For four days the internet public was reading there instead "sober". I added the "m" only now. I don't really know why I did it. I like the adjective "sober" better than "somber", and "sober" did cover most of what I wanted to say - maybe I should have changed it into "sober and somber"?
January 12th, 2002 Wilbert and Simona were looking late last night into the shop window, seeing me working, though at first they thought I was asleep. I went to open the door for them and with a few beers we found each other soon in a conversation. We came to speak about artists who don't find recognition while they are alive. Wi.Si. had just been visiting an old aunt, widow of such a one. I spoke about my father, also in that row. Then I remembered a moment with Karl Ludwig. Karl Ludwig and his wife Babs had come to Amsterdam together with Malcolm and Brigitte on the 29th of Dec., 2 weeks ago, from Heidelberg. (See the entry of Dec.28th.) We didn't know them before. Karl Ludwig told us that he was busy preparing a Nolde exhibition for an institution and that he hoped that in the wind shadow of the famous name there would be in future other less predictable shows possible. I mentioned to him the name of an artist who had volunteered for and then died in the Spanish Civil War, Heinz Kiwitz. (I know about Heinz because my mother has told me he courted her around 1930.) I thought I had mentioned the name of an unrecognized artist. Karl Ludwig however knew him, and even immediately placed him in relation to a friend from back then, Günther Strupp. When sitting together with Wilbert and Simona, telling them about this incident, I heard myself say that at that moment when I learnt that there was a professional person who knew, I had felt like giving him, my hero Karl Ludwig, a kiss. Of course there came second thoughts. They were caused maybe because I recently noticed in a letter by Ira that his understanding differs from mine in regard to the Eichendorff poem Dieter quoted, writing it into the guest book of the gallery in which he had his last exhibition a few days before he died. Ira was a friend of the late Dieter. The line in question goes "und es kennt mich auch keiner mehr hier". Dieter said (in the words of Eichendorff) that soon nobody will know him here anymore, feeling undoubtedly, that he wouldn't live much longer. For someone who was well aware of his fame, it is a somber statement. To me Dieter with this poem shows that it is no question for him but that he will have to be ready to join ranks with those artists, about which Wi.Si. and me worried. Dieter seems to me to claim that he will soon have to be unrecognizable by anyone. As anyone else who dies. And that what the living ones are saying about those who are dead is at the most some part of the process of forgetting them. - Before I'm lost too deep in the mist of paradoxical thoughts, I'll call it a day as an artist who attempted to be recognized but knew in the long run he wouldn't.
January 9th, 2002 Today was different (from the 5th). Joris, who once considered to become a student in the Dieter Roth Academy, came back from Copenhagen with a book parcel from Jesper. In it my favorite
Andersen, Finn Thybo At Bćre Vand Carrying Water drawn picture story, (Köbenhavn) 1995, EUR 10.-
Inflated Constructions Part III a flip book with quite a long - er - "movie" by Hanne Nielsen + Birgit Johnsen on the occasion of an exhibition, Köbenhavn 2000, EUR 14,50
and other books, which also are very delightful. This is as near as I can get to ordering the reader to order. Read also the NEW ITEMS section of this web site!
January 5th, 2002 When of marks a day made some are to be written down, and the one who supposes (selfinflictedly supposes of course) to have to write them down, - he, who is me, the one who is writing: I can only say what a shitty day it was. Shit marks all over! Something wrong here today, at least grammerwise. Little Kaspars are sticking their tongues out.
January 3rd, 2002 Well, that was the season, and now it is over. The season had looked like getting a tail, Dizy and his wife from Berlin had announced themselves for a few days right after the change of the year, and Heide and Jörg wanted to pass by from a holiday at the seaside, but both couples called their visits off. Hetti, Rúna and me are quite happy to be able to fall into a slower pace. I began to calm myself down yesterday by cutting up a piece of cardboard tube lengthwise into half. Then I cut 7 slits for 7 cardboard bulkheads crosswise into one of the halves of the tube to make 8 separate compartments, one for each of the 8 different coins the new currency has. This makeshift till is now in function, the Euros have begun to roll in and out of it. Who opens the first few letters of our book list in this web site can see that we are in the process of making the new prices known potentially world wide. Rudolf suddenly appeared, on a day trip from Cologne, with bars of chocolate in his pockets. He was disappointed that I had to give him the copy of
DIETER AND DOROTHY Dorothy Iannone Dieter Roth Their Correspondence in Words and Works 1967-1998 edited by D.Iannone, a big, colourful and interesting book, Zürich 2001. As was mentioned before in this diary (Oct.20th, 2001) we take orders for it. (EUR 106.- plus postage)
- that I had to give him his copy unsigned by Dorothy. He had bought it when he paid a visit to the Boekie Woekie booth at the last Frankfurt Book Fair but left it with me because Dorothy would be present at the reception we had organized for one of the next days on the occasion of the appearance of this book. I had promised him to ask her to sign it for him. That I had to give him his copy after all unsigned by Dorothy triggered off bits of a complicated story which wouldn't have been easy to tell anyhow but since Rudolf is a nervous type who can't listen to many words in sequence but rather makes them himself not much came of it. He left with his book, and I continued to change prices from Guilders to Euros until after midnight.
December 28th, 2001 Rúna bought today for Boekie Woekie an Euro-calculator. There was still a piece of soft eraser - we begin to adopt the new currency. One of us will have to be here tomorrow already at 9 am, while usually we open only at 12.00. The delivery of the ordered amount of new coins has been announced to take place between 9 am and 4 pm. Guess who will be here early tomorrow morning. Yes. And it is getting midnight soon. And a visitor just came by train from Paris, announced by phone only this morning by Vera, from Iceland. She is going to meet him here the day after tomorrow I think. If they don't find a hotel we'll put them both up. But more guests will arrive tomorrow - Malcolm and Brigitte from Heidelberg. Our Amsterdam friends know that in the afternoon of tomorrow the finisage of Malcolm's Boekie Woekie exhibition will take place, since there was no opening. Malcolm and Brigitte will have friends with them. The house may get quite full of guests. Let's say it is the season.
December 21st, 2001 I was in a hurry to leave a big city last night - in what one would call a dream. Since I didn't know where the bus I would have to get would stop, I was crossing hastily the big avenue, to read the destinations on the schedule boards of other bus stops too. I saw with a bit of surprise, that I had sandals and no socks on my feet. Under my arm I held a large drawing pad, which I knew was empty because I just had got it. Though it was night it was not dark. The light did not come from the street lights, but from the moon. Everything was visible and very detailed, but only the details I account for, now in this description of my dream, I can recall. That "everything" was visible and detailed is a description of how I felt it was, when dreaming. The earth was also up in the sky, blue and green, green the tiny but recognizable continents. A bus came, in the window above the front window it said Central Station. I thought I would better take it. The driver asked whether the airport wouldn't be better for me. I said if he could make it, there would be a plane at a quarter past eight. He knew the time: in three quarters of an hour, and he thought he could. Out of this acceleration I woke up. It wasn't much past seven. I almost right away thought it was strange that I had in my dream not thought that, since I had seen the earth up in the sky, I had been on an other planet. How inappropriate of me to want to take a bus to the station for a train to come back to earth! And who had been the driver of the bus? Hadn't it been his intelligence (to suggest the airport) which had made it possible that I could come back? This morning, I didn't even remember whether I had seen his face.
December 18th, 2001 I had just opened the shop when someone came in - a Japanese looking young woman. After a while she put what she wanted to buy in front of me. A conversation ensued, she had been visiting us before - 10 years ago. Then she must have been here as a child, I thought, but suppressed to say it. She wanted to know how to pronounce Boekie Woekie, and what it meant. She showed me a booklet with for me strange handmade signs - Japanese writing. Tomorrow she said she will fly back to Japan. Amongst her Japanese signs in Western World signs the 2 words in question appeared: BOEKIE WOEKIE. I let her hear the pronunciation, and explained what those 2 words mean to me. That "boek" is Dutch for "book" and phonetically the same. That of course "boogie woogie" is the name of a kind of popular music of some decades ago, and a way of turbulent dancing. And that we had felt when we began our enterprise 15 years ago, that what we were embarking on, would probably proof to be a shaky business. And that therefore a fusion of book and boogie woogie had seemed to us not at all far fetched. Then she said that if she would come next time, in 10 years time, she would very much hope to come back to Boekie Woekie. I said I would hope so too.
December 15th, 2001 It became early today morning last night in BoeWoe, sitting with beer and Helgi and Magga and Rúna talking once more about everything. Hetti was disappointed that her marinated cabbage and smoked and boiled sausages did not lure us to her dinner table. I don't claim it was a trick of mine not to go home for dinner yesterday, in order to get today a bigger portion than I would have got last night, when 3 of us would have had to share the meal, and now only 2. Though the sausages are something special, Hetti brings them in the wintertime from a butcher in her hometown Zwolle, when she returns from one of her occasional visits to her aunts, 3 ladies in their 90 ties.
December 13th, 2001 Guido gave a hint in BoeWoe today about our "German folk art" (see the entry of Dec.7th). He said that in case we wouldn't have sold "it" (the more than 100 pieces of it) by Christmas, those Christmas Fathers which would remain might still make good merchandise, if bundled up, as firewood. We always like the clever people. But as we are who we are in BW it doesn't make much of a difference to us since we anyhow sell close to nothing and at the best we sell the dust the stuff we don't sell has collected. (See the entry of August the 3rd.)
December 10th, 2001 Today an old friend called who was worried about what she had read further down, about my health. She had an idea for what I could do. We'll talk again about it. For the moment I'm surprised and glad - in the entry before I mention my health, the one of November 23rd, I express the hope that this published diary could be read as an ongoing letter by those with whom I am used to share what's going on by writing to them personally. It was read! At least by one of them.
