Museum covers its floor in enough peanut butter to make 15,000 sandwiches to honor late artist
A museum in Rotterdam has covered its floor with over 800 pounds of peanut butter as a tribute to eccentric Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers, who died last month at the age of 83.
The installation, called Pindakaasvloer, or Peanut Butter Floor, is on display for two months at the Depot offshoot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
Schippers first created the piece in 1969 as part of a wider series of unusual floor coverings that also included salt and glass shards.
Museum staff followed a strict 20-point instruction plan Schippers left behind, using 40 buckets of smooth Calvé peanut butter donated by the brand to cover a 25-square-meter hexagon.
Several days spent to make the exhibit boring on purpose
According to The Guardian, Schippers specified the peanut butter had to be spread to exactly two centimeters thick and applied “as smoothly and boringly as possible.”
Two employees spent several days smoothing it out with drywall trowels. Visitors are warned about the smell before they even reach the room and are strictly forbidden from standing or lying on the peanut butter itself.
Schippers was a major figure in Dutch culture beyond his art, best known to many as the voice of Ernie and Kermit the Frog on the Dutch version of Sesame Street.
He co-founded the avant-garde A-dynamische groep collective in the 1960s and frequently used food in his work, at one point upholstering a chair entirely in canned noodles.
It is not the first time food has been used to make a cultural statement. Elsewhere, a botched restoration of religious statues in Brazil became an unlikely tourist attraction after drawing comparisons to Spain’s infamous “Monkey Christ.”
