Amsterdam - Day Four

Bagels for breakfast, yummy yummy.

Today we mopped up the last few museums – the Stedelijk’s harbour-front gallery, Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum (Naval Museum) and Rembrandt House.

The Stedelijk visit was a lot of fun. For starters, finding the damn place was almost like performance art. It’s a temporary gallery in an old post building, in a disused area of the harbour.

There was no clear road or route to get there, and it took us some wandering. The complete lack of other tourists was very off-putting, but we got there in the end, and had the gallery pretty much to ourselves.

There was a strange air travel showpiece, whose purpose we never quite determined. The main collection itself had several wonderfully interactive pieces (one pictured), including an ‘endless’ pile of green candy by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (I ate a couple, apple-flavoured):

Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work is sometimes considered a reflection of his experience with AIDS. Many of Gonzalez-Torres's installations invite the viewer to take a piece of the work with them: a series of works allow viewers to take packaged candies from a pile in the corner of an exhibition space … These installations are replenished by the exhibitor as they diminish. The most pervasive reading of Gonzalez-Torres's work takes the processes his works undergo (…piles of candies dispersing, etc.) as metaphor for the process of dying.

and a person writhing on the floor:

Someone has been writhing, artfully, on the floor of the ICA gallery every day since January 17. A number of people have assumed the role and, changing shifts every three hours, they successively embody a work by Tino Sehgal: Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things, 2000.

We had a more traditional experience at the Naval Museum, the highlight of which was the full-sized recreation of a 17th Century trading vessel, and at Rembrandt Huis, where the artist's home and studio is recreated alongside a gallery of his work.

Afterwards we went shoe shopping. No really.

Alas, our time was up, and we returned to the airport for our flight home. In a bizarre twist, our airline had booked us into two completely different rows on the plane. A quick whinge later and we had seats together, thanks to a helpful hostess. The weather was frightful on the return trip, and we didn’t get any free drinks because there was too much turbulence.