December 7th, 2001 Madeline and her mother Cornelia came with more than 100 examples of "German folk art", as they call it: branches of trees sawn to pieces of various length of up to about 25 cm. The one end is cut flat, so that the piece of branch can stand on it. The other is cut diagonally. That end they have painted with Father Christmas faces. When a group of these branches is standing close together, with their faces so to say looking up at you, they are quite a comical sight. Of course they are meant to be sold. It is the season. The arrival of those funny Father Christmas fellows coincided with a not at all funny scene. The entrance to Boekie Woekie has frequently been used by homeless people, as it offers some shelter from rain and wind. (It is that season.) Pieces of cardboard, left behind in the entrance hall, having obviously served as a mattress were bearing witness of those guests. Or, as several times recently, the homeless is a late riser (mind Boekie Woekie only opens at noon!) and who of us was first to open the shop had to climb over her (the recent guest was a she) to get to the door and into the shop. Before our branch of Father Christmas arrived that day the situation culminated and the police had to come. And the shop could only be opened at one o'clock, and impatient words were used, and I felt thoroughly lousy.
December 2nd, 2001 When I think about the struggle I have with the Boekie Woekie offset machine, that it doesn't want to make the pictures as I want them, I get ideas. Ideas one gets when one needs them, is one of the ideas I get. Another (not altogether new either, but newer) idea is why should the offset machine not know better how the things should look which it makes? It is a professional tool after all. Of course I'm a professional too, my profession is learning, and learning is learning to appreciate rules and, of course, how to circumnavigate them. So what shall I say when the stem in the flower image of my postcard with the 4 words "Two Lips From Amsterdam" appears juicily green on the cardboard I'm printing on, but the petals of the "tulips", the "two lips" are staying pale, as much as I struggle to get them juicy too? In all former editions of this card there have been juicy lips/petals, now my machine thinks they should be very faint. I have to say "aha". But there is, just in time, a 3rd idea: No more thinking!
December 1st, 2001 I wasn't really awake yet when Rúna phoned. She pointed out that we were in a hurry to get the picture postcards ready, which a Japanese museum has ordered. It didn't take me long to know again what she was talking about because I hadn't forgotten the subject: almost all of last week I have been trying in vain to get our Rotaprint R 40 Automat-offset machine to cooperate with me to make the images more or less like I would want them on a kind of cardboard which our machine and me have little experience with. So I got today some cardboard the machine has liked for years before. Tomorrow I'll see more clearly, where we are at.
November 29th, 2001 Ineke stayed with us for one night, just to be able to catch an early plane to Ireland, where her parents live since they retired. Ineke is the owner of what we think is an outstanding painting by Rúna, and has become a friend. She lives 2 hours by train away from Amsterdam. We drank a not too late beer with her around one of the near corners and I took the opportunity to tell her about a sensation I feel since a few months after biking to, or home from BoeWoe - some sort of pain in my chest. Ineke is a GP, and found I would better see a doctor and mentioned the word arteriosclerosis. I pointed out that for a more serious check-up my health insurance would make it necessary that I would go to a doctor in Germany, and that that would not be all that easy - I don't really have a place of my own there any more. She suggested that at least I should take an aspirin a day.
November 23rd, 2001 I know I owe letters. To not yet have answered must put me into a bad light with some of my pen pals. I am under pressure. The best is I give everything. But no more of it tonight, only this thought: Couldn't I get away with delaying to write those personalized notes by making those who expect to hear from me aware of this diary?
November 20th, 2001 I was going through the pockets of my clothes before I gave them to be cleaned, and came across a stiff, carelessly folded A4 sheet which originally was handed to me as a Vehicle Identification Pass when I drove on to the grounds of the Frankfurt Book Fair, more than a month ago. I mention it because on it is a hand written note I must have made during a train ride. (I think I only took the train twice, since then, Basel to and fro.) The note says in German something like: During a night train ride a child opens with the help of its father the tiny window which still can be opened in German trains and frightens the darkness by shouting out "Booh".
November 15th, 2001 Hetti and I agreed that it would be more appropriate in the present situation, if we delayed our departure for Iceland until early next year. Besides the daily responsibilities of running a shop, postcards need to be printed, and the whole administration needs to be made fit for the coming new currency. Just to think that some thousands of books need to get their old prices erased, and the new ones written into them!
November 4th, 2001 Now I'm back in Amsterdam from 5 days in Basel. I went from A to B to in order to check the contents of card board boxes Dieter had stored in his cellar. My intention was again to list the contents of what I would find there. I thought only 8 boxes were left of about 120 which I hadn't checked so far. But then on a shelf unnoticed before, there were some more boxes, at least another 8. That's why I have to say I returned from a mission not yet completed. Gunnar and Björn are still building shelves, and they are organizing the transportation for all those plus/minus a 130 boxes from the humid basement into the dry. The day after my return to A Malcolm came, he installed his second exhibition in BoeWoe. While he was busy, Pieter and Marianne walked into the shop - it is long since we met, maybe more than a year. I have respected Pieter as an artist and liked him as a friend for more than 20 years. I saw in him for long the only artist/collegue in Amsterdam I could really talk to. But his spells in Amsterdam have gotten fewer and shorter and those in the South of France more frequent and longer. When asked he says he works on his house there. He will soon go again.
October 25th, 2001 Gunnar has gone to Basel. He is to build shelves in dry surroundings for the contents of the more than humid cellar in which Dieter stored his archive. While in Amsterdam Gunnar was taking the waters in my company. Doing that we talked among other subjects about the Dieter Roth Academy. And about my Lada, which is stored in a dry place not far from where Gunnar has his workshop near Reykjavík. I hope he will, when back in Iceland put the number plates back on and see to it, that the obligatory checkup takes place, without which it would be forbidden to drive the car. And boy, do I long for to drive it. And Hetti has to practice driving. When she was in Iceland last January, early February, she made her driving license. I think I maybe didn't mention it. But since then she hasn't touched a steering wheel. I hope Rúna will soon have settled in her renewed apartment, so that Hetti and me can "go for a drive".
October 20th, 2001 It feels to me like I took a long leave from diary writing. But I stayed away from it only for 12 days. The feeling probably is due to the permaturbulence of those days. From the second last Tuesday to this week Monday it was Frankfurt and the 53rd Book Fair and from this week Tuesday to Thursday, the day before yesterday, it was Rainer and Agnes from Hungary. They were visiting. And from today until next week Tuesday we have Gunnar, from Iceland, as our guest. What should I mention? I learnt from Martin, from Kirkireton, near Derby, and temporarily even nearer, as neighbor in hall 4, 1st floor, aisle M, I think booth 111, since our address was at 109, and between him and us was only the booth of Simon an Erica, that that which we were doing there in Frankfurt in English was "taking the waters". We (mainly Simon, Björn an me) took our cure seriously. We never waited longer than noon, before opening the first beer bottles, to then continue non stop for the rest of the day. As always there, endlessly many unknown faces streamed by. A few known ones occasionally stopped, words from the English or German vocabulary played their role. Orders were placed. Two forthcoming publications were shown around in our vicinity as big dummies, both part of the aftermath of the late Dieter. The one showing colorfully the collection of originals a Hamburg lawyer has compiled, essentially with Dieter's help, the other a collection of interviews Dieter gave throughout his life. Barbara has compiled it. For the one Lazlo brought his long awaited text. The other looks like it is going to contain besides a lot of text and a number of photographs also a photograph of Dieter and me. This photograph shows clearly the benefits on my face of "taking the waters", while Dieter is portrayed in this quasi healthy mode a couple of times. There was also one new ready book which without Dieter wouldn't have been there. It got called
DIETER AND DOROTHY Dorothy Iannone Dieter Roth Their Correspondence in Words and Works 1967-1998 It also is big and color- and also beautiful. We take orders for it. Until the end of 2001 it costs 170.- of our Guilders. (EUR 77,50)
Björn and me stayed at Aldo's and Karin's new home - and Dorian's second home. Dorian, their son, is now one year old, and doesn't find me as frightening when he is up on the arm of his mother, it seems, than when he stands on his feet holding her leg looking at me from down there. Hardly back in Amsterdam Rainer and Agnes came. We knew they would, they were invited. It is 20 years since they last were here. Now they were en route from Pécs via Passau, Frankfurt (were we also met), Cologne, Amsterdam, Bad Salzuffeln, to Berlin in order to let their 17 years old Audi undergo the biannual obligatory checkup, without which it wouldn't be allowed on the roads. Rainer wants Boekie Woekie to be the sole representative for the books of his 30 years of publishing. Though this intention honors us the Dutch will hardly buy his books. Titles in German are not necessarily popular here. (I hear every so often someone say "dit is 'n duitse boekenwinkel" and then leave.) Wilbert and Simona sat in their car when they left. For them a day trip, they would drive first to the Kröller Müller Museum in Otterlo whence they would return by train. The wild boar watches over his sow and their young ones near this museum, as I witnessed the 2 times I came there. So far I haven't heard that Wilbert and Simona are back, or that Rainer and Agnes have reached Bad Salzuffeln, but there is nothing in the papers either.
October 8th, 2001 There are now 100 copies of the catalogue, or more appropriately, of the price list, of the books of Roth's Verlag and Boekie Woekie. 100 must be enough for the book fair. 100 beers have been processed to get them accomplished. That must be enough for the time being. Good night everyone (in case you are as tired as I am).
October 7th, 2001 No laughter so far today, but work work work on the book catalogue for Roth's Verlag and Boekie Woekie which I have to take with me when I go to the Frankfurt Book fair the day after tomorrow. And no longing to laugh either, certainly after I heard from Hetti just now on the phone, that the politicians want the military to make worse what they themselves have spoiled in the first place. Heide had phoned earlier today, and I remember I have said something like fighting terrorism could only be effectively done by allowing no reason for it to occur. By allowing all to get a fair deal. It's almost 10 pm, I have the manuscript of the catalogue ready for photocopying it tomorrow. The first copies of "Til Dćmis ...", the new Dieter Roth Academy publication got ready today too (see on top of "new items" in the opening menu) - what else can I do than to go home and get sadder by watching tv.
