Dutch museum honors artist thru ‘peanut butter floor’

SWEET TRIBUTE In this photo provided by Niels van der Pas, people look at the peanut butter floor spread across a museum floor in tribute to Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers, who died last month, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on Thursday. —Associated Press

ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands — More than 800 pounds (363 kg) of peanut butter, enough for around 15,000 peanut butter sandwiches, have 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 will reopen to the public on Friday at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam for a two-month show.

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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.

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“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.

40 buckets in all

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 told The Associated Press (AP). The food photographer and writer saw the 1997 exhibition as a teenager. She said the pungent scent of peanut butter wafted throughout the museum.

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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).

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Schippers did not specify the size, shape, thickness, or type of peanut butter the work needs. Dutch peanut butter brand Calvé donated tubs of smooth 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.

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“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.” /cb