In Amsterdam

In a bookshop is discovered ‘Brandscape’ by Anna Klingmann, published by MIT Press. It is an American book, published in the United States, and has the paper quality and object-weight that suggests something worth reading.

Brandscape will be added to the catalogue of keywords that are being put together as a guide to the city of Amsterdam.

The keywords include exploitation, commodity-image-(sensual)-object, capital, value and money.

On the first page of the catalogue is simply written:

‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.

How else to explain a chain of shops called ‘Mama Ducks Store’?

Plastic objects in rows. Produced in far away lands in factories hidden by a haze of funnel-smoke from bulk carriers and container ships and lorry movements and metallic traffic jams.

These bright objects, emitting signals of consumer emotion and whispering, ‘buy me!’ are commodity-image (sensuous) objects produced by bringing together labour, capital, machines and raw materials.

Products of exploitation, social relations by which workers, living labour, are coerced to sell their life essence at an unfavourable rates of exchange.

They become surrounded by the mystical quality of value, and at the dual point of buying-selling they are transformed into money

And this plastic kitsch imprints its image into the brandscape that is central Amsterdam, the area of coffee shops, tourists, women standing in windows.

These commodities are citizens of the world, able to travel across borders and into urban areas regardless of the political forms of oppression; autocracy, monarchy, police control, military authority.

They have far greater freedom than the people of the world who are shackled, controlled, monitored by cameras and facial recognition software and digital finger print identification.

In his book Amsterdam the Dutch writer Greet Mak recounts the story of Elsje Christiaens who arrived in the city in 1664.

She rented a room in the Damrak but was beaten by her landlady as she could not pay the rent. It may be that the landlady was trying to coerce Elsje into prostitution.

She fought back with a hatchet; the landlady fell down the stairs and died. She was hung in the Dam, the area in front of the baroque palace which was once the town hall.

Rembrandt drew her corpse; lifeless and beginning to bloat as gas and bacteria formed and expanded.

It is described that she wore a grey jacket and red skirt.

In the Rijksmuseum there is a painting by Pieter Baltens A Flemish Kremis. It is of 1570, a century before her death but it would have been a world which she would have known.

Many of the people are wearing red. It appears to have been a popular colour of the time. Elsje Christiaens was wearing the fashion of the age.

The place of her execution is now a ‘tourist attraction’, a place for global tourists to congregate and for political causes to protests. Flags fly, people hold hands in a line, a drum beats.

There are hot dog stalls and people taking photographs of each other with mobile phones.

Outside the building of a language school. Brick expressionism, sculptures by Hildo Krop. Two young women in the doorway sheltering from the drops of rain which are increasing in weight and frequency.

The conversation turns to housing and the first woman tells me that there are now a lot of issues in the city about immigration and younger people having to live with their parents and the cost of living. It is not clear how this conversation might develop. There is a need to listen, to probe, to consider presentation.

I suggest that in Britain all the key industries and services are dependent on migrant labour. Construction, manufacturing, transport, health, social care, education, retail, hospitality. I pull the sleeve of my shirt up and rub my right hand across my left arm, ‘and the worse the job, the blacker the skin’.

The second woman says, ‘that’s the same here’. She has come to Amsterdam from Romania.

The conversation returns to the first woman who explains she works with refugees in the city and in her view the older people are more tolerant than the younger people.

The rain intensifies and they return to their classes.

I walk along the Singel watching the rain drops splash into the canal water, a few concentric circles, wavelets, the murky water keeps its secrets well.

Into the Rijksmuseum and slow meditation with the art works. The ever unfolding of the Spirit through the sensuous realm of art.

Transfixed by a painting of Mary Magdalene by Jan van Scorel from 1530.

Unexpectedly mesmerised by the Banquet at the Crossbowmen’s Guild in Celebration of the Treaty of Münster. Painted by Bartholomeus van der Helst in 1648.

The sensation of being absorbed by a painting in a space that is beyond time and a question forms; ‘what is it that you are afraid of?’

It might be a question that the viewer did not realise was there for the asking.

Although we live within the Society of the Spectacle much now seems less visible.

News filters through, of political resignations, salvation from moral bankruptcy, justifications for cutting off the supply of water and electricity to Gaza.

Radio documentaries now sound like extended advertising material. Buying real estate and the elimination of the history of Palestine.

The panzer tanks that invaded the Netherlands were based in Bremen and Dusseldorf.