September 30th, 2001 The laughter of today came when it showed that I had forgotten the back scratcher (or what it may is called, that practical prolongation of ones arm and hand one uses to relieve the itch which ones anatomy does not allow one to easily get at) - that I had forgotten the back scratcher under my shirt. It was still there after I had come to Boekie Woekie. I thought I remembered I had used it half dressed with my first coffee. Somehow I had forgotten it there, and only felt it when sitting and leaning back in my chair. The laughter of today was for me mixed with the worry that here and there my functions fail. I couldn't help to think that that must be the work of the Ruďnettes!
September 28th, 2001 We happened to stumble over a new name today, it triggered off our laughter: The Ruďnettes. Hetti, short for Henriëtte, and Rúna, short for Guđrún, when they work together, they are the Ruďnettes. Boekie Woekie knows all about it.
September 26th, 2001 Often people mistake Boekie Woekie for a stationery shop and enter to ask for anything from pencil sharpeners to telephone cards. When one was asking actually for stationery the other day I began to think that that is what one might call Boekie Woekie really, a stationery shop. Don't words get attached to every item here, written, spoken or thought words? Doesn't every item change sooner or later hands and thus simply becomes a legible message from one to another? Or is Boekie Woekie maybe a letter box - one into which senders deposit their letters, and out of which receivers take those which they understand as meant for them. Or is it all only words, words not attached to anything real, and what are the items then, in case they are no potential word carriers? In case one needs to sound interesting, it is handy if one can pull out from ones sleeve a little paradox. However, this is the wrong time for me - I'm stuck in the middle of organizing a complex book, to be ready in 100 copies in a few days. No time for paradoxes.
September 20th, 2001 Back, together with Rúna, from Iceland. Ibby's funeral. She only got 51. Poor Sigrún. Her parents, now both dead, made my first 10 years in their country possible. Kristján's retrospective exhibition opening in the municipal museum of Reykjavík. Many of his friends have been my friends for a long time. His opening was a long, wet affair. Kristján and me own since 22 years a house together out there on the shore of a fjord of the north coast. (See also the entry of June 17th.) It was by no means dry during the remaining 5 days, but they were short in comparison to the amount of work that had to be accomplished. Together with Björn, Magnús Reynir, Eggert, Gunnar and Rúna and Gulla we worked on the manuscript of the 2nd Dieter Roth Academy book, and even printed a few first pages. After arriving yesterday afternoon, I had to sleep for 15 hours. Today I was happy to see that Hetti had managed Boekie Woekie well.
September 10th, 2001 There is a quite serious time pressure to get the before mentioned second Dieter Roth Academy publication ready for the Frankfurt Book Fair, which begins in just one month. Tomorrow I'll fly for a week to Iceland to organize the manuscript together with Björn, and Magnús Reynir is going to help. We had planned to work on it in Amsterdam, but Björn found it on several occasions impossible to come.
September 3rd, 2001 The Dieter Roth Academy exhibits from May/June in Pécs have been brought by friendly Dutch summertime neighbors of Rainer and Agnes to Holland and finally also to Boekie Woekie. Rainer delegated the return of the works of the participants in the exhibition to us, though their return would have been his obligation. Two cardboard boxes, 2 big suitcases, and quite a sack are messing now up the first back room of Boekie Woekie. It is the same room were work is picking up speed and volume for what will mainly be a text and only to a small extend a picture book, and the Dieter Roth Academy's second publication - I'm sure I will have reason to write again about it. (It was first mentioned in this diary on Feb.17th.)
August 30th, 2001 For once it is easy what subject I shall pick for the diary of today - I'll pick the pictures of chairs I found while tidying up my room earlier today. The pictures are 8 drawings on cardboard I made back in '85. I picked then pictures of chairs I had found in works by Hopper, Klee, Spitzweg, Lissitzky, Holstein, Matisse, Rot and Bosch. Each drawing I headed "Pick Chair!". Often in my picture making career a phonetic twist has triggered off an image. I took the drawings with to Boekie Woekie when I went to take the shop over from Hetti in the afternoon. There I took my monkeys down and pinned the pickchairs up.
August 25th, 2001 I closed the shop punctually at 6 in order to go to, and am now back at 7 from, an opening of mainly video works by Nan which took place in a big building reserved for modern media arts around the corner from BoeWoe. Raul and then Michael, who obviously had had invitations, had dropped into BW on their way there, and had made me aware of the presentation. Now back, I started the pc again to give my opinion here on what I have seen - I am fervently negative. To collect my thoughts I go to stand for a moment in the door to the street, when Raul appears again - I without problems lure him in with the prospect of more beer, and instead of writing do the much easier job of telling him of my dislike. On top of which he tells me something, and I tell him something and he me and so on, until we are happy to grasp the chance to forget what we have been saying anyhow and go each to his home. August 21th, 2001 I had taken a few steps out of the shop on my way to the mailbox, when I was approached by someone who asked me directions for where to buy a mosquito net. I said I had no idea, and walked on. Only later I thought maybe this was a staged meeting by this someone who politely expressed his criticism. He may be reading this diary, and may not agree to my nightly action paint activities! (See the entry of Aug.10th.) He may have meant that I should rather buy a mosquito net, than that I hunt them and turn them into pictures!
August 17th, 2001 In my entry for July 28th I mention the back room behind the back room I had written about before. Those 2 back rooms are separated by a small patio. This patio is almost entirely covered by big gray tiles and many potted plants are usually standing there. 3 weeks ago we put them higher up, on makeshift tables because green stuff lovers were coming for a visit, we feared for the plants. Among the visitors is what I thought was a young hare, but it is what would have been a wild rabbit, if it had not become a foundling. Foster mother is 9 years old Fritzi, daughter of Fredie (see further down) and his wife Yntse. They went off to camp in Belgium. I see the small animal many times a day and each time I see it I'm stunned how beautiful it is. Since I was ready to call the spots slammed mosquitos would make works of my art I'm insecure now what nature, art and my love for it is. August 15th, 2001 It is hot in Amsterdam, and heat and books by artists we know since long don't go together - in more than 4 hours, that we are open now one lost lady has walked once around the main book table and then left.
August 10th, 2001 Raul was visiting the shop today, amongst other topics speaking about my monkey paintings. Whether I would lend them for an exhibition. (See my entry of June 20th.) I have let him include before some of them in a gallery show here in Amsterdam. But I said I was more into action painting recently. Mainly red paintings, quite small, made at night, murals. Not easy to lent because of them being murals: they are not hanging, as pictures, on walls, but have become part of walls, and those walls are needed where they are. I was speaking of my slammed tormentors, those itch creators, my bloodsucking muse, those goddamned mosquitoes. He got it and smiled. Later I thought I'll cover the wall of my bedroom with sheets of paper - like some artists prepare several white canvasses to work on simultaneously.
August 7th, 2001 Rúna is off again to Iceland - her flat is under reconstruction, and instead of waiting for it to get ready in an alternative flat the landlord would have provided, she took the opportunity to switch for a month from her home to her home country. I think it is today that 30 years ago I myself arrived there for the first time. Shortly after I got there first, the dress rules they had for going out became a problem for me. In Reykjavík you needed as a male to wear trousers which had no seams along the outside of their legs, and a tie. No blue jeans, which were all I had come with! I was introduced by someone who understood, to a man of my build, who lend me a pair of his trousers. Later we became friends. On our first meeting I remember his wife in a dark kitchen washing dishes, smiling. There was a new born baby. Now she has to get morphine in a hospital and cannot live much longer, and he his dead since 15 years, having half fallen, half thrown himself in front of a car on a highway. But their baby daughter from then is now 30 years old and has a child of her own. August 3rd, 2001 We are running for 15 years a bookshop which carries artists' books - as we understand that term. In most of the cases a book in BoeWoe is not bought by us from its maker, but it is given to us on consignment. The owner gets his money only after his book is sold. We feel it is right that the maker of a book in an edition of copies who chooses not to have behind it the launching power of the book making industries, experiences reality similarly to us. BoeWoe is investing the rent for the space the book is lying (or standing) on, he has taken care of making the thing. BoeWoe is sharing with the maker the risk that the happy moment of selling it might be long from now. I have found for us though our own sneaky way for a chance to profit from the calamity of maybe having to wait forever. This shows:
Voss, Jan Implodierte Skulptur vacuum cleaner bag full with dust from books waiting to be bought in Boekie Woekie, numbered, signed, since 1994, 500.-
That this multiple does not really sell either, who would be surprised. It's mainly show business.
July 30th, 2001 It is late, it is already the 31st since 34 minutes, but for me it is still today, which was the 30th. There is another bottle of beer. Last night I was uncomfortable, mosquitos and sweat. I think it will be the same tonight. I'm tired but since I can't avoid it, I 'd like at least to delay another nightmare. (The more tired I'll be the better the chances are that I'll sleep through, is what I tell myself, knowing it will not be so. More tired means more erratic bits of sleep.) I'll be waiting to have the tv on for "Der Landarzt", a treat. This television series is about as inconsequential as the best of ones dreams, it feels I could say it is as refreshing as sleep to watch it.
July 28th, 2001 Boekie Woekie has a back room which is even further in the back than the room I have so far called the back room. It is our storage room and some time ago we paid quite an effort to tidy it up. But arranging the book and picture storage space more according to our needs luckily rendered space for a small table, next to an ivy clad window. I have spend some late night hours there recently, working on a book I'd like to present in the fall at the book fair in Frankfurt. An offspring of it, which was quite easy to make and therefore already now available in Boekie Woekie is:
Voss, Jan Es Dämmert brief text- and picture story, numbered, signed, Amsterdam 2001, 25.-
But what I was setting out to say was something else: The table I made in the back of our back room proofs to have a slightly bent top. A round thing, a writing tool for example, will roll down and over the edge of it, so that it falls to the floor. Hearing it roll and land down there, and having to lean out of my chair to pick it up, is distracting and makes me forget what I was thinking about. And when I have put the pencil (for example), this time more carefully, back onto the table top, and while leaning back in my chair, there is a new idea: I think the distraction did not only let me forget what I was thinking before but it lets me think of my table making self as of the impish husband of the mother of all invention. And then I'm quickly off to the front room, where the pc stands, to proclaim to the public my newly found out martial status. - You are not surprised, are you, if I say that by now I have forgotten many times what I was going to write, and what stands here is a totally different story from what I thought it should be shortly after I had picked up the pen from the floor.
