A bizarre, some would say nutty, tribute has been made to a well-known Dutch artist who died last month in the form of a floor covered in 800 pounds of peanut butter.
The sticky homage has been created at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam for Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers. The installation involves enough peanut butter for around 15,000 sandwiches spread across the floor of the museum – it is not clear it it is the crunchy or smooth variety.
The conceptual artist, who died at the age of 83, first created the Pindakaasvloer, or peanut butter floor, in 1969. The work will reopen to the public Friday at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam for a two-month show.
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. The men used drywall trowels to smear the peanut butter to a thickness of 2 centimeters (0.8 inch).
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.”
Schippers 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 thing I remember is the smell,” Mieke Weismann said. The food photographer and writer saw the 1997 exhibition as a teenager. She said the pungent scent of peanut butter wafted throughout the museum.
Schippers did not specify the size, shape, thickness, or type of peanut butter the work needs. Dutch peanut butter brand Calvé donated tubs of peanut butter for the work.