In the street I’m looking at some of the early public housing built in the city..A woman asks me if I’m lost. I explain I am studying the Amsterdam School of architecture and the modern housing of the period between around 1910 to 1930. We have a long conversation.

She tells me that the flats have recently been renovated ‘as they are now a national monument’. And adds, ‘they are like a Rolls Royce on the outside, but not on the inside’.

I give her my card and we talk about commodity fetishism and the relationship between wage-slavery and the enslaved consumer.

Objects have the aura of magical powers. The labour that produces commodity-image-(sensuous) objects is generally unseen.

The rates of pay and conditions of work unknown except to the workers themselves. Human labour is homogenised and sterilised and transformed into solid plastic and the liquid form of money.

The object of human labour is worshipped, the live carrier of human labour degraded.

In the 1960s the Provos described Amsterdam as being ‘full of refrigerators and food mixers’ and ruled by a ‘sickening middle class’.

Labour that was applied centuries ago continues to add value. The draining of land, the building of houses, the digging of drainage ditches and the construction of dykes and dams.

There is a long history of the dominance of the owners of private property.

I walk along the Zeedijk towards Nieumarkt early in the morning. The streets are busy with workers in high viz orange jackets and trousers. They clear the streets of last-nights rubbish.

Days are spent exploring the housing of Amsterdam Zuid. It is on a huge scale. The buildings are of good quality, well decorated with curious and fascinating sculptures, nicely designed, arts and crafts brick work, surrounded by flowers and the spaces in between filled with trees and play spaces.

The historical brandscape is distinctive but thus emerges new contradictions and further tensions between different forms of capital.

In the bookshop there is a much better copy of Geert Mak’s book on Amsterdam. I recommend it to someone who is browsing.

And test myself by recounting some key dates in the history of the city; 1566 and iconoclasm, 1568 and the start of the Dutch Revolt, 1672 and the year of catastrophe, 1763 and the end of the Seven Years War. I want to understand what I know.

The political histories of cities are better known than the technical histories. The time of electrification, the first computers and networks, the appropriation by the citizens of computers and mobile phones; these histories are quickly lost, as if all all technology starts at year zero.

And now no-one can really remember clearly the time before the mobile phone or the internet connection.

What was loneliness like in that time; how were the time-spaces filled throughout the day?

Walking through the Rijksmuseum as if it is a living dream. A pair of shoes from the year 1660.

There are a set of weights from the time of colonialism and empire. These were used by Dutch traders and merchants in the unequal exchange relationships. Their historical weight is immense.

I watch a magic lantern show from the 18th century. Parts of it are of people working, the labour processes illuminated in vibrant colours. There are brief pornographic images.

An animation of a woman raising her hand that holds a shoe and bringing it down again and again on the bare buttocks of a man she is tightly holding to prevent his escape. It is as if being in that time.

A harpsichord from the time of the Dutch seaborne empire. The paintings of the owners of slaves and plantations have an aura of acidic moral corruption.

On the third floor there is a film about the workings inside a Philips factory. Footage of glass blowers in choreographed motion. The making of valves; a combination of machine precision and endless repetitive motion of human hands. It is filmed in an avant garde style. The sphere of work is only sporadically admitted to the sphere of visual culture.

Pieter Cornelisz Hooftstraat is the luxury shopping street. Every major city has such a place. Concentrations of Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Hermes, Versace, Gucci.

A slogan in a window, ‘Tomorrow’s People’.

A woman sits on a white painted bench with white painted nails and white painted clothes and lips like distorted bicycle tubes. I don’t know if her expression is scorn or pain or anaesthetic in her antiseptic eyes.

The eternal crisis of capital continues.

Into the working class district where people from around the world are pulled and pushed and washed up and rinsed out. The clothes are cheaper, brighter and with more style. The shops sell cheaper goods. Are people less content with their purchases? Flower stalls, balloon shops and Asian King next to American Nails.

After a long day of walking the streets I was full of images, words, sounds, art works; all the sensations of the city swirling together, kaleidoscopic movement in shining glass bead colours.

I waited for the tram to take me to the centre of the city and as I photographed it arriving the smartly dressed woman driver with black hair tied up in a bun smiled at me as she brought the vehicle to a stop.

The city looks distinct through the moving window, a cinematic representation; it looks more like the Amsterdam I imagined, a collage of photographs and film.

The next day I saw her wearing a big blue billowing dress riding a bicycle along the Singel canal. She looked so different out of her uniform; as if she was momentarily free.