Ruth Leon recommends…. Ten Things – Rijksmuseum
Ruth Leon recommendsTen things Point of View
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On the website for the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam’s great museum, there is a series of called Ten Things. Drawn from their own collections, the curators have drawn parallels to give insights into particular aspects of their artworks and, often, to explain Dutch culture and history while showing images of the different items.
This one, Ten Things Point of View, is about the collection seen from a gender perspective. What you wear in the morning, which desk you work at or how you are photographed: ideas about gender affect everyone. However, how they are shaped varies from century to century and place to place. What do you see when you look at the Rijksmuseum’s collection with a gender take?
Take a look at all the 10 Things videos; they are all a joy to watch and you may even learn something you didn’t know before.
This is misleading, there are no genders in Amsterdam. And not in the whole of the Netherlands, for that matter.
This is an old trick, with which the first truly bourgeois nation in Europe got rid of nasty rulers and arrogant invaders who could not deal with it.
Already in the 16th century when the Quite Low Countries were part of the Habsburg Empire, that genderless, unruly society irritated Charles V so much that he gave it to his fanatic ultra-gendered son Phillip, who tried to hammer some sense in the Dutch. But his armies were so confused by the ungendering of the locals that after an 80-year attempt to get them straight, they simply gave-up. That’s when the Free Republic Without Genders was founded. In the 17th century, the French Sun King gave it a courageous try, but even for him it was too much. Napoleon tried to force the Dutch into correct gender behavior through his brother, who settled in the City Council Building in the centre of Amsterdam (turning it into a palace), but his regular looks from his window mellowed the poor Frenchman who begged the emperor to give him permission to gently sink into the local night life. Napoleon got angry and fired him, and tried to gender the country himself. But Waterloo where fully-gendered allies gave him a hard beating prevented the plan from being realised. And when the nazis pulled all the stops of their sadistic ingenuinity to get some Anständigkeit into the stubborn Dutch skulls, the result was the postwar cultural revolution which celebrated total ungendering throughout all stratas of society, wiping even the remotest corners free of gender weakness, and drawing hippies from all over the world, even from the USA, colourful youngsters who landed on the Dam Square and the Vondel Park as a swarm of completely ungendered butterflies, demonstrating how far Dutch influences had conquered the civilised world. And, by the way, Geert Wilders is an Indonesian woman.
We visited the museum in 2015 and couldn’t see the paintings for the crowds; one man pushing an older woman in a wheelchair pushed aggressively forward so that she could see. The rest of us just had to get out of the way. Outside, once our visit was over, we saw both of them walking beside the empty wheelchair!!!
1. What time did you go? My experience with major museums is that it can only work if one waits at the door before they open.
2. If they were trying to actually see the art, that’s refreshing. Many visitors take photographs and selfies.