In this blog I want to tell you more about the source of my way of guiding, associative and always improvising. It has a clear origin: my mother.
Art historian and my mother, Anne-Ruth Meijer, born in 1954 on the same banks of the Amstel River where my daughters now grow up. She worked for decades as a museum guide and tour guide for art historical tours in Europe. After her career as an art historian, my mother began painting. The illustrations on the Storylines website, all set in Amsterdam, were painted by her.
As a child, I traveled all over Europe with my parents. Together we viewed cities, churches and museums. My mother could tell beautiful stories about what we saw and I was fascinated by her stories. So I learned early on how to make historical sense of art and cultural expressions. My father, the sculptor Leo Vroegindeweij shared with us in apt words his conceptual sculptor’s vision: an ahistorical maker’s eye for space, material and form. With such an upbringing, my formal training as an art history teacher was mostly a perpetuation of what I was already unconsciously skilled at.
An “interview” with my mother
That my mother influenced me is obvious: I became a guide, just like her. But how can you describe “our” way of guiding and what distinguishes this style? By interviewing my mother, I hoped to gain more clarity. Armed with a questionnaire and a voice recorder, I installed myself at the table in the living room of my parents’ house in the Amsterdam Pijp district. But after the first question, boundaries soon began to blur in our conversation. Between past and present, here and there, memory and contemplation, events and thoughts. In retrospect, I could distill only one clear answer to my research question from this conversation:
“Some guides want to share their own knowledge above all. The more and the more detailed, the better the tour, in their eyes. I tried to do something different in my tours. It’s not about how much I know, it’s about them learning something. I let my clients construct their own knowledge. In that way what they see and hear becomes meaningful to them.
Guiding as breathing
The first season for guiding under the Storylines banner started. Almost daily I guided my clients in all kinds of associative storylines. At the Van Gogh Museum, I brought Vincent van Gogh to life in the minds and hearts. In the Rijksmuseum, I introduced them to the construction of “The Dutch Identity,” and how it is expressed in the paintings and artifacts from the 17th century. Walking along the canals and through the streets of Amsterdam, I traveled with countless families, couples and solo travelers through the layer cake of Amsterdam’s history. I just did it, effortlessly like breathing.
With the distance of almost a year, I look back on the diffuse conversation with my mother and discern in this fog the seemingly solid outlines of a cloud.
The form of our conversation was also an answer to my research question, I see now. What I share with my mother, what I learned from her, is the ability to seemingly effortlessly evoke an endless associative field in the form of spoken language. This is my mother tongue, or, as we Amsterdammers say, “me moerstaal’.
Rhetorical three-stage rocket
Some guides work with a fixed script, but I always improvise. With a combination of spoken text, intonation, expressions and gestures, I invite my clients to connect the dots I present them with. These ‘dots’ come from a cloud of facts that I have created in my head through extensive preliminary research.
Creating storylines is my form of creative expression. The rhetorical triad I use for this seems as simple as a Blues accord. One: I show something so that my clients can see something for themselves and thus experience it as true and relevant in that moment. Two: I tell something that connects to general knowledge about history, psychology, politics or natural laws, so that my listeners recognize it and can connect their experience to pre-existing knowledge in their long-term memory. Three: I add a ‘dot’ from the Cloud in my head. Et voilá: my clients construct knowledge that is relevant to them and adds another bead to the story chain that the tour thus becomes. This is how I create a storyline.
But that’s not the whole story. A storyline needs space.
Illusion of space
A storyline gains depth, and therefore eloquence, once it contains a sense of spatiality that breaks through the linear nature of language. Language, whether spoken or written, is literally linear, two-dimensional: one word comes after another. As soon as you talk about (art) history, there is a danger that your story becomes a sequence of dates and names. Informative and correct, but that does not make a good story.
Compare language to a painting. A painting is a flat surface, by definition a two-dimensional reality, bounded, moreover, by a frame, a cut-out. The Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honors is full of paintings where acclaimed 17th century painters used every painterly trick possible to evoke an illusion of three-dimensionality on this two-dimensional plane. As viewers, we thus experience depth and perspective, we believe in the illusion of space that continues beyond the edges of the plane. As endless as our own reality.
I try to play this game with my storylines as well. I paint a background of information, without too much detail, just rough outlines. This background serves a handful of details that really matter: a date, a name, a subject term, a quote. Thus the storyline gains volume, comes to life outside the frame.
A Time Traveler’s State of Mind
A storyline needs not only language but also time as a medium. Time and language make each other possible. Each storyline is a time travel in multiple temporal dimensions. The subject of the tour stands out the most: history manifesting itself in multiple time layers, partly a-chronologically in a street scene or in a museum gallery. As a guide, my job is to take my clients through these temporal leaps, allowing them to see how different meanings exist in different times.
However, the storyline is also in itself a temporal leap. With small narrative interventions, I can look ahead or revisit what has happened or will happen at another point in the storyline. Foreshadowing, flash-backs, cliffhangers, flash-forwards: all cinematic terms that originated in the 1920s, when the sophistication of film editing techniques in Hollywood led to film-stories that could enchant a mass audience.
I find that this kind of temporal slicing causes my clients to become more involved in a storyline, emotion comes into it. In this time traveller state of mind, my clients can experience that the past and the future are contained in every moment. And that is the magic short-cut to love of history, which is also my source of inspiration.
No encyclopedia can beat that.
Back in Amsterdam
For several years, my parents have owned a place in the north of France. Since then they have been commuting back and forth between their rural and their urban lives in complete satisfaction.
As a born-Amsterdammer, I view the contented happiness in the French countryside with mixed feelings. I understand the appeal of an orderly, quiet life. I get that you need it more as you get older. But I miss my mom here next door in the city where we both grew up.
Just now that my mother has let go of Amsterdam a bit, I realize that I didn’t just learn guiding from her. I also learned to be an Amsterdammer from her. I learned from her how to live in this quirky global village city.
I notice this when we go shopping together in our neighbourhood De Pijp, at the Albert Cuyp market or at the Turkish supermarket on the corner. Just like me, my mother makes small talk, a “gebbetje” (Amsterdam-slang for ‘joke’) in every store. I feel proud when the shop owners realize that she and I are mother and daughter, so similar in how we talk and interact.
I notice it in how we exchange gossip (old English for “best friend”) about the state of the city. What’s going on in the museums, galleries and cinemas? What restaurants have opened, which ones are really good and which are only popular because everyone wants to be seen there now? Where can you eat a good ‘Döner’ sandwich? Which terrace has good coffee, which store has good chocolates, exquisite cheese?
Generations are there to transfer knowledge from the past to the future. If you are lucky, it is a pleasant relay race, where you walk together for a while before taking over or passing the baton. By asking my mother to make paintings of Amsterdam for my website, I hope to entice her to walk beside me a little longer. With her painters-eye on our city on the Amstel River.
Ruth Meijer’s work can be followed via her Instagram account.
