A field guide to Amsterdam’s avant-garde cultural enclaves and artistic landmarks -
some edgy, others extravagant, but all awash in attitude.

by Anna J. Kutor

Few places in the world embrace progressive art and design with the fervor of Amsterdam,
a city overflowing prestigious museums and trendy galleries. Institutions
housing Dutch colonial artefacts, wax figures and the works of the Great
Ear-Mutulated Master (aka Van Gogh) are crowd-drawing mainstays, but the
staying power of Amsterdam’s artistic prominence can also be attributed to
experimental art spaces and off-the-beaten-track landmarks.

Take the incumbent artistic hotbed of Westergasfabriek. A
poster child of creative renewal, this sprawling art and culture park was converted
from a derelict and decaying 19th-century gasworks site on the city’s western
fringe. Its renovated brick-and-metal structures now house canal-side
restaurants, offbeat art galleries, a food-design studio and the art-house
cinema Ketelhuis. On the north side of the campus, the massive cylindrical
Gasometer building plays host to a variety of large-scale exhibitions and
festivals, including Awakening’s all-night rave (October 2) and the Affordable
Art Fair (Oct 29-Nov 1).

Another industrial wasteland treated to a cultural makeover is the NDSM shipyard on the northern banks of the IJ-Canal, a ten-minute ferry ride from the back of the central train station. On the outside, the premises remain
largely unaltered expect for bold swaths of graffiti and a few life-sized
Easter Island statues, but free-spirited artistic expression explodes within
the ironclad warehouses. A collaborative breeding ground for emerging talent,
the shabby-chic halls house over 250 independent artists, designers, architectural
firms and theater groups, many crafting projects on-site. Besides these small
clusters of Bohemian activity, concerts, performances and festivals are
frequently held on the grounds, including the whimsical Storytelling Festival.

Clever Conglomerate

“Artists now are hungry for action. There is a need to participate, to collaborate and
to be part of something bigger than themselves,” says Thomas Peutz,
director of SMART Project Space, a multi-genre arts center located inside a former pathological anatomical laboratory in Oud-West. At the vanguard of cutting-edge experimental art since its inception in 1994,
this hybrid creative domain is a collaborative artist-incubator that stimulates
the exchange of ideas across artistic boundaries. You won’t see any watercolors of quaint villages or even diamond-encrusted skulls here; instead
you’ll find a group show focusing on the practices of accumulating various
materials (through October 25), music clips that question our social
conditioning and a mockumentary of various phobias. And this is only a fraction
of the unrestrained experimentation spread throughout the centers exhibition
and music production spaces, two cinemas and artist-in-residence studios. Peutz
adds:”Alternative art spaces tend to become the pulsing heart of a city, a
place of stimulation, refreshment and adventure, which reaches out beyond the
confines of its walls to involve those in the city and far beyond.”

Urban Display

Blurring the frontier between private and public art domains, some of the most fun and
forward-looking art installations are popping up on street corners instead of
showrooms. Alongside the vibrant mish-mash of innovative graffiti and murals,
Amsterdam’s most unusual layers of urban artistry are the Lego patchworks of
German artist Jan Vormann. As part of the ongoing “Repairing” project
by Platform 21, an eclectic design foundation, the clever
young handyman has mended doorposts, crumbling corners and wall cracks with the
famous brightly-colored plastic building blocks.

This fall, Amsterdam’s street-side showground expands with a number of boundary-pushing
and bizarre additions thanks to ArtZuid, an outdoor sculpture
show running until 26 October. Vibrant geometric shapes, a Pinocchio-inspired
blockhead figure and a giant limbless body are among the forty forms that
appear on the lush green lawns of Apollo- and Minervalaan in the city’s south
side. Abstract as the attraction may be, it bring a new, knock-you-sideways
quality to city’s expanding art spectrum.

Museum Night

Those in need of a late-night culture fix will gobble up the visual feast of
contemporary art during Museum Night on 7 November. Museumnacht, as
it is known, involves more than 40 museums and galleries in the city, all of
which offer a high-octane program of concerts, dance performances, film
screenings and workshops, some going on until 2am. Standout events include record-breaking
athletic stunts at the Olympic Stadium, a mind-warping musical show at the
Planetarium and the Sixties Party of the Year bash in the Amsterdam Historical
Museum.