July 25th, 2001 Fredie is quite efficient in finding more drops for the museum. I have one too, but rereading the fairy tale of the brave dressmaker by the Grimm brothers, I see that out of the stone which the giant squeezes, water drips, but the juice runs out of the cheese the dressmaker squeezes, cheating the giant. (I had hoped the brave dressmaker wouldn't have been all that strong, I find dripping cheese a more fascinating picture then cheese out of which the juice runs. And with the drops which fall out of the hand which presses the stone - who tells us it's not sweat which is falling.) - I haven't had the nerves yet to return to postcard printing. - Solveig is in Amsterdam with her eldest grandchild, a girl of 10. They stay with Rúna, amidst the mess of cardboard boxes - Rúna has to leave her apartment for a fundamental reconstruction of the house she lives in and has packed almost all her belongings. The house from the end 19th century started to sink (on one side more than on the other) for more than 10 cm a few month ago - we are in Amsterdam. We all ate there the marinated haddock Solveig had made and brought with her from Iceland. The marinade from sugar, salt and dill makes the fish, just because it is so much less fat than for example salmon, a real delicacy, nobody minded for a while how tilted the house is.
July 19th, 2001 It is the end of my holidays, however before I'm back to print postcards - an activity I dread under the circumstances (see below why), I take the opportunity to loose a few words on what the holidays of my holidays were, just now, I mean recently, the last few days. They began with that I couldn't see right what I saw one morning because my still sleepy eyes wouldn't adjust to the tele text page which I had awakened by remote control in order to kindle my interest in the world. Through some blur I was let to read "Tropfen Museum", but after enough blinking, it became "Tropen Museum" (Museum of the Tropics, the Dutch colonial museum in Amsterdam). But "Tropfen" (drops) I liked better - imagining a river with all its particular drops, or a permanently suspended rain fall in a museum. To begin, I wrote on an empty card board box "Tropfen Museum" and put it into the shelf, ready for the rain to start falling. Then Fredie (the Fredie of the Waldeinsamkeit, see the entry of March 10th) came with a booklet by Paul Gallico he had happened to find and bought for me on the flea market. It contains (in Dutch) a story called "The Snowflake". He had bought it because he knows I collect books referring to or are about Iceland, in German, Dutch or English. This book from 1953 had caught his eye because he found it "nicely made" - it is made in the style of the time, which is about in the middle between his and my birth date, which almost automatically makes me find it "nicely made" too. When Fredie had opened it on a random page, he had stumbled over this bit of conversation between Snowflake and Raindrop: "Tell me now about your birth, how did that happen?" "It was above Iceland, I believe." - I dropped the book into the Tropfen Museum as a 1st exhibit (and will have to be on the look-out for a second copy for my Iceland shelf). July 17th, 2001 I have had a quite mixed week. Bad luck, or my inability to deal with the matter accompanied me for 2 days when I was trying to print new BoeWoe picture postcards on a for us new kind of stiff paper. We have bought a lot of it. I'm afraid that may have been a mistake. Anyhow it is frustrating when one sheet after the other tears up in the machine, because the 1st one gets stuck to the rubber mat and then all those which follow pile up in a messy mess. I was really relieved to come out of our printery when Hetti and Rúna asked me to attend to the now urgent request of the authorities to pay them the value added tax. It is that calculation I'm taking a holiday of when I write this diary. Twice relieved: no printing, no bookkeeping, just diary writing! Yesterday I had a spare relief, that was when Thomas came on a visit. It got later than it will get tonight.
July 8th, 2001 When I opened, just now, the diary page in my computer and read over the last entry, I saw I had put it on the world wide web without finishing the text - the 2nd last sentence was incomplete and unreadable, more spelling mistakes than I'm ready to permit myself, real computer confusion, due of course, to real me confusion. I corrected now what I saw was wrong. At least one person has read it in the wrong form. I have an e-mail from Ana, who quotes from it. But she doesn't tell me I must have fallen asleep before finishing what I wanted to say. Yesterday, on my way to Boekie Woekie I happened to meet Cheng on Nieuw Markt. He just was coming from the dentist. His upper lip was still artificially made stiff. It was the first meeting since he closed his restaurant we used to go to for so many years. I had for some time imagined to meet him or his wife, knowing they live in the neighborhood, and I had been planning to propose a dinner at our home where she would do the cooking, because in spite of all the China town restaurants around, their duck was singular, and I would enjoy to once wait on him. The roles were the other way round for so long, and Rúna or Hetti or both and me could maybe learn some tricks of the duck cooking trade. But with some dried up blood on his lower lip I was too shy to mention it. Our Fins are back home. Anja checked out some of the diamond places in town, but felt rebuffed, because of what she thought the diamondtiers thought was her Russian accent in her English. Matti ate a whole pot of chocolate pasta sandwich spread.
July 4th, 2001 My hay fever medicine can't cope with the amount of pollen in the air. I had a bad day today. Yesterday it was better. Because the English language has it in it, I'm saying "Since then it is going badder all the time". Yesterday Holger came with his student Klaus S. (the S abbreviates his 2nd first name) a former architect, around the same time that all the Fins popped in. One of them smoked together with his mother his first joint on our patio, back home in a few days he must become a soldier. Holger enjoys his sabbatical (but speaks much about how involved he is with processes around his art school - it seems they can't really function without him.) I break the line because it wouldn't be straight thinking if I where to continue.
July 1st, 2001 Ulla with her son Matti and her friend Anja came from Finland. Ulla, when she studied here, was Hetti's friend and they stayed in contact ever since. Ulla and Anja are psychiatrists. We went to a restaurant and while reading the menu we pondered on the question, why one eats. I offered that we might have started to do it "back then" in order to muffle the sound of the constant chattering of our teeth and that, once we had learnt how to suppress that sound, it became quite easy to get new sound absorbing cushions for in-between our teeth: the bison wouldn't hear us approaching. A couple of thousands of years later, the cushions began to taste, the origin, to overcome the symptoms of fear, was forgotten, and if the steak hadn't come, we could have speculated about Pavlov and his dogs in that new technique called speech, which, I would then have claimed, after all is nothing but the return of the chattering of teeth in a new guise.
June 27th, 2001 Today I got 2 pages of writing by Dieter in the mail. As this sentence reads, Dieter would have been their sender. But it was Aldo. The 2 pages are part of a publication of an improvised appearance on the occasion of an exhibition in 1985 in Munich, together with one Michael Seeger. I never saw this photocopied text (type-written with many corrections in D.'s hand) before, but I don't doubt its genuineness. Aldo had asked me on the phone a few days before where the Dieter text on Picasso could be found, and I had had no idea. And now he was proud to have found it in his own collection, where he knew he had seen it. I'll try to translate this "Picasso text" from the German (as good as I can do now):
"Dear Listeners, some of those sentences, which you always have longed to hear being said, or have wanted to read, - which however you never have asked for - they might possibly appear in the text which we now permit ourselves to read to you:
Artists pretend to give something useful to those who look, or buy to look at, in their 3 dimensional stuff, or they act as if they were showing in their 2 dimensional flat stuff something like a plan that reveals what useful things the artists have discovered for the spectator, or one sees the road marked or described, which leads to where it's good, or where something good can be had. It's a pity, but nothing is to be had there. The apples are made of oil, the clouds of lead, the advises of blah blah. That's annoying, especially for those who are already in difficulties. For them the artists have nothing to give (the artists' stuff stays in the exhibition, or on the wall), it only talks about the artists' power & (an illegible handwritten word follows). One can say, then, that what they are giving is art! And art apples are from oil, and art clouds are made of lead, and so on. Art shall be, art makes people happy. Art is like the good Lord, he exists, and he is kindly disposed towards people. Though many say, he doesn't exist, only a few say there is no art, art that gives you something. One buys the works of art - as an individual or as a club - and beliefs one receives in the art work a value that gives one something - even though one cannot see it. It becomes difficult to recognize, whether the acquired item is, or at least can be called art. (It would be as difficult as recognizing the consecratedness of a bit of water, whose consecration happened without witnesses and without any consecrator being present.) There people like Picasso come in handy, who produce objects which look like what has been - unquestioningly, because for so, so long - called art, which simply "is art". Who would contradict someone who says: The Greek vase makers were artists; the sculptor Gonzales was an artist, and his stuff that is standing around, is art, Giacometti, he produced art; the negroes, obviously - where for us there are apples sitting on our art surfaces, for them there are idols. Picasso also makes such objects of art. For the attention of all those who can not belief in the art of his examples, who experience them as too sad, bitter, hopeless, gone wrong. Those objects among the objects of art, which have gone wrong, are sad, hopeless, are the only objects which can give something, namely the opportunity to detach oneself from the respect for art. And Picasso puts in front of those who don't like that, but who want to continue to belief and hope, things that are made like those which so far were called art. If his examples can be called objects which can't give anything in their gone wrong, sad, furious ways and make it easier to people to maintain their respect, their fear of art and artists, then one can call Picasso's sculptures objects which demonstrate their successfulness in their successful, funny, cunning ways. - To be looked at with that fear and that respect, with which works of art - unhappily for the viewer or owner - oppress the people. Picassoesque successfulness; he succeeds in pretending that the piece went wrong, he does so as if he were one of those bitter, sad, art-respect-dissolvers. To me however he appears smiling - whether in the triumph of success or in the triumph of failure, I can hardly say, but since Picasso's creations seem to be meant to maintain the uselessness of art - here at least of the sculptural art - and to maintain the false pretenses of salvation, I call them dummies. Cardboard - and bronze silhouette targets put up under protecting roofs, which simply act as if one could call them art, one of the manifestations of misery.
