LAST month in Amsterdam, “the significant other” says I’m to be taken to the headquarters of the Netherlands Bank. I mount my Gazelle and pedal after her. It is a city that encourages compliance.
The building is a monument to “nondescript” – somewhere between a state prison and a grey shoebox. I thought it didn’t look over-enticing, but my Dutch chum was adamant. Inside the sliding plate-glass doors, we crossed a lengthy antiseptic space to approach a security guard who sat some way behind a series of screens.
He didn’t speak. He waited.
Els said we’d come to see an exhibition of photographs. He said we had to book to see them. She said we had. He said he didn’t have her name on the list. She pointed to it. His face darkened. He was clearly possessed of Cable Street inclinations when it came to letting people pass.
Els showed him her ID. I showed him my press card. For the first time, he smiled. He said he couldn’t let me in with that. It wasn’t an acceptable document. With a flourish, I produced my passport. He was crushed.
To intrude further, we had to wait to enter a glass cage. After release on the other side, a young bank official greeted us kindly. She led us along a long, silent, empty high corridor lined by a wall of glass.
Turning right at the end, we found ourselves in a larger space into which a vast functional box jutted. It was Security. Inside, uniforms stared at screens flashing images of the building.
On the top of Security, to my intense surprise, was a life-sized model of a soldier’s head, arms and upper body poking out of a bush. Clearly Asiatic, he rotated regularly, on guard. The binoculars pressed to his eyes glowed and darkened.
As my mastery of the Dutch language remains incomplete, I contented myself with pointing at the figure. Our guardian told me we were now in the arts section and that, therefore, the soldier was an objet d’art.
It seems that it represents Hiroo Ononda, the Japanese soldier who, not being informed of the end of the Second World War, dutifully remained in a state of combat on the island of Lubang until the 1970s. I had mistaken it for a good joke, not an oeuvre. Perhaps it was both, but I am not sure that is allowed.
Past Security, the room opened out into a huge white-walled windowless space, on which hung photographs the size of advertising hoarding. Els says it’s a photo series by Reinier Gerritsen. It shows images of people who all think of themselves as “Europeans” – in cities from Istanbul to London and Berlin, from Romania to Russia and France. They are generally taken down the street, but the focus of all their faces is away from the camera; no one is looking at the lens.
The bright woman at the desk tells us that Gerritsen takes his pictures covertly. On the sly. He dons vivid high visibility clothing and sets up his camera on a yellow tripod. No one takes any notice of a surveyor with a theodolite.
“So he takes picture of people who are unaware of him doing so?” I mused, as I looked past her towards the flickering lights of the screens in Security. I realise that I am, in that moment, at the epicentre of security as a concept. I’ve passed a succession of checks, cameras and observations until I have reached the vault of a national bank – where I am looking at a windowless wall-full of surveillance pictures.
It dawns on me that we are actually coming, not to tolerate, but to treasure surveillance. It’s moved beyond the functional to become an art form. I have a vision of museums of the moving camera sprouting up across the country. We are beginning to celebrate our methods of entrapment.
A particular friend of mine, the late Ian Breakwell, once produced an event where he filled a cinema and then, using cameras at the front, projected images of the audience as they were, looking at the screen: watching themselves. He was ahead of his time, Breakwell. This is masterful. You create a world where people, for their own entertainment, observe themselves. It’s post Orwellianism.
I can see a world where we come to love security and surveillance. We will embrace it, take it to our hearts, devote a bank holiday to it and sell poppies in support of further research.
The idea of loving the vile and detestable reminds me of that time Tony Blair said “new” Labour wouldn’t have won until the party learned to love Peter Mandelson. It is a heartening concept, because I can’t stand unelected right-wing free-marketeers in general and Lord Mandy in particular.
When I emerged from the Nederlandsche Bank, I felt I had something profound to say about the nature of security in modern society. And it all ends up, again, with “I hate Peter Mandelson”. It just proves that there are various roads by which we can find the truth.
