A Rotterdam museum is paying tribute to a recently deceased Dutch artist in a most unusual way — by covering its floor with more than 800 pounds of peanut butter, enough to make roughly 15,000 sandwiches.
The installation honors conceptual artist Wim T. Schippers, who passed away last month at the age of 83. Schippers originally created the work, known as the Pindakaasvloer — or peanut butter floor — back in 1969. Starting Friday, visitors can view the recreation at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, where it will remain on display for two months.
Beyond his visual art, Schippers was also known as the Dutch voice of both Ernie and Kermit the Frog on the Netherlands’ version of “Sesame Street.” His body of work was known for being absurd and playful, often poking fun at traditional notions of what art should be.
“Isn’t it fantastic that we are all standing here looking at peanut butter?” Schippers once said to reporters at the Central Museum in Utrecht in 1997, when the piece was shown there for the second time.
The peanut butter floor was part of a larger series Schippers called his Floor Covering Series, which also featured floors blanketed in glass shards and salt.
Food photographer and writer Mieke Weismann, who attended the 1997 exhibition as a teenager, recalled the experience vividly. “The thing I remember is the smell,” she told The Associated Press, describing how the sharp scent of peanut butter drifted through the entire museum.
To prepare the current installation, two museum workers spent several days using drywall trowels to spread 40 buckets of peanut butter across a hexagonal area measuring 25 square meters — about 270 square feet — applying it to a depth of roughly 2 centimeters, or about 0.8 of an inch.
Schippers never set strict guidelines for the work, leaving the size, shape, thickness, and type of peanut butter open to interpretation. For this version, Dutch peanut butter brand Calvé donated tubs of smooth peanut butter for the project.
The artwork has had its share of memorable moments over the years. During a 2011 showing, several visitors accidentally stepped into the sticky surface. And in 1997, a group of people placed 12 slices of bread along with several bags of hagelslag — the chocolate sprinkles commonly eaten on bread for breakfast in the Netherlands — directly onto the floor in what was considered an act of vandalism.
Schippers, however, seemed unbothered. “It doesn’t look bad,” he told Dutch newspaper Volkskrant at the time. “The sprinkles have been applied with a sense of proportion and a skillful hand.”