DUMMY (title at the end)"
I hope my English transports the complexity of Dieter's text. (From today, Sept.2nd 01, the translation of "Dummy" appears here in a revised form - I had asked Malcolm to check it through.) To mention something from a really different level: Hetti has started to come to Boekie Woekie on her bike again!
June 26th, 2001 Alec phoned a few days ago, that he was in Amsterdam, but couldn't be sure that he would make it in time (before 6 pm) to visit Boekie Woekie. We said we would anyhow stay on in the shop longer, and would look forward to see him, regardless whether he would be a little late. Before he hung up, maybe in case he wouldn't make it at all to come, or that he would find the shop after all closed, he said that Hans is hopelessly sick and that he had come to Holland (from Scotland) for a last visit. We were shocked. Hans is one of the artists we have books by, and we have known him for more than 10 years as a man to whom his art is very important, but who never pushed his point but very gently. Today came the announcement that he has died, 51 years old..
June 20th, 2001 Dick came to pick up his monkeys. He is the owner of 5 of them. Although 12 more unsold ones are still up on the walls of the back room of Boekie Woekie, - without those 5, my monkey exhibition seems to be over. I had namely an almost unannounced exhibition here of monkeys. My monkeys appear on used cleaning rags of our offset presses while I fiddle around with them a little, fiddle with brush and paint. Heide and Jörg have another 4. I have maybe another 100 used cleaning rags, I still can fiddle around with. As far as I'm concerned, monkeys are no endangered species. I shall, if necessary, recreate them. Petra came by, happy to see that we (still) have the first issue of her newspaper "Kronkel" on display. During 3 weeks, we only sold 1 copy, but the selling she says now isn't what it really is about. "Kronkel" aims at being the mouthpiece for those themes which are of importance to people with a vital interest in psychiatrical dealings - of course the patients, then the public and especially the law makers. Petra has a very good point. Because of taboos, few areas, in which people (have to) live are as easily manipulated. Her will to give reason a chance makes in my view "Kronkel" worth its 3 Guilders - please order, to convince yourself!
June 17th, 2001 At the end of the former entry to this diary, I seem to (me now) coquettishly want to tell something about that week, that instant, that split second. But by now, 2 more weeks are behind me (and everyone). I spend one more in Iceland, and another one here in Amsterdam.. Most of the details of that potentially long, long story are now hidden behind a good deal more of split seconds. That is how it goes, of course - but there were in that week about 10 minutes on the waters of Eyjafjörđur which I suppose I will not forget, how ever long those 10 minutes may really have lasted (especially if counted in split seconds). During them (and during about 70 before, and 40 after) I was together with Eggert, ţorđur and their apprentice on board of Bliki II on its first trial sail. It so happened there and then that the engine ran out of diesel and stopped. Kristján and me had been looking for some years for a new "Bliki" and finally he had found it in April near Reykjavík and bought it for himself, Ívar, Reynir and me. The being put into the sea at "our" harbour had been my reason for going to Iceland this time. Those 10 minutes ended when Jón Forseti, the beautiful oaken fishing vessel from Olafsfjörđur came sailing into our direction, and luckily became aware of our distress and towed us back to where we had come from. I can't help to think about this book:
Thorkelsdóttir, Rúna Blind Navigation images of small boats as if lost on a big sea (of paper), numbered/50, signed, Amsterdam 1987, 120.-
Please order!
June 3rd, 2001 I will not be able immediately to place this new entry on the diary page of the Boekie Woekie web site, which reflects on the more remote position of the pc I'm facing. More remote means fewer friends near by to help with computer questions. I'm in Eyjafjöđur, in the north of Iceland. What the pc here needs to enable me to change our site isn't easily installed. I could e-mail though what I am writing now, to Amsterdam. I'm sure Rúna, in Boekie Woekie in Amsterdam could, if told on the phone, copy it from our e-mail inbox and paste it into the appropriate spot in the diary section of the Netscape page composer program, and then call back the diary page from the computer of our server and send back to it the renewed version with the FTP program. But then, in one week I'm back in Boekie Woekie! With me will be what I have written here, stored as a copy on a floppy! I'll publish it only then. Were, for centuries, readers not used to wait for years, for decades for diaries to be published! What is a week, in comparison to the instantaneous. I'm for a week now in Iceland. It was a mere instant. But as any split second, it can be a long, long story.
May 26th, 2001 Reading over the entry of 3 days ago, I find I don't do justice to what I experienced in Pécs. Of course my first concern wasn't Laszlo's attitude. It was the joyous feeling of being among people who know whom to thank for their acquaintance.
May 23rd, 2001 Back yesterday from Pécs. However short the trip was, or shall I say the spree, it left some memories. Laszlo had given his welcoming address for the Dieter Roth Academy show, of course, in Hungarian. But that he didn't give the translator into English, which was present, the opportunity to translate, but just to bundle up in a very much abbreviated form what he had been saying, left me disappointed, since I'm quite curious about his stance. He must have felt something, or read and understood the entry to this diary of Nov.20th of last year as my gloomy prediction to his capacities, or something I'm not aware of which may play a role. Anyhow later that or the next night in the restaurant "Noah's Ark" (the Hungarian name I did not register well, therefore I can only give what the Hungarians said it was in English) Laszlo offered to those sitting near by to consider, how negative I generally was. Luckily the Barak Palinka had made them immune to the word negative. At an other occasion before or after, probably the day after the opening, but before eating and drinking at Noah's, we had visited under Laszlo's guidance the museum for the works of a painter (his name is Csontváry), which I was very happy to be introduced to. Even more touched I had been by the hundreds of keyless padlocks locked to each other in a big cluster to a fence on the way to the museum. Nobody near me knew to say where they had come from, but the idea amongst us visitors prevailed, that the local people were just adding locks as a form of poetic sport. The locks reminded me of what Robert Filliou once said when he saw someone with a big ring full of keys: "Many keys and no place to go to." Here in Amsterdam Hetti obviously is recovering, in good spirits, but carrying anything or going up and down stairs won't be possible for her for some time still.
May 17th, 2001 Hetti at home again, recovering, Hanneke has an eye on her. I'm off to Budapest and Pécs tomorrow - the second time friends and collaborators of Dieter Roth meet under the caption "Dieter Roth Academy". (The 1st time was last year in May in Basel.) There will be 2 openings in Pécs tomorrow afternoon, the first of an exhibition of works by Dieter from the collection of Rainer, who lives in a village near Pécs, the 2nd will be the Dieter Roth Academy show. Lazlo, himself Hungarian by origin, who is to write in the coming Hamburg catalogue of the DR originals in the collection of a lawyer, will give the welcoming address. The show has 26 participants, of which 20 will meet there... Rúna went already a few days ago to help to put up the show. Magnús Reynir and Pétur visited Boekie Woekie yesterday en route to Hungary from Iceland. They hadn't slept the night before, and their connecting flight to Budapest left Amsterdam so late, that they had to take from Budapest the slow night mail train to Pécs, arriving after 3 in the morning... and Pétur was going to test the sniffing abilities of the ex-socialist custom dogs... and suggesting that in future it should be Amsterfjörđur and Seyđisdam...
May 9th, 2001 Now it is Hetti who is in the hospital recovering we hope, from an operation which went well. That the operation would come one day we had known for more than 2 years, but when the date was finally set, having known it would come did not help much. I had for days felt a little pain in my right foot, as it often is the case with me, but when the hospital had phoned this little pain became a serious thing - making walking almost impossible. Then I saw Hetti after the operation, yesterday, saw her alive, and heard from the doctors that all had gone according to plan, and within a few hours the pain in my leg was (almost) gone. All this means I can not go to Pécs to help install the Dieter Roth Academy exhibition which I have helped to prepare and which is to open in 9 days. Rúna will go already next Saturday, others will come to help on Monday and Tuesday. I hope they won't miss me too much. Hansjörg was here, over from London for a day. He had a stack of about 160 b/w photocopies of colour photographs of works by Dieter with him, which will be the section of big reproductions in the catalogue of more than 500 originals which a Hamburg collector has accumulated of DR works. Hansjörg wanted us to comment on the sequence of the images. But there wasn't enough time to get ideas.
April 30th, 2001 Queens day, the streets of Amsterdam are full of people, many wearing orange clothes, or other signs of devotion to the monarchy. Now it is early evening, and don't they start to look like loving Heineken and Grolsch even better than their monarchy! And it would hardly be Holland if there were not some drops of rain thinning the 5%. That makes me think of this morning - around 10.30, when I sat at the edge of my bed with coffee Hetti had come with. The television was on, but because of mouth-and-foot disease, Beatrix was not shown visiting some area of the country as it would be usual for this day. Instead there is a film about her mother's life, Juliana, now today 92, one year younger than my mother would be. Hetti thought they had this film in the drawer to be ready for her death. Tears roll out of my eyes, caused, I think, by the official solemnity of the tone of the telly in contrast to the fleeting quality of the night's dreams which have not yet quite left me. Then I get ready to go to Boekie Woekie, leave my orange scarf behind, and there are words with Hetti about those tears, when I'm halfway down the stairs. She wants me to belief she found it stank when she came with the coffee into my room, and that I should take a bath and change cloth. And I say I washed my face as good as I could.
April 25th, 2001 Just back from a week in Basel, where I went through 15 more of the cardboard boxes Dieter stored as his archive in the basement of one of the 2 places he had in Basel. Eight more boxes to go, then all 120 will have been checked for their contents, the contents listed and placed in time. Back in Amsterdam, Cheng has closed - Moy Kong is gone, is now called Good Fortune instead. Nearly 20 years of a loved kitchen, and Cheng, our unique man! When Ludwig came there with us for the first time and talked and talked instead of that he ate, Cheng finally took his hand, stuck it with the fork into the rice on his plate, and lead it into Ludwig's mouth. Rúna was for him Groote Bier. He used to call Dieter Groote Vodka. His son Björn became Kleine Vodka, and he marinated us steadily in Rose Snappses, and in what we called Moth Ball Juice, or Liquid Dungeon Dust, products of China which make one drunk - we were very happy with them.
