ROB SCHRÖDER
rob-schroder.flv
Beatrix Park | Rob Schröder (1950, Oegstgeest)
Although the Beatrix Park lies at the edge of the planning area for the Zuidas, it will undergo radical changes in the coming decades. Using the park as his operating base, Rob Schröder is making a documentary portrait of Jan Lever, author of the Bomengids van Amsterdam-Zuid (Guide to Trees in Amsterdam South). Schröder typifies Lever as “a species that’s almost extinct. Everything he does is the opposite of what is happening in the Zuidas. What he does is all about love and dedication and attention. My documentary will be a statement about the necessity of nature in that environment.”
Rob Schroeder, excerpts from a lecture, in: Lisette Smits (ed.), Democratic Design. The Lectures. Kunst op de markt van vraag en aanbod (Art in the Market of Supply and Demand), Utrecht: Casco, 2003
The ‘makeable society’ that characterized the past 50 years had its bad sides. Yet there was a lively public domain. Commerce did not rule the roost completely. Experimentation was possible without the need for it to sell, without the dictatorship of the consumer, and had an influence on our way of looking, discussing and conducting affairs. We were searching for the new outlook, the new content, the new epitomy of quality, as independently and critically as possible – the arts as the mainspring of innovation. Audience ratings were not the deciding factor. One didn’t even aspire to them. The autonomous deed was what was most important. In the time that I was active as a designer with my colleagues in the collective Wild Plakken, we were given lots of freedom. Our clients, whether an action group around the corner or the still unprivatized PTT, were looking for personal and innovative designs. That made them stand out, that is what they wanted.
It's a paradox. In these neo-liberal days, individualism reigns and people parade it about. Real individual freedom, in other words. But curiously enough, it is becoming more and more difficult to be, and remain, independent and to look with an independent eye. Places for independent research and the development of independent ideas are becoming increasingly sporadic.
Budgets for the familiar breeding grounds – art academies, art film houses, museums, semifinished buildings – as well as the few public broadcasting channels that try to make critical and intelligent programmes, are being cut back drastically.
I pay taxes to the government because it has the responsibility to ensure that we have a high-quality public domain. In that public domain the future must be designed in as great a freedom as possible; new forms must be developed for the common good. And this public domain must be protected against steadily advancing commercialism and bourgeois morality. That's democracy to me. And that's where discussions should take place about how the future is to be designed and what means should be employed.
We are now in a period that has fallen so much under the influence of market forces that a number of important places have been lost as a result. I am making a plea for a future in which we find a new balance between both worlds. A number of fundamental values and freedoms that have made our culture, its architecture and design into something great are disappearing.
My position is this: the places where you can still to some extent try out how things could be different, different than what we now know, are disappearing. In those places you can try to build in another manner and find new solutions. How this is to be done, I don't know – but the most important condition is that you have a place to try it out. That's where the challenge lies.
