The Lieverdje (pronounced Lee-vert-cheh) and meaning “the beloved little one” or ‘the darling boy’ is a statue of a small boy located on a street called Het Spui (pronounced, ‘Spow) in Amsterdam. The boy is from Amsterdam folk legend, a 19th century street boy who died while saving a cat from drowning in an Amsterdam canal.

Happenings are ‘improvised events’ executed by gifted and inspired eccentrics. They are wacky! I was much impressed by Robert Jasper Grootveld, an artist from Amsterdam, who staged happenings on Spui Square in 1960s. I felt there was much to learn 40 years on!

Each happening depends on the audience to complete it by means of its own performance and understanding of what is going on, regardless of any ‘planning.’ A Happening is always a catalyst. It is both theatre, dance, poetry, music, painting, using everyday objects and activities in ridiculous situations and incongruous locations, to erode the boundary between life and art. This strategy serves to destroy the traditional passive role of the audience, creating what amounts to a revolutionary new situation, given the right circumstances.

The Happening is a totally open form with unlimited possibilities for exploitation, and in Amsterdam, the passionately adored ‘Magic Centre’ of the Dutch avant-garde, was put to an extraordinary use by the gifted master: Robert Jasper Grootveld, who was a genius of the absurd.

Grootveld was born July 19, 1932 in Amsterdam. His father was an anarchist. Grootveld was a school drop out, and did odd-jobs (window cleaner, seaman, copywriter) before becoming a full-time ‘happener’.

When he worked as a window cleaner on the Leideseplein, a public square lined by cafes in the centre of Amsterdam, he spent a week living on a life raft afloat in the Amsterdam canals, cooking over a camp stove and wearing a different suit every day. The stunt was picked up by the local press, and he knew from that day the power of publicity.

He then bought a ‘bakfiets’ which is Dutch word for a bicycle

with a trailer (two wheels at the back one at the front), on which he painted ‘Amsterdam-Paris’. Friends urged him to peddle the contraption to Paris, which he did, joining the Paris cabaret scene as a transvestite performer, he then peddled back to Amsterdam.

Grootveld then went to Africa as a seaman. Here he was impressed by African tribal ritual, (perhaps the Dogons, pictured right) shamanism and Native American peace pipes, etc. He began to see that smokers are like sacrificial victims, and are like the addicted consumers of society. It was while at sea he received his ‘magical shaman’s box’ from an American couple, a doctor and his wife. It is effectively an assortment of cleaning bottles, tins and medicines. (I personally took a photo of it when I finally got to meet Robert Jasper in 2006. It was in his apartment in the Sint Jacob Hospital. Robert Jasper died three years later in 2009).

Resenting his own addiction to nicotine, he resolved to be a one-man anti-smoking movement – a “charlatan, a simple and inadequate exhibitionist”, whose goal would be to outlaw cigarette advertising in the Netherlands. He considered himself a fanatical social worker. He derided the obsessive need to buy television sets, washing machines, electric egg beaters…and began putting graffiti on cigarette ads around the city, and coughing his way into tobacconists with a rag coated with chloroform, provoking customers.

Then he started his own anti-smoke temple in a shed behind the Prinsengracht (and leased by the millionaire magus Nikolaas Kroese who owned the 5 Flies restaurant), where he led his collaborators, primarily artists and local teenagers, in ritual performances against tobacco and smoking.

Vast quantities of smoke were produced to exorcise evil spirits, with Grootveld leaping around the fires in ceremonial dress, his face painted. He ended his sermons with the anti-smoking song: “Ugge-ugge”.

His rituals were becoming increasingly frenzied, and on April 18th, 1964, he burned down the shed, the anti-smoke temple (which he called now the Church for

Aware Nicotine Addicts), much to the consternation of Kroese and the authorities.

As he set the place on fire he shouted insanely: “Remember Van Der Lubbe!” (a reference to the Dutch man accused of burning the German Reichstag in 1933, an incident that consolidated Nazi power). Eventually in court he pleaded that it was a case of “a ritual that got out of hand.” For this performance he was place on probation.

“He used word play too. The “Marihu” project, ‘marihu’ being short for marijuana: ‘Marie what?’ Marie where? Marihu! Watch out for the Mariheer (the Marihuana Master).’ He instructed everyone to make packages of marihu…marivoodoo, maritaboo, mariyogurt, marihuwelijk (a pun on Dutch word for wedding, ‘huwelijk’). Grootveld claimed everything was marihu and marihu was everywhere. It was a game he called ‘Marihuette (after Russian roulette). The rules for the game went out in a chain letter that requested that people copy five times and circulate among friends. This gave followers the freedom of improving or adding to the rules as they learned the game. Although many played this game, no one understood the rules. It had a point system: a marijuana arrest was 100 points; a voluntary visit to the police station was 150 points. The game grew hopelessly elaborate when players began informing police of their actions as part of the points system. This exposed the hypocrisies as they saw it of police attitude to marijuana (and eventually led to its legalisation in Amsterdam because the police could simply not deal with this situation).

In Grootveld’s view, the none-sense manifested in the game of marihuette mimicked an absurdity he observed in real life. Addicted potheads were being arrested by nicotine-addicted policemen, and the incidents were being reported by alcoholic journalists and read in press or viewed on TV by public addicted to cigarettes and consumerism.

Grootveld was becoming a well-known figure and Amsterdammers have a taste for both humour and political adventure.

HET LIEVERDJE (the darling boy)

The bronze statue of the Darling Boy was a gift to the City of Amsterdam by the Hunter Tobacco Company. Grootveld immediately felt anger towards the donor of the statue, since for him it characterised ‘the addicted consumer of the future’ and a dishonour to the memory of the darling boy who saved the drowning cat at the expense of his own life. He protested its presence and organised happenings every Saturday at midnight, giving speeches that ended with a burnt offering. The police interfered but Grootveld kept on.

Dozens of teenagers and students began showing up, chanting ‘Image, Imaga’ (French for ‘image or idol’ (ee-ma-jeh) and shouting some of Grootveld’s slogans, including the coughing chant: ‘Ugge, Ugge’ Grootveld would conduct a solemn sermon against smoking: ‘Friends, we are gathered here in this earliest hour on Sunday…’

“The ritual happenings started in June 1964, and

continued until September 1965. He continued to lay blame for Western Culture’s addictive

tendencies at the feet of the tobacco industry (dope syndicate), the liquour industry, the media and all media advertising, and the nauseating middle class (het misselijk makende middenstand). He predicted a future where the press would become so corrupt and bland that illegal newspapers would spring up everywhere. He envisioned a special mission for the city of Amsterdam, describing the extraordinary effects of the encircling pattern of the canals had on him. He predicted, quite prophetically, that a mass influx of young people, particularly from America, would arrive in Amsterdam soon, and that the ‘publicity’, the image, of the city would prove an irresistable magnet.”

 

 

References:

PROVO: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt by Richard Kempton
Het Witte Gevaar by Roel van Duyn
Magier: van een nieuwe tijd (het leven van Robert Jasper Grootveld by Eric Duivenvoorden.
SIIG (Dutch Institute of Social History www.IISG.nl)