When I was writing the entry for this diary on March 10th, I should have remembered that Malcolm had come with 2 cds he had burnt. Those cds namely became the reason that we founded the Seedy CD company. The name had been M.G.'s proposal. The 1 of the 2 CDs I have entered into The Boekie Woekie stocklist is mine:
Voss, Jan My First Mobile CD with the sound of what the answering machine of M.Green recorded, after J.V. had left his message, but didn't know he had a button to press to stop the phone transmitting, with a brief text by J.V. about his 1st, and his very 1st mobile, signed by M.G. and J.V., (Heidelberg Amsterdam 2001), 40.-
What is good about this CD is that it saves time by not making one want to listen to it twice.
April 13th, 2001 Recently (recently meaning half an hour ago) Rúna realized that though she always knew that there takes place a "diary" on the Boekie Woekie web site, she never had read it. I showed her the way to read it off-line, because of the money the telephone costs, otherwise. I asked her to not voluntarily or involuntarily play around with the keyboard while reading, because all changes would probably be made public together with the next entry without me noticing them. There occurred a moment in which the question whose diary this is played a roll. - Now I sit thinking, within Boekie Woekie 3 diaries should be kept, Rúna's, Hetti's and mine!
April 11th, 2001 I have tried to figure out why the MACBA has canceled our presence (see the entries of March 4th, 18th and the 2nd of April). I think it is because Dieter's big sculpture, the "flat scrap", which was lend to the museum in Barcelona by the collection of a Mr.Flick of Zurich, got unforeseen by the museum such a high insurance price tag that for our participation no money was left. Tonight the Dieter Roth exhibition in Barcelona opens. Martha from Mexico was here. She roamed with Hetti through the Chinese super markets of which there are quite some in Amsterdam. Future cooking will include different flavors. Martha prepares the financing of a catalogue of artists' books she has been compiling. Her interest is to deliver a survey of the phenomenon including the Americas and Europe, with at the centre, Ulises Carrión. (See the entry of Nov.2nd, 2000.) I found her amazingly energetic - coming home at 2 o'clock in the night, and leaving the house again before eight in the morning for the next appointment. When I mentioned this to her husband on the phone from Mexico, he explained her being in good shape for our low lands because her being accustomed to the altitude of her Mexico City. I hadn't thought of that.
April 2nd, 2001 Rúna has returned from Iceland. We think she is okay again. The MACBA has made us understand that they won't be able to have us with a bookstand of Dieter's books during their DR exhibition, which opens in 10 days, not even for the few first days until after Easter, when they expect many visitors. A pity - a big Dieter Roth show without his books! One recent evening, when coming home, I found a note on the door. Dizy had rang the doorbell in vain, and was now sitting in a beer bar down the street. (Hetti had been at home, but the doorbell gave up its function years ago.) In the bar I met Dizy. He sat in front of a beer and was in company of a man who drank water. We embraced and stated mutually, how long ago it was that we had met. We thought it was close to ten years. Dizy has been a musician for many years, but I got to know him as the first serious alcohol seller in my life. While I studied at the Düsseldorf art academy during the later years of the 60s and early 70s, he ran the Uel, which we then loved to go to. Now he and his companion were a little nervous about their car full of instruments - they knew of the reputation of Amsterdam, being an unsafe place. So we unloaded a banjo, a guitar, a trumpet, a tuba, and a saxophone into the frontroom of the place where Hetti and me live. Dizy's companion went to the hotel they had booked, when they started to think they might be waiting for me in vain. Dizy and me had a few drinks at another bar, and then finished what Hetti and me had at home. Hetti had already gone to bed when we got there. Dizy preferred then not to have to go to the hotel anymore, and slept at our place. While I went to open Boekie Woekie the next midday, they were loading the instruments back into their car, to drive to Hoek van Holland, take the ferry boat to Harwich, drive through an area of mouth-and-foot disease to reach the ferry to Ireland, where they have appointed a concert tour. The friend will sing and play the banjo, Dizy will play the wind instruments. The last topic I remember of our long talk through almost all the night was Dizy explaining to me the benefits of fruit vinegar for an untroubled sleep. Today Martha phoned from Copenhagen, she'll come to Boekie Woekie in time for the "happy hour" and stay for a few days.
March 26th, 2001 I was in for a surprise when I read our e-mails of today. Among them was a letter from a reader of this diary! That, after I pondered on this subject whether there ever would be any reader at all the last few days. One is found who has read (some of) this diary after that I wrote it! But the pleasure of the reassurance that I don't write this for nothing is overshadowed by a complaint my correspondent makes. She finds she reads about a "closed society" or "private party" (the translations Collins German Dictionary offers for "geschlossene Gesellschaft") and argues that she looked in vain for a reference I might have made early this month about my visit to the home of her and her friend. Of course one can't give an account of events and thoughts omitting nothing. Omitting may happen by chance or more or less consciously. The writer's secret!
March 23rd, 2001 In my last entry of March 21st, reading it today, it seems to me I suggest, that anyhow nobody takes notice of whoever steps on top of a soap box at Speakers Corner, so to say. To have a place in public where you can utter yourself, doesn't mean that anyone listens to you. Today I think this suggestion is right.
March 21st, 2001 Writing this diary and publishing it (almost) instantly is not much different from what has been usual for me for 30 some years. I have (had) printed, more or less spontaneously, more than 100 books by me during those 30 years. What maked it different to this paperless form of publication seems mainly, that for those 100 titles I had to perform a variety of acts - from preparing to print the idea to - well, all the way to opening a shop which would carry them. In the case of publishing this diary not more is asked of me than to press the keys I have been told to press to get it there where all pc-with-a-modem owners can possibly read what I wrote. Some must read it. The rate of visitors is 3,5 to the cover page of Boekie Woekie per day, if the counter can be trusted. How many of those who find the cover page also open this diary I have no way to check. And even if the diary is opened it is still quite uncertain that it is read. Chances are that who ever will read this diary after me, will be the first. I ask myself, can it be a triumph to state that nothing has changed - internet or not? Because hardly anyone ever wanted those books of mine, already long before the internet came about.
March 18th, 2001 The end of another day. Gunnar was on the phone from Iceland a few times. He prepares the flights to Hungary for himself and the other Icelanders in May for the Dieter Roth Academy manifestation. Cornelia came and we were drinking coffee and had a lot to talk about. Cornelia has been for years operating Boekie Woekie together with us, and follows our affairs with continuing interest, but she hadn't been able to come by in the recent weeks. I tried to get Björn on the phone, but in vain. The application form for the Frankfurt Book Fair needs to be filled in and send to the organizer. I did that for Roth's Verlag at the earlier occasions, but feel I should have his consent. Hetti had a bowl of delicious fish soup for us. The bookkeeping for January got ready today. If we are going to open a branch office in the MACBA in April (the museum in Barcelona, where on April 10th an exhibition of works of Dieter will begin) we should not have to be busy that month with calculating the VAT which we have to pay quarterly. When I'll get home soon I'll slip away into sleep out of which the song of an astonishingly unmusical blackbird will wake me up. He (I think, or is it a she?), I think, thinks, that it is springtime. The room I spend my nights in has a battery driven clock on the wall. The batteries gave up one of the last nights hours before the bird began to sing. So it was the bird that told me springtime comes awfully early in the morning.
March 10th, 2001 Rúna is out of the hospital and staying now with her son and his wife. She sounds confident on the phone that she is better now than she has been for some month. Fredie came by today to bring a few copies of one of his books:
Beckmans, F.F. Woorden Zonder Dichter numbered/99, signed, Amsterdam 1994, 10.-
He also had parts of a turning picture postcard rack with him on his bike. He said he was collecting turning picture postcard racks. (I'm not at all certain that turning picture postcard rack is what the English speaker calls those things which in German would be Ansichtskarten Drehständer or in Dutch postkaartmolen, but I hope you get what I mean.) He intends to use them for his part in a group show he plans for the coming summer here in Amsterdam. Some days ago he had already asked me if I also wanted to contribute to it. There is a romantic title to that coming show, Waldeinsamkeit, - some German words are scoring high among the Dutch. Fredie had a forest in mind of turnable picture postcard racks. He didn't know, but I have a history - well, not so much of forests, more of groves - of those racks in art exhibitions. I'm the owner of about 20 of them, but I would love to have a few hundred, storing them is the main problem. An aim of mine for years has been to fill a large exhibition space densely with those racks of which each compartment should be filled with different picture postcards. For example with:
Voss, Jan Ansichtssache by Jan Voss & Co, PICTURE POSTCARDS cut-outs from all sorts of printed matter pasted as pictures on postcards, since 1989, 1,75 each
Visitors should walk in the forest and turn the racks by moving around amongst them and be tempted to take cards out of the compartments and by that continue to change the picture of the installation, which could be recorded by video cameras. At first Fredie said something like "oh, shit", but then we thought we could combine our efforts to get really many postcard racks, and have a joint work at that coming exhibition.
March 4th, 2001 Rúna flew to Iceland last Wednesday for what was to be a month of visiting friends and family, but on Thursday she was taken to hospital. That what had bothered her early in the winter has come back, the doctors think they'll have to operate on her. Hetti and me think it's good for Rúna that she is in Iceland as this overcomes her, a surrounding which feels more like home to her than the Netherlands. Though one of us sick and not near by does not feel right. Roland, whom we did not know before and who prepares a Dieter show in Spain came to see us, we spoke about the possible contribution Boekie Woekie could offer by providing a book department, maybe as a temporary small branch office shop. We'll see. Then came Malcolm for the weekend, with more books:
Nitsch, Hermann The Fall Of Jerusalem the drama-to-be-read from 1974 translated by M.Green, numbered/300, slip cased, with a large folded print, London 1997, 160.-
(Duchamp, Marcel) Marcel Duchamp A Life In Pictures text by Jennifer Gough-Cooper & Jacques Caumond, illustrations by Anrdré Raffray, translated into English by A.Melville, a cute little book, London 1999, 28.-
and more copies of his own print:
Green, Malcolm Spot PRINT offset reproduction of a painting of a dalmatian looking into a mirror as if worried about a spot, signed, 35.-
Among other topics we spoke about how little we do by way of gymnastics to keep the body fit, but Malcolm pointed out an exception: our talking muscles are very well trained.
