The plan was the brainchild of British artist William Speakman who gave his work the title Spiritual Teenage Moodmaker.

Exactly opposite the Beyerd on Boschstraat in Breda is Peter’s Headshop, which sells, among other things, a large number of instruction booklets aimed at the semi-professional home-grower of cannabis. The trade in seeds, cuttings and every conceivable accessory, such as special light bulbs, irrigation systems, ventilators, concentrated plant foods and insecticides, seems to be almost as lucrative as the trade in Netherweed itself. In many attics and back rooms – government estimates speak of 35,000 to 50,000 – illegal, self-built plantations are being run and exploited by private individuals.

Apart from the public location and the security camera, Speakman’s nursery set-up differed little if at all from such clandestine home plantations. In the darkened attic, which also housed the big extractor fans required for this work, hardboard had been used to create a blank-walled booth. A small door with a round window gave access to a short ‘lock’ from where the nursery interior could be viewed. There, under a blaze of yellow light, stood dozens of cannabis plants waving in the current of air from a ventilator. Water and fertilizers were delivered automatically by means of a pump, a time switch and a system of pipes.

Was the art lover supposed to regard this installation as an up-dated version of a synaesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk? The senses were certainly under mass assault here: from the bright light of the High Pressure Sodium lamps, the industrial sound of the machinery and the oppressive, sickly smell of cannabis.

Although the artist, according to the press release, was chiefly interested in making ‘a good piece’, there was every reason to interpret his project as a subversive act aimed at breaching the cult of the visual and upsetting the sociocultural hierarchies that often find affirmation in a museum environment. The oddest, but also the strongest and most political aspect of Spiritual Teenage Moodmaker was that despite the above-quoted assertion – there was no trace of visual or expressive ambition to be seen. The work was what it was: a cannabis nursery and nothing more. (A modest appendage in the form of a video projection behind a wooden partition was out of action during my visit to the Beyerd.) The subcultural suggestions went no further than the title, an indirect reference to the Nirvana hit ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. There was no question of an enforced trash, grunge or scatter aesthetic. This discrepancy between the title and the businesslike, semi-professional set-up of the work itself consigned teenage spirituality to an unverifiable interior world of euphoria and anaesthesia. At the same time it underlined the extent to which that spirituality is an attractive field for trade and commerce.

So, neutralization of the work via aesthetic appreciation was out of the question. The opportunity for aesthetic judgement was restricted to a spontaneous and somewhat primitive evaluation of the obtrusive cannabis smell: pleasant or unpleasant. Such a judgement, however, is anything but socially neutral.

Compared to modern museums, which claim to play a central role in material culture, drugs occupy an unlovely position on the cultural fringe. Yet these substances are among the key variables whereby sections of the population are able to define their lifestyle. There is nothing criminal about this, but nothing romantic either. Now that the cultivation of Netherweed has developed into an advanced bio- industry, with a public image the Dutch tomato growers might justly envy, the original ideologists of the unrestricted use of drugs have been reduced to a stuffy and ageing rearguard.

For instance, I read in High Life – an ‘Opinion and Lifestyle Magazine’ purchased for five guilders in Peter’s Headshop – a rather anachronistic plea by the writer Gerben Hellinga against the intensive and artificially accelerated indoor cultivation of cannabis and in favour of a natural growth cycle in the open air. His argument is as follows: ‘Indoor weed is stress. The plants are forced into flowering. The stress ends up in the product and has an adverse effect on the high. …And something that is stressed cannot be subtle, for stress is accumulated tension, a result of external pressure.’ Only plants nourished by moonlight and irregular rainfall, it seems, would be capable of triggering the subtle high that reveals the ‘divine’ side of life. Given the many advertisements for Growshops and Headshops in this news magazine for the blowing hobby grower, however, Hellinga’s plea seemed rather misplaced.

Speakman’s transfer of an illegal cannabis nursery to the rooms of an art institute is no isolated incident. Various recent exhibitions, such as ‘Crap Shoot’ in De Appel, have brought offensive border clashes between art and life to public attention (see Archis 6 and 7, 1996). But the most interesting analogy concerns a project by the Danish artist Jens Haaning that took place in the Vleeshal in Middelburg. In the summer of 1996 he carried out his plan to move a Turkish clothing workshop in Vlissingen lock, stock and barrel to the Vleeshal where production continued in public for the next seven weeks. Visitors expecting an exhibition of visual art were confronted with hard-working and probably underpaid foreign-born workers seated at sewing machines among piles of quickly produced ready-to- wear clothes.

Although the high-grade output of a modern cannabis nursery is in sharp contrast to the shoddy quality produced by an illegal or quasi-legal sweatshop, the set-up is similar: both operate in a social and economic twilight zone, both make use of informal networks and both are geared to maximizing profits by minimizing costs. (In the case of the sweatshop, however, the stress is likely to accumulate not in the product but in the workers themselves.)

What Haaning and Speakman’s works had in common on paper was a uncompromising and outspoken introduction of rationalized production lines into the ‘value free’ domain of art and culture. Both works confronted the public with the blinkered awareness underlying entrenched expectations and habits of looking. They forced it to take a position on consumer society excesses that are usually excluded from official consciousness.
That at any rate is the obvious interpretation and the one dictated by theory. But how did it work in practice?

By the time this issue of Archis appears, William Speakman’s exhibition in the Beyerd will be finished; the plantation dismantled and cleared away. Anyone who had wanted to see it for themselves will be too late – or maybe not? To what extent does such a conceptual and transgressive operation, that sharply downplays its own visual ambitions, demand to be seen in the flesh? And what benefit does this confer?

Unlike Spiritual Teenage Moodmaker, I know Haaning’s project in the Vleeshal only from announcements and descriptions in the press. A comparison suggests that projects like these two lose a good deal of their radical conceptualism as soon as you go to see them on the spot. The result always turns out to be more self-evident and ordinary than you had expected because of the unavoidable pragmatic adjustment or reconciliation between the official culture and the fringe. However violent the clash between these supposedly incompatible worlds may appear on paper, it will never succeed in permanently disrupting daily routine. In the Beyerd, too, the world went about its business as usual: members of staff went to lunch, a brass band passed by outside, the coffee cost fifty cents…

The true radicalism of such projects may lie precisely in the extent to which they – seemingly to their own cost – show up the imperturbability of institutional practice. Works like those of William Speakman and Jens Haaning demonstrate that though much is possible in the Dutch culture of tolerance, the psychopharmacological effect of that freedom looks less like euphoria than anaesthesia.