The show Amsterdam Abortion Survivor by Dutch stand-up comedian Micha Wertheim has been selected for the best of Fringe NYC Encore Series.

He distinguished himself with his funny, adorable accent, strolling through political correctness during the Fringe Festival, and got the honour of being booked for the Encore Series.

‘My native language is Dutch, not Deutsch’

In the show Wertheim explains the difference between Germany and the Netherlands like this: “Holland is tulips, windmills and cheese. Germany is beer, sausage and genocide. I am not saying one is necessarily better than the other. I am only saying that they are different cultures.”

‘Gloriously controversial’

Wertheim discusses things you cannot say in Holland or in the U.S.: wheelchair people, Foster Parents and abortion of course pass along in a fierce and hilarious monologue.

See for yourself here.

Micha Wertheim at the Soho Play House, 10 – 19  September.

A spectacular exhibition, opening tomorrow in the National Gallery of Ireland, pays homage to the remarkable painter Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667).  

It brings together forty of the artist's finest and most celebrated works from all phases of his career, including a number of recently discovered and restored works.  

The exhibition also features the Gallery's own companion pieces, A Man Writing a Letter and A Woman Reading a Letter, generally considered to be the artist's most renowned works. After Dublin, the exhibition will travel to Amsterdam and Washington. 

Fresh and spontaneous

Although his career was relatively short, Metsu enjoyed great success as a genre painter, but also for his religious scenes, still lifes, and portraits.

His ability to capture ordinary moments of life with freshness and spontaneity was matched only by his ability to depict materials with an unerring truth to natureMetsu had an unrivalled talent for imbuing his figures with humanity and personality.

His engaging genre scenes provide a window onto life in seventeenth-century Holland, from the quarrels in the neighbourhood street market to the amorous affairs of the upper class.  

Enlightening book

At the same time of the exhibition, Yale University Press published a thorough study, written by Adriaan E. Waiboer. This enlightening book resituates Metsu as one of the leading genre painters of his time.

It offers a portrait of the age through his patrons and his wide network of contacts and colleagues in Amsterdam, as well as analysis of Metsu’s technique as a draftsman and as a painter, and it documents the fashions and fabrics of the time through his work.

You can see Metsu’s paintings on Webgallery of Art.

In the spring I was stunned, wanting one day to see Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and his View of Delft at the Mauritshuis and stumbling upon the great master’s three earliest works: The Procuress from Dresden, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary from Edinburgh and Diana and her Nymphs from the collection of the Mauritshuis itself (see blog 21th May).

Now the three paintings are in Dresden.

The exhibition in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister will feature major works of other artists to accompany each of the three paintings, as well as two lost paintings known only from catalogues.

Museums and collections around the world have loaned works by famous artists like Jacob Jordaens, Dirck van Baburen, Peter Paul Rubens, Leonaert Bramer, Giovanni Biliverti and Hendrick ter Brugghen, which will allow visitors to gain deep insight into the early stages of Vermeer’s artistic development.

The Dresden exhibition will feature a comprehensive educational programme for visitors of all ages, which will take as its starting point Dresden’s second Vermeer, Girl reading a letter at an open window (picture).

So it’s Dresden, Germany now. If you are in the neighbourhood. If not, just wait for Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland (10 December 2010 – 13 March 2011).  

Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden,  3 September - 28 November 2010

Delvoye's Tower in Venice, Paris and Brussels. 

In the past he’s tattooed pigs and sold turds produced by his own defecating machine, Cloaca.

Now there’s a Gothic tower made by him in COR-TEN steel on the roof of the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, on the rue Royale/Koningsstraat side.  

Travelling tower

In June last year the tower looked out over the Canal Grande near the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, in Venice. During the summer of 2010 it was in the garden of the Musée Rodin in Paris. At each new destination a new floor is added to the bottom of the tower.

The Paris version measured ten metres, the Brussels one seventeen metres. In the meantime it weighs ten tons.  

Wim Delvoye (Wervik, Belgium, 1965) always plays for high stakes. In Venice his tower had to compete with the whole city, in Paris it challenged the Eiffel Tower. In Brussels you can see it contending for the crown at the top of the tower of the city hall, one of Brussels’ Gothic pearls.  

Architecture and ornament

Delvoye’s tower is architecture as well as ornament. As usual, the artist thought up the work and then left the execution of it to computers and craftsmen.  

This is his scholium on the artwork: “While the Renaissance was a world view, the Gothic was a state of mind. The Renaissance was a finite epoch lasting half a century before being succeeded by Mannerism. Gothic was an art outside of time. The human eye takes in detail like a stroboscope. Glancing over lights and tracery, crockets and finials, it thrills to the joy of the tower’s soaring ascent.”  

Much can be said about this idiosyncratic vision of art history. Is Delvoye a joker, an anarchist with a mission or a con man? In either case he dances through the art world of today and long ago, uninhibited and with mercantile success.  

Foretaste of heaven 

‘Toren/Tour’ is a foretaste of Wim Delvoye’s first solo exhibition at Bozar. Under the title of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door he will present Gothic-inspired drawings, models, sculptures and towers. The artist will also do an intervention in the parallel exhibition The World of Lucas Cranach. 

Delvoye in The Low Countries Yearbook 

In 2000, The Low Countries Yearbook published an article entitled Everywhere a Tourist – The Lively ‘Almost-Art' of Wim Delvoye.

You can find that text in its entirety here.

The high-profile Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is opening again. Temporarily.  

The new extension isn’t ready yet, but the renovation of the historic building is almost complete. Taking Place will take place there from 28 August 2010 to 9 January 2011. Taking Place will be a reintroduction to the Stedelijk Museum and its illustrious history. National and international artists will bring the rooms to life in an experimental way.

