De Revisor — Simone van Saarloos reads a text about Stefan Simchowitz, KIRAC Episode 8

In 2019, the literary magazine De Revisor presents its own programme series, Het personage: four evenings on which writers and artists bring a different character to life at a special location. On 19 May, during the fourth and final edition, you can explore the collector’s territory at De Zwaan auction house.

Het personage

Het personage is a series of literary wanderings through unusual buildings in Amsterdam. In a pickle factory, hotel, auction house and football club, writers and artists bring a different character to life at each event. Four evenings in which building, history and character become intertwined. Het personage is supported by the Dutch Foundation for Literature through its Literary Events and Activities scheme.

Practical information

Doors open at 19:15; programme begins at 19:30. Location: De Zwaan auction house, Keizersgracht 474, Amsterdam. Tickets: €10. Further information: De Revisor.

Stefan Simchowitz, Simco, is an art dealer who sometimes buys so obsessively that he creates a monopoly, taking possession of almost all of a single artist’s work. Artists and dealers do not want this, and some bar Simco. In that case, he sends an emissary, someone disguised as innocence, who then passes the artwork on to him. He wants a faster art market, with fewer big shows and more small exhibitions. If Simco wants you, he offers you time and space. He rents a studio for you and makes sure you have no expenses for the time being. Produce first; sales will follow. He sees the artist as a one-person factory that needs to be kept well oiled.

To be honest, I was surprised by the surprise surrounding this man. I had never heard of him, but when I began looking into him, it was a little like diving into a swimming pool filled with concrete. This man is so transparent that surface and depth cannot be separated. Transparency is his credo, his brand. Simco says what he wants and thinks. If he thinks you are a bad artist, he tells you. In the interviews he has given, he quotes classical philosophers. It is not that I find him unpleasant, or shockingly commercial. Rather, I cannot understand why he is portrayed as controversial. For a pioneer, he is quite boring. Hold on to that word for a moment: pioneer.

Simco fits in well here, at De Zwaan auction house. One of his favourite thinkers is Nicholas Taleb, whose field is risk analysis. In short, that aligns precisely with Simco’s ideal of many small exhibitions, always backing several names at once so as not to create homogeneity. Taleb is known for his fondness for black swans. Black swans are surprising, unexpected events with a major impact. Black swans cannot be scheduled. Taleb therefore advocates allowing for risk and chance, so that you occasionally encounter a black swan. Simco says he chases white swans. Or perhaps he means that he wants to turn black swans — exceptional events — white, that is, ordinary. According to Simco, the way to do this is to make as many connections as possible and meet as many interesting people as possible. As an example of a White Swan event, he says: you might just have been Mark Zuckerberg’s housemate at university. White and black: hold on to those words too.

So his fondness for swans and this auction house, De Zwaan — The Swan — go together. But Stefan comes from South Africa. And my family apparently once ruled in Amsterdam’s Golden Bend, living and trading there as mayors. Those events can be connected. Pioneer + white and black = colonialism. And that is what we are now standing in the middle of.

Simco himself provides the starting point for this story. In a video in which he explains why he would make a suitable director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, he says he wants to organise an annual show of African artists. He reminds us that, as a white South African, he is closely connected to the Netherlands. ‘I’d engage in a lot more work from Africa, which is close to the Dutch, and the Dutch colonies.’

De Zwaan auction house specialises, among other things, in what it calls ‘tribal’ art. Tribal is a racial term. Like ‘ethnic’, tribal does not simply refer to a specific group of people; otherwise we would also call the residents of Oud-Zuid or the Rivierenbuurt tribal. Tribal is a term introduced to replace ‘primitive’. What many auction houses and art dealers in the West now call tribal art used to be called ‘primitive’ art. Primitive art is not merely a term referring to time — something that happened first or has an early origin — but also to a location: if the same thing happens simultaneously in different places, the West is still progressive. The word ‘primitive’, then, does not merely refer to time, but to a time designated as ‘outdated’, ‘undeveloped’. In this way, time and space are always connected.

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman writes that African slave traders sold strangers to colonists from the Netherlands, France, Portugal and England. They were not selling brothers and sisters. They were selling criminals and foreigners. They only became brothers and sisters, only became one people, in the eyes of Westerners, who imposed the idea of race. I think of that when I hear the word ‘tribal’. How you make small what is vast and diverse, so as not to feel your own smallness.

In 2013, this auction house fetched a record sum for a mask from Congo: €300,000. Now, I cannot claim to know how this particular mask got here, or who grew rich from it. I want to stay with the mask itself for a moment. The mask itself: hold on to that.

An artist from Congo recently appeared at the Holland Festival. His name is Faustin Linyekula. I once heard Linyekula speak after a performance in New York. He performed at the Metropolitan Museum and had spent a residency there. He acknowledged that the African objects in the museum raise a painful question: should these objects be returned to the places from which they were stolen, and would that make sense? Can you return objects at all? Anyone who believes that a mask is an object and therefore lifeless may think so. Anyone who understands objects as more alive knows that a return is not simply a going back. The object carries its journey and history with it. The object has been changed by the rituals to which it has been subjected: lonely nights in the museum, a static place on a plinth in a white-cube gallery, bought and resold and bought and resold for thousands of euros. Linyekula found the objects in storage the worst of all. The museum does not exhibit everything; some things stand in the basement. How are those objects doing, Linyekula asked; who talks to them, aren’t they lonely?

Linyekula is accustomed to objects having souls. That these very objects should be traded as aesthetic commodities, rather than as, for example, life partners, is bizarre. I want to stay with the mask itself for a moment, I said. As if there were such a thing as an isolated mask, without a story, without history and energy. Objects: hold on to that word.

In 1790, Saartjie Baartman was abducted from South Africa, sold and sent to England. She lost her own Khoisan name and had a Dutch name imposed on her. Her husband was murdered by Dutch colonists. Baartman was exhibited in London as an exotic object. Visitors paid to look at Baartman’s body. Above all, they wanted to see her genitals. Later she was sold to a French animal trainer and had to appear at parties. When she died, a surgeon from Napoleon’s tribe took charge of her. He disassembled her body and exhibited it in pieces. A body deprived even of the context ‘body’.

In 1994, Mandela became president. He wanted to bring Baartman back to South Africa to give her a respectful burial. France refused, made difficulties, found it difficult, feared that it might have to return more things. Only in 2002, 192 years after Saartjie Baartman left South Africa, was she brought back. Can Baartman’s story be compared with the story of so-called tribal art, which is still sold at a large profit to be exhibited? Is a body similar to art? The assumption that objects carry no life within them is as Western as the ownership of another person’s body. Possession: hold on to that word.

Hold on to it hold on to it hold on to it for a moment hold on to it hold on to it hold on holding on, collecting

How was that sold for a fortune?