The objects making public space, the statues and buildings, are specific to the homonidae, Michel Serres – the maverick of French letters – writes in Genesis, and they stabilize our relationships and slow down the intervals of revolution. Not so for the other primates. For an unstable band of baboons, he goes on, social changes are flaring up every minute. One could characterize their history as unbound, insanely so.
I once watched a movie that followed the events and tribulations of two tribes of baboons in Africa. They were Anubis baboons, whose adult males have huge manes of thick hair and canine teeth like swords. They live in big packs – not like wolves, in dozens, but in troops of several hundred. The hierarchies in these packs are delineated as strictly as if Dickens had written them, and as I was watching the movie curled up with Jackie and his mum on our big red sofa, the sight of the animals ranged across their browsing grounds like citizens woven into a social fabric raised strong feelings for the commonality of primate life in all of us.
Especially this: the movie concentrated on the antics of a young female baboon, a favourite daughter of the alpha male, who spent what time he had left over from copulation prowling the edges of the terrain watching out for trouble. This little princess scampered about doing whatever the hell she felt like and no one was allowed to stop her. At one point she clambers onto the lap of an elderly female who’s peacefully peeling and eating fruit and starts picking the pieces out of the old one’s fingers and stuffing them in her own mouth. Sitting there, brazenly chewing, spoilt rotten. If that happened to you, you would sweep the little one off your lap with a snarl and a hiss, but the old one can’t do that: alpha male, way across the other side of the troop, is watching. So she gathers up what’s left of the fruit and puts it all in her mouth at once and clenches it tight shut and the little princess starts in pulling at her old lips and prizing them apart and poking at her old teeth to try and get two fingers inside her mouth, which stays clamped closed, her head straining back as far as she can, fury in her eyes and, I’ll bet, murder in her heart. This shocking display of privilege abused is so Marie Antoinette that the three of us sitting on the sofa couldn’t wait for the revolution to happen. And sure enough, it arrived in the shape of two burly young males with brand new manes and charismatic muscles who ganged together to overcome the alpha. There was a big scuffle that seemed to kick up all the brown dust of Africa, but before too long they had him on the ground. He retired immediately and went to sit in a tree while the two deposers beta-and-gamma’d the daylights out of each other until there was only one left standing.
This is not quite revolution as humans know it, although the character of a joint action that quickly splits into factions is what does happen with us. Coups d’etat are a regularity in baboon life. They do it instead of holding elections. And the aftermath is generally peaceful. The reality of alpha leadership is that the Alpha male gets to do most of the insemination while he’s in office, so a lot of the tribe are descended from him, hence are related to each other, hence the established relationships in the tribe will maintain. Which makes me think: is that why a Scottish clan chief was called ‘father’ of the clan – because he literally was? Was feudal life back then as much a family life as the baboons’?
Anyway: the very first act of the new leadership is to chase that obnoxious little princess clear out of the community. The movie shows her little pink bum scuttling off down into the valley swatted and spat at by everyone she passes, and it follows her on her subsequent wanderings as she tries to join another tribe – and has to start right over, right at the bottom of the pecking order.
THE NEXT DAY I am walking through public space dodging the bikes and gawping at the breasts of the women for hire, and I haven’t gone more than fifty metres before I hear a deep voice behind me.
“Hey, man, I know where you live.” It says. I turn, to see the man with the Audi standing there with an I am the alpha and omega expression on his face. Then he cracks a smile: “Isn’t that what the bad guy says?” He pushes his hand towards me and says his name is Bamba. Bamba! And then, as I continue walking, he falls in beside me and starts to talk. I assume he wants to find out how much I saw back there on the bridge, but no – it seems to be just chat. Pleasantry. As we pass the sex shop on Oudeverburgwaal he points out an artificial vagina in the window and tells me it’s “modelled on the actual interior” of a specific porn star. So next I think it’s going to be about Katrina – she of the Anubis profile – but no, as we pass the lurid transvestite display in the shop window on the corner of Molensteeg, he tells me he wishes he had a “real education” like me.
“I can make people do what I want,” he says. “I know how to feed the animals in the donkey sanctuary. But you, I mean guys like you, you need to give something back to the world, because you have the power.”
“There is knowledge, and there is what you know.” I say. By which I mean that knowledge is the letters after your name. Knowing is what got into your head through experience. I am paraphrasing Gertrude Stein. For whom there was no qualification that mattered more than feeling.
“See! That’s what I mean. There is knowledge and there’s what you know. That’s so great.”
So great? And so easy to say. I try to explain what it means to me: usually books of knowledge are criss-crossed with blizzards of footnotes referring to the other volumes that contribute to their field – without this corroboration, they intone, how can what you know be trusted? Whereas I –
“There you go, babes!” He says, interrupting me with a playful punch.