Feb.26th, 2001 The most remarkable event since the last diary entry was my trip to a museum in a northern German city, were I was expected to give a talk on the subject "The artist as producer, publisher and salesperson. About Boekie Woekie". The museum is situated across the river from the brewery of a very reasonable beer, and it houses - owns by now - the archive Guy has compiled of artists' books of the 60s and 70s. There was quite a space taking exhibition on, recruited from the archive. We know Guy because he has been a partner in a consortium of firms which for some years in the 90s were present at the Frankfurt Book Fair under the heading of "United Untied" - Boekie Woekie was one of them. (The name was my suggestion). Lately the consortium has been untying more than uniting, and no one likes to mention it any longer. When I found out in Bremen, how few of my books are kept in Guy's archive, I was a bit shocked. I do consider myself an artist from the 70s. My first books are from the late 60s! I gave my talk. At the end I sang a song about monkeys running through the forest. That was a compromise. One of the listeners had suggested I would dance the Boogie Woogie... Later I ate with Guy and Dr.Anne in a Bavarian chain restaurant - I ate haddock. That the people of the coast of the North sea have to bring in the Bavarians, in order to construct an excuse for the fish being no good, is somehow sad.
Feb.17th, 2001 There was another storm, and that has abated too. No more work on the metatext was carried out. But days in Pecs and Abaliget, airplanes and gipsies. And Rainer and Agnes, and Björn and Oddur with whom I flew to Budapest, and then took the train to Pecs. Björn and me wanted to check out the situation which arose around a new Dieter Roth Academy manifestation. Oddur is the son of Björn, still young, and catching glimpses of the world. But for his father and me in this case, it wasn't much more than that either. A uranium mine fogged us, with near by a prison, where the miners, forced to mine, had lived until only a few years ago, plus of course we fogged ourselves, by way of drinking local fruit snappses and beer, for which nobody who fears my anger should take responsibility. The new manifestation would, or will be, two exhibitions, one of DR's works from the collection of Rainer, and one of works of "the DR Academy staff". There are two official places in Pecs ready to stage those shows. But "the real aim" is to assemble another Dieter-Roth-Academy-book from the works of the "DRA staff". (The book published last year has appeared in the following 2 editions:
Dieter Roth Akademie 5.5.-1.7.2000 founding report of the academy, texts mainly in English, and book on the occasion of an exhibition of the founding conference members: E.Einarsson, K.Gudmundsson, S.Gudmundsson, G.Helgason, D.Iannone, P.Kristjánsson, R.Pretzell, B.Roth, A.Tippel, R.Thorkelsdóttir, H.v.Egten, J.Voss, T.Wasmuth, many pictures, normal edition, Basel 2000, 48.-
Dieter Roth Akademie 5.5.-1.7.2000 founding report of the academy, texts mainly in English, and book on the occasion of an exhibition of the founding conference members: E.Einarsson, K.Gudmundsson, S.Gudmundsson, G.Helgason, D.Iannone, P.Kristjánsson, R.Pretzell, B.Roth, A.Tippel, R.Thorkelsdóttir, H.v.Egten, J.Voss, T.Wasmuth, many pictures, special edition: numbered/100, signed by all participants, with the hardest hard cover we have seen so far, Basel 2000, 350.-
That is from the Boekie Woekie stock list, which forms the reason for this web site. We are ready for your orders.)
Björn, Oddur and me left Hungary after 3 days, as planned, and came to Amsterdam. The chained, barking dogs, yet waggling their tails, are now memory. In Holland dogs have no tails. In Holland dogs are tales. (I have to put in here this tip from the Boekie Woekie list of books:
Thorkelsdóttir, Rúna Heads And Tails Of Fairy-Tales numbered/75, signed, Amsterdam 1985, 140.-
Thorkelsdóttir, Rúna Heads And Tails Of Fairy-Tales SPECIAL EDITION with a watercolor picture, numbered/10, signed, 280.-)
Before he had come to Amsterdam to go to Hungary Björn had been repairing in Hamburg parts of the work of his father Dieter, at the center of which are recordings of the sounds dogs made which were locked up in kennels somewhere near Barcelona. Back in Amsterdam we composed a letter to inform those of whom we think they belong to the DRA, or at least belong into the vicinity of the DRA, of the latest developments. It will reach close to 100 people in the next days. Am curious of the outcome. - Björn and Oddur returned to Iceland yesterday, today I saw Peter and his wife, from Hanover I think, walking back and forth through our street, they seemed to be looking for something. I thought it was Boekie Woekie they tried to find and went to the door and shouted their name. They reacted and came over, but didn't recognize me - I understood it was their daughter which they expected to show up. But the couple, once they had put together on which occasions we formerly had become acquainted, where happy - one was on the watch out for the daughter, the other talked. Then the daughter appeared, and soon they went - they had asked me for a recommendation for a Asian restaurant.
Feb.7th, 2001 There was a storm, but now it has abated. We had Rod and his wife Liz, they had brought their own tea, plus milk, and sleeping bags. At the same time Gunnar from Iceland and his whole firm, 7 carpenters, were visiting, but 5 of them were in a hotel. They needed though all the beer of all the breweries of all the Netherlands. A storm, and a flood. Rod's opening was bringing us many new faces. Liz sat in the easy chair. The sound for the occasion of the opening was played through loudspeakers, now, if you visit Boekie Woekie, you get the easy chair and a pair of head phones and you can listen to 9 CDs of digitally manipulated sounds, if you like. Moritz is putting more words into the metatext of the pages of our web site, in the hope that the search engines bring more people to look at what we can offer. He'll soon be off to live again in Toronto. I hope he can finish what he began, and that it works ... Hetti is back from Iceland.
Feb.2nd, 2001 Tomorrow Rod will come for his opening - Jan (another Jan, than the one who writes this, but since a long time closely linked to the BoeWoe enterprise) brought yesterday in his car an easy chair from his study which he is letting us have for the time Rod's sound presentation will last. One problem solved (see the entry for Jan.17th). - I'm back from that "Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in southern Germany" which I mentioned I would be going to in the entry of Jan.27th. It is a bit much to do a trip like that by train in 2 days. The bones in my meat sack got a little soft during the rides. But being invited to that academy, you must know a plane ticket will not be refunded, and the train only from and to the German border station. Luckily the Netherlands are not very big. Holger, my host, paid that part of the ticket out of his own pocket. - Writing this, I think of my writings in English. My English gets corrected sometimes, though maybe only after I have been made it public. Michael, Malcolm, Dorothy. Dorothy, for example, has just pointed out a "since" in the invitation mailed by post to Rod's presentation. In a fax from Berlin she says that particular "since" was confused with a "because" the way I had put it. She does not access the internet and therefore doesn't inform me about the mistakes in this diary. Also M. + M. have not commented on the diary yet. I admit to feel a bit silly to show off my insufficient knowledge of English. But if I were to write in German I also would make spelling mistakes. 25 years of loose contact only with German speakers, and the new rules of spelling which were introduced there only a few years ago - which never reached me in detail, and the Dutch idiom being in many ways so close to the German, so that it almost can feel the same, have send many details of my mother tongue into oblivion, and even fogged large areas. Those who read Dutch of course should be relieved I don't write in that language. And it is maybe funny to remark, that more than 30 years ago I became Dorothy's first German teacher.
Jan.28th, 2001 Midnight in Boekie Woekie, Rúna and I are listening to a CD with the Audio Events of the MOB SHOP 1981. The MOB SHOP stands for Mobile Shop, twice it was a summer conference of young and more experienced artists Magnús, who send the CD to us, was organizing back then. Rod (the Rod, whose audio "show" opens here next Saturday) has restored and transcribed the original recording to CD. We listen now to the voice of Robert Filliou, who speaks about his idea of an Eternal Network. There are musical sounds, we just listened to an interview with Robert and his concentrated way of speaking, and one with Margrét í Dalsmynni who quite fanatically stated, that there is not much new in art, since Hreiđar heimski did it all before. Rúna helps me to understand this. About Hreiđar one can read in the sagas, she says. Robert sings: Poetry is here to stay.
Jan.27th, 2001 I'm invited to talk to students and guests of a Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in southern Germany next Tuesday about Boekie Woekie, books by artists, and in particular, about me as artist, book making artist and artists' books bookseller. Holger, who teaches there and invited me, has made, together with his girl friend, a poster to announce the event. He has send me a copy - a picture postcard of mine is reproduced there, which shows a drawn figure encompassed by its (empty) speech balloon. It is quiet in the shop again today, time to make up my mind with which words the speech balloon shall be filled on Tuesday.
Jan.24th, 2001 One month after Christmas business is still slow. But that rather undisturbed time has allowed the book-keeping for 2000 to be done and ready and put away on a high shelf in the storage room. A relief. Rúna seems to get better. Another relief - thanks to penicillin? When she'll be good enough to manage the shop, I'll be able to draw, print, paint, write and look out of the window for a while. Will that be a relief!