Some famous names have been selected for it, many of whom participated in the controversial exhibition, Op losse schroeven, in 1969. In those days they were still unknown. The Stedelijk was the first museum in the world to show their work. Jan Dibbets, for example, dug five holes around the museum and Marinus Boezem hung bedding out of the windows, while Richard Long exhibited rocks from Dutch riverbeds.

The museum opened its doors to any artists who thought that their work belonged in the exhibition. They got a following. Op losse schroeven became a benchmark in the history of contemporary visual art.  

Taking Place will be the first exhibition under Ann Goldstein (1957, Los Angeles), who was appointed as the new Director in January 2010.  

Artists featured in ‘Taking Place’

Karel Appel - Stanley Brouwn - Daniel Buren - Jan Dibbets  -Rineke Dijkstra - Ger van Elk - Morgan Fisher - Mario Garcia Torres - Hans Haacke - On Kawara - Martin Kippenberger - Barbara Kruger - Germaine Kruip - Louise Lawler - William Leavitt - Navid Nuur - Roman Ondák - Willem de Rooij - Diana Thater - Lawrence Weiner.

Photo: Taking Place @ Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Anne Frank’s chestnut tree is dead.

On 23 February, 18 April and 13 May 1944 she wrote in her diary about the tree in the garden of The Annexe, which she could see from the window. “Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs, from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.” (23/2/1944) 

In 1968 Anne’s father, Otto Frank, said this about it:“How could I have suspected that it meant so much to Anne to see a patch of blue sky, to observe the gulls during their flight and how important the chestnut tree was to her, as I recall that she never took an interest in nature. But she longed for it during that time when she felt like a caged bird. She only found consolation in thinking about nature. But she had kept such feelings completely to herself.” 

Symbol of persecution

What if Anne had described not a tree but a cat, a Dutch columnist wondered. But the tree became a story and the story became bigger than the tree. The tree became a symbol of the persecution of the Jews.

That became obvious in 2006 when the authorities wanted to chop it down because it was affected by fungus. People from the neighbourhood put up resistance. The judge agreed with them. The tree was propped up and six cuttings ended up at a nurseryman’s in Groningen. 

Broken by storm

At half past one on Monday 23 August, the chestnut tree snapped in a summer storm. The thirty ton tree that was more than a century and a half old broke off about a metre above the ground, bringing to an end the discussion about whether the diseased tree should go or not.  

Since then branches have been offered for sale on the internet.  

When Todd Byers from Seattle heard the news, as he came out of the Anne Frank House on Monday, his laconic reaction was: “Not a single tree will live for ever. Fortunately, it’s been cloned.” 

What is it that makes us think of this verse by M. Vasalis? 

For a tree in the Vondel Park

A tree was cut down with long locks of green.
It sighed with a swish like a child
as it fell, still full of summer wind.
I have seen the wagon that carried it away.

O, as a young man, as Hector in his chariot
with trailing hair and the smell of youth
streaming out of his beautiful wounds,
the young head still unscathed,
The proud buttocks still undefeated.           

(translated by Cliff Crego)

At the Architecture Biennale in Venice (29th August – 21st November 2010) the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement will be awarded to the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (Rotterdam, °1944).  

The jury states: “Rem Koolhaas has expanded the possibilities of architecture. He has focused on the exchanges between people in space. He creates buildings that bring people together and in this way forms ambitious goals for architecture. His influence on the world has come well beyond architecture. People from very diverse fields feel a great freedom from his work.” 

In 1975 Rem Koolhaas – together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp – founded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture). OMA gained worldwide fame with daring projects. Koolhaas was mentioned in Time in 2008 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. 

The most important works by Koolhaas and OMA include:

the Netherlands Dance Theatre at The Hague

the Kunsthal in Rotterdam

the Grand Palais and EuroLille Masterplan, both in Lille, France

Seattle Public Library

the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago

the Dutch embassy in Berlin

the Headquarters for Chinese Central Television in Beijing (picture).  

You can read an older article from The Low Countries Yearbook about Koolhaas here.

Nigel Williams (Bristol, 1954) moved to Belgium in 1976. He took up comedy and won the renowned Humo Comedy Cup in 2000. He tours around the cultural centres of Flanders with themes such as a penis monologue, a show called Terrorist, and the current show called Geloof mij! (Believe me), in which he takes on religion.

Now he is back in the UK, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, till 29 August.

He will be performing nightly, splitting with Adam Fields, a stand-up comedian who was born in London but now lives in Amsterdam.

“I’ve never done stand-up in Britain”, says Williams, “and I have never done it in English”.

The comedian thinks Edinburgh will be a challenge. He wants to get his arse kicked again.

He believes comedians should shoot upstairs: “Don’t laugh at the people who can’t defend themselves”.

The Newsroom (Venue 93), Leith Street Edinburgh, nightly at 20.45. Till 29 August 2010. Shows are free.

The show Geloof mij! returns to touring at the end of October in Belgium.

© Photo Nigel Williams

The “Grachtengordel”, the historic urban ensemble of Amsterdam, has the form of a half moon and  is a system of canals, roads, bridges and decorous manors with closed inner gardens. The Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht were dug from 1612.This was a long-term programme that involved extending the city by draining the swampland, using a system of canals in concentric arcs and filling in the intermediate spaces. These spaces allowed the development of a homogeneous urban ensemble including gabled houses and numerous monuments. This urban extension was the largest and most homogeneous of its time. It was a model of large-scale town planning, and served as a reference throughout the world until the 19th century.