We pass the little pack of crackheads who inhabit the corner of Oude Hoogstraat and the Klovenier canal. They look like the beggars in nursery rhymes from two hundred years ago. They usually come up to me in their smelly rags and try and score money, especially when I’m with Jackie, but when they see who I’m with this time they slink back into shelter. Okay. I decide to tell him something complicated, about the problems for choirs singing Rachmaninov’s vespers. It’s a story about the dynamics of everyday relativity. In unaccompanied choral music, especially with a large choir, there is a tendency for the music to drift flat as it progresses. The change is inaudible to the participants or the audience, who are caught in the relational web of the moment. In Rachmaninov’s vespers, however, the bass lines are notoriously at the bottom of the register of most singers – in the Nunc Dimittis they reach the B flat below low C – and so as the choir tends towards the flat, pressure is put on the basses trying to flex with the tuning. They reach a sort of human absolute of low voicedness.
“Wow!” he says. “I’m gonna use that one!” and I think, how are you going to use that? You gonna write my book? And somehow he knows what I’m thinking, because he laughs a big laugh and slaps me on the back. “Don’t worry!” He says. “You worry too much, man!”
BIOLOGISTS TELL US that individuals in shoals and flocks manage their progress by continuously monitoring the few others immediately adjacent to them. This is how those big flocks of starlings that appear in central Europe in the fall pull off their spectacular swooping cloud formations. At home on my desk is a well thumbed copy of A Thousand Plateaus by the great mentors of multiplicity Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a book that is way too radical to be compared to Bamba, but somehow has Bamba’s same brand of bumptious assertion. It says this about life in packs: animals that live in nomadic packs live outside the stasis of laws and territories. This is most complicated in mammal packs, for here the dominant and submissive behaviours endemic to all societies – even bees bully each other, apparently – erupt into the sort of leadership spats we saw in the baboons. The leaders of these fluid organisations cannot rely on precedent or law, since everything – everyone – is always shifting. They need practical cunning. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the leader has to gamble everything on every move. Now what I’m thinking is that I am the leader of a pack of thoughts, the pack of likes and dislikes that populates my head. This pack is continuously shifting, things on the periphery becoming central, things in the middle flying to the edge; if I want to like everything I must let the pack shift and self organize, I must not burden it with structure but follow the flow, and gamble on a positive outcome. I must do the opposite of what we are taught to do all our lives. Remember those six degrees of separation? Those six historical lives? Look: Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Lauryn Hill, Erykha Badu. Did you see what happened there? Context is everything. Isn’t it a whole lot better than saying oh god! Celine Dion! I can’t stand her!
And now Bamba and I have come all the way down to the Dam of Amster-Dam, which is the big public space of the centre city, and we find the place full of commotion and noise and hundreds of men dressed in red and white clothes. Football supporters. Ajax is playing Feyenoord this afternoon and the home crowd is out in force. The rivalry between Amsterdam and Rotterdam is keen and hard. They have painted their faces and are wearing archaic red and white jokers’ hats with long felt spikes carrying bells, and they push and shove as though they own the place. And right now, they do. The noise is tremendous. I yell over it and tell Bamba the macabre story about Dutch settlers in seventeenth century New Amsterdam, now New York, who played football one day on Broadway with the heads of some natives they had massacred. The strife engendered by this barbarity is what caused the wall on Wall Street to be built, and what kicked off an escalation in hostility that never slowed until all the native tribes of America had been concentrated into reservations almost three hundred years later: and I wonder whether that noise the crowd is making, a sound that swells and swoops abruptly like a flock of birds, only with menace rather than beauty, is the same as on that day in the new world.
As I stand in the soccer crowd and it fluxes and spins round its changing centres, I ask myself if this sort of thing could be classed as debate. Question: what shall we do with public space? Answer: this! It is a historic space, a space made of rumour and flux, an Anabaptist space, a witch hunter’s space, a public execution sort of space. I stand in the middle of the turbulence asking, “but can we still have statues, please?” And then Bamba suddenly breaks into a run and disappears into the throng, swallowed up as spray is by the waves.
DOWN BY THE OLD HARBOUR, where blocks of apartments are going up in the SuperDutch style, a brusque hand-over-fist in blue - KLM – and orange – national soccer strip – and grey – the colour of machines, a stone sculpture stands. It is a solid block of limestone, a three-metre cube, covered in what look like the scratches of wild beasts. Several stone carving chisels and hammers are attached to it by chains silently inviting passers by to contribute to the evolving shape of the thing; which they do – although if you’ve tried stone carving, you’ll know that the implacability of the material asserts itself immediately on the beginner. This is why start-up classes in stone carving all end up with a bunch of tortoises, like ashtrays used to in school pottery classes. And that is why this democratic sculpture is covered in scratches, and is slowly taking on a completely different aspect of victory to Nelson’s column: the aspect of attempts on its nature repelled.
The debate itself has become the public space. This in itself is an exciting state of affairs, and may see the current generation through. And it may be enough to leave it there. But is there any future for the product? Do those who love the material of public art, the columns and plinths and giant statues, have anything to look forward to?
Maybe this: it is a quality of contemporary fragmentation that works of art have the potential to escape their valuation, and run outside those busily debated narratives. It would be a loose and wild existence, but art in such a free fall could at last let go of its critiques, and become instead the perception of things yet unnamed.
And public space? Public space would be everywhere.