Jan.17th, 2001 Boekie Woekie is preparing for an exhibition of works by Rod Summers, the sound specialist from Maastricht. To come from Maastricht to Amsterdam for the opening of his "show", Rod will take the train. Since his show will be more something to listen to than to look at, Rod wants, for the listener (he obviously thinks of one at a time), an easy- or armchair. He has asked us to find one for him (since to take such an object along in a train would be a near impossible thing). We Boekie Woekies don't have an armchair. Whomever we have asked so far, they can't lent us theirs, because they don't have any. Amsterdam staircases seem to be too steep to transport them, too narrow too, though bigger pieces of furniture are moved up here on ropes and in through the windows. Or should I recognize that Boekie Woekie can not borrow such an armchair because the mental frame of the people we know here and ask for such a chair, does not allow them to own such a gadget of lazy- or, at least relaxedness? Do the people in The Netherlands have nothing to sit on, or uprightly in, than these kitchen chairs which are in reality sawn of pieces of churchbenches, measured of course to each persons needs (width of ass)? Maybe it is the picture of an armchair licking its lips after having consumed the one who came to sit on it, his slippers remaining as prove.
(Today, 4.7.01, I have "embroidered" the original entry of Jan. 17th and want to add, that the image of the hungry armchair can be found in:
Voss, Jan Tägliche Einfalt 365 folded sheets (Din A2) printed recto verso and bound as 12 books in wooden container with display window for 1 opened book, wheels, handles, numbered/100, signed, Amsterdam 1990, 8500.-)
Jan.16th, 2001 The mailman who brought the mail yesterday made the usual few steps into the shop to deliver what he had for us. He said, when I held the small mail stack in my hand "You don't happen to have a plaster?" Well, there was one in our not too impressive first aid kit, it had the picture of a blue elephant on it. I stuck it onto the finger he held up, first time in my life that I bandaged a postman. There had been a little blood on his finger. He did explain he had been stuck with his hand in a mailbox. When he was gone, I came to remember that mailmen have had traditionally to lead a life in the fear of dogs. Soon afterwards an idea popped up, -namely that, if mankind could teach the slits of mailboxes to bark, they probably wouldn't bite mailmen any more. Such were an artists' book bookshop caretakers speculations before midday, now, a day later, and after eight, I'm off to go to Mr.Cheng again, following a strict program to eat his ducks with the aim to teach my belly to quack. Sometimes, at night, it does it beautifully well, but then there are usually no witnesses.
Jan.8th, 2001 Rúna is sick, Hetti takes off to Iceland the day after tomorrow, Boekie Woekie can be found now on the world wide web under a much simpler name: www.boekiewoekie.com -but the old address continues to be valid too. That once again happened thanks to Michael. At a recent late night moment in the middle of bookkeeping I jotted down "ein Schiff voller Ersoffener" - a ship full of drownies-, if that makes sense in English. And in a dream in a recent night I explained to who ever it was, that we in Amsterdam had no drug addicts, only duck addicts. Ask Mr.Cheng, he can verify this statement as far as it concerns me.
Jan.1st, 2001 Edith and Steffen stayed for 2 days because of us in Amsterdam between the holidays. Edith prepares for a documentary movie on Dieter. She has visited several of the people who knew Dieter well, now it was our turn. The main thing was probably the interview she took - we spoke for one and a half hour in front of the camera Steffen was operating. I hardly remember what it was we talked about. Part of it though was what I think I remember of Dieter and Joseph, long ago in Düsseldorf. Steffen was just letting the legs of the tripod of the camera collapse, because the tapes were fully recorded, when 2 people came into Boekie Woekie, one of them I recognized, but only at the 2nd glance: Barbara. (We have quite a few Barbaras in our world, this was the one who has lived for some years in Australia, and she had her reason for doing so with her, a chemist, who does research without chemicals, on a computer. Edith and Barbara, both Swiss, happened to know each other slightly.) Barbara and her fiancé were in Amsterdam to visit jazz concerts, and since there was none that night, they joined in when we went to our Chinese restaurant around the corner of where I live with Hetti. Cheng, whose place it is, has the habit of giving presents to his guests. We went home with calendars and little Chinese figures, where we gave it an effort to get a headache the next day.
Dec.25th, 2000 An exceptional month lies behind Boekie Woekie. We three who run it (Hetti, Rúna, Jan) have in the last years arranged our lives in a way, that always at least two of us would be in Amsterdam together to take care of the shop. Now for the first time we left it to one of us. Rúna was alone with the responsibility, while Hetti and Jan were in Iceland. It went well enough to think it could be done again, especially since December sees all those x-mas bunnies running around filling their baskets, keeping shop keepers on the alert. Of the recently deceased Emil (Zatopek) one heard in the 50s that he trained for his marathon performances barefooted in loose sand: if the busiest month can be handled by one, shouldn't we be more than capable to do all the others easily alone? That is potentially good news for Iceland Air, to whom we are used to pay the entrance fee for nature's wonderland (to borrow a term which is the title of a book we have in stock:
Weijer, Mark de Nature's Wonderland reproductions of paintings made in Iceland and 7 brief life accounts of local people, a text by D.Ruyters, Dutch/Engl., Den Haag 1995, 20.-)
And it has to be said that Heilco helped Rúna out on a couple of occasions. Nov.20th, 2000 Jan, me, the one who writes here: I, I came back today from Basel, where I had gone to, once again, in order to run through the contents of the cardboard boxes which Dieter left behind as his archive, more than 2 years ago, when he died. There are well over 120 of them, and a good 2 thirds have been done now. The most remarkable I came across this time was the BBC interview of Richard with Dieter, from 1974. Barbara who in Berlin is editing a book of interviews with Dieter, I believe hasn't yet been able to find it. But it is thought to be important, as I understood from Hansjörg. And indeed I recognized much of his singular way of expressing his insights when reading the answers Dieter gave to questions about his life and art. Lazlo came also to Basel, to research aspects of the life of Dieter, about whom he is asked to write for a catalogue which is to document the collection of Dieter's original works a Hamburg lawyer has compiled. I hope he can find the right words - at least if the words will be words of evaluation.
Nov.12th, 2000 Peter-Michiel from Utrecht opened an exhibition of collages in our gallery space - the back room of the book store really. It was the first show since almost a year, and the reason for some people to show up which we hadn't seen in a while. The "fan club" of Peter-Michiel we had not met before. At the end of the evening I found myself waking up in a chair when the last people were leaving. Nov.2nd, 2000 Michael came to try to install the search engine from out the Boekie Woekie pc, since he hadn't been able to do that from his own computer. I felt the stir of a bad conscience, because I noticed a sense of relief to see him having difficulties with it. On the one hand, this computer stuff makes me an idiot because everything is as easy as pressing the right button (and I'm told which one to press). And on the other hand it creates idiots because daring and confident people who hold their intelligence in esteem are made to feel stupid because of manuals which they can't understand. Well, into this situation walked Martha, on an unannounced visit from Mexico City. It is more than 2 years that I saw her, then it was over there in Mexico, on her invitation, where she had pulled off an artists' book exhibition, combining books from Latin America and the so called Western World. At the center of her exhibition had been book works by Ulises Carrión, the Mexican pioneer in Amsterdam, whose artists' bookstore "other books and so" in the 2nd half of the 70s of the last century ranges for us from Boekie Woekie of course amongst that which is unforgettable. In a way Martha is a pioneer too, because Ulises' work isn't known in Mexico, and even the projection for a map in which to chart him hasn't been developed. Martha didn't recognize Michael for a while - they hadn't met for years, and Michael without a beard really looks like a different person. That is what I remember I thought when I saw him first after that he had cut off the extra hair. But then they embraced and kissed. Michael had provided, about 30 years ago, if I have it right, the first premises for the founders of the "beau geste press" in Devon, which were Martha, and her then husband Felipe. Well, the search engine was not installed from the BoeWoePeCe that afternoon, but the happy hour was extended, and the next day, yesterday, Michael managed that the thing works, after all from out his computer. He phoned, when he had succeeded, and we joked, that we should add a line for the user to disregard the advertisement which automatically goes with this search engine. Oct.27th, 2000 Back in Amsterdam from the Frankfurt Book Fair, I think it was our 13th participation in succession in this yearly event. Heilco drove us and the books to and fro. Rúna and Hetti kept the shop in Amsterdam open, and came only for short visits to Frankfurt, the one at the beginning, the other at the end of the fair. We exhibited 5 new books - but were unusually unsuccessful in selling them. Most of those of whom we think they are our Frankfurt customers didn't show up. In Amsterdam, in the shop, where I sat in the midst of the returned cardboard boxes, Michael showed up, asking whether we wanted a search engine for our web site. I had before asked him to install a diary file. The search engine hasn't yet started proper function, but I suppose this diary will work, and that it will open up the possibility of adding another tone to our web communication. After all we declare since more than a year in the introduction to our site that Boekie Woekie is an artist run store for books by artists - and as artists to present an alphabetical list alone, doesn't contain enough of a challenge.
(waiting to see what will happen, today's
diary of tomorrow)
. 
Or shall I reveal
my plans for a new piece of shop furniture, a shelf/showcase
combination? How about I attempt to explain my assumption-generated
thoughts on the state of the world? (Are there only assumptions left
to generate thought from? Does nobody know anything for sure
anymore? What has happened to careful, neutral, scientific
consideration? To the knowledge accumulated as a collective effort
of all generations? Who has today the hope to arrive at thoughts on
the state of something as encompassing as the state of the world?) 
The entry to June 9th, 2006 tells the story
of how the Queen fell to her knees in front of me. Today my eyes
fell on this picture of two ladies dressed much like the actresses I
encountered back then only they were not in an open coach but had
stepped out of a Rolls Royce. 
Picture shopping. Memory shopping. My mother's
first post WWII job in 1947, I was told later was that of secretary
of an art gallery. This was Galerie Oberstenfeld, situated in one of
the few houses which had not been ruined during the war in what I
call my hometown, Duisburg. My mother staged exhibitions there - I
remember the names Levin and Radziwil from my earliest youth - which
nobody came to see during daytime. But at night the true purpose of
the gallery became apparent: It's basement served as an important
hub for the black marketing of potatoes. I think one can talk about
this 60 years later without revealing any living person's dark side.
Anyhow this story has often been useful to me when I wanted to point
at a certain quality of what we call art, art's being an
organization form to disguise reality. - Well I don't know if anyone
will buy this, not even me.
(Here it is.)
