ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) – More than 800 pounds of peanut butter – enough for around 15,000 sandwiches – has been spread across the floor of a museum in the Netherlands in tribute to Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers, who died last month.
The conceptual artist, who died at the age of 83, first created the Pindakaasvloer, or peanut butter floor, in 1969. The work was unveiled on Thursday at the Depot offshoot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam for a two-month show.
Schippers was a beloved non-conformist character in the Netherlands, where he also voiced Ernie and Kermit the Frog in the Dutch version of ‘Sesame Street’, and created absurdist and silly works that challenged conventional ideas about the meaning of art.
“Isn’t it fantastic that we are all standing here looking at peanut butter?” Schippers told journalists gathered at the Central Museum in Utrecht in 1997 where Pindakaasvloer was on display for the second time.
Schippers created the work as part of a Floor Covering Series, which also included floors covered with glass shards and salt.
The aroma, redolent of breakfasts and lunch boxes, is what lingers with many who experience the work first hand. Museum staff directed visitors for the opening to “follow the smell” which was wafting by the ticket counter, three floors below where the artwork is laid out.
“The thing I remember is the smell,” Mieke Weismann told The Associated Press. The food photographer and writer saw the 1997 exhibition as a teenager.
The art installation may not be for everybody. A sign at the museum’s entrance warns visitors with peanut allergies that they might not want to enter the space.
It took two employees of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen several days to spread 40 buckets of peanut butter across a 25-square-meter (270-square-foot) hexagon last week.
“It was a lot of work,” Leon Duenk, one of the two men who installed the artwork, told AP.
The pair used drywall trowels to smear the peanut butter to a thickness of 2 centimeters (0.8 inch).
Prior to his death the museum and Schippers discussed how to recreate the work in the future, producing a 20-point plan that included the requirement to apply the peanut butter “as smoothly and boringly as possible” and that “no one is supposed to stand in, or lie down on the peanut butter”.
Schippers did not specify the size or shape of the work, but he did say it needed to be smooth peanut butter and that he preferred the Dutch peanut butter brand Calvé. The company donated 40 tubs of peanut butter for the work.
Multiple visitors stepped into the sticky artwork when it was on display in 2011. In 1997, the work was “vandalized” when a group of people placed 12 slices of bread and several bags of hagelslag – chocolate sprinkles commonly eaten on bread at breakfast in the Netherlands – on the floor.
“It doesn’t look bad,” Schippers told Dutch newspaper Volkskrant at the time. “The sprinkles have been applied with a sense of proportion and a skillful hand.”
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