Peanut-Butter Platform, Nr 19 B/sC in the floor covering series

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• Anouk Poppema asked

  Hello,
  For a paper I'm writing i have some questions about the peanut butter floor. Firstly, do you know the cataloque number of the work? and who did you buy the work from, directly from the artist, a foundation or a gallery? I hope you have an answer to these questions!

• Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen answered

  Hello Anouk,
  
  The catalogue number is BEK 1861 (MK). The ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’, better known as the Peanut Butter Floor, was first realized in 1969 in the exhibition space of the avant-garde Mickery Theater in Loenersloot. The peanut butter was spread over a wooden platform. In 1997, the Peanut Butter Floor was shown for the second time during a retrospective exhibition of Wim T. Schippers at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. In 2010, it was recreated once more at the gallery ZINGERpresents in Amsterdam, after which Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen acquired the work for its collection later that year. With this acquisition, the museum can now present the piece in various forms and at different locations again and again. I hope this answers your question!
  
  Kind regards,
  Manus

• Luise Baumgartner asked

  Good afternoon
  I am currently writing a lexicon entry about peanut butter as a material in the visual arts (lexicon about food as material in contemporary art, ed. by Fabiana Senkpiel and Ina Jessen), and one of my examples is the Peanut Butter Platform by Wim T. Schippers in the Boijmans van Beuningen museum. This work is not permanently exhibited / installed, is that correct? Is it really stored in the depot (original material composition from 2011) or is the museum only archiving doumentational materials from the installation from 2011? If it is really the peanut butter material from 2011 that is stored in the depot - how are you managing the degradation process / how is the artwork conserved? Thank you very much for your answer!
  
  Best regards
  Dr. phil. Luise Baumgartner
  Art historian
  Hochschule der Künste Bern
  Switzerland

• Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen answered

  Dear Luise, it is very nice to hear about your research and I am happy to give you the requested information. Wim T Schippers' Peanut Butter Platform is not present in our depot, but in our archive. It is in the shape of a document that gives instructions how the platform should be executed (conceptual art). In this case the instructions are rather loose - typically Wim T. Schippers - and state that the floor can be executed in any size and needs just an appropriate amount of peanut butter. Of course we also document the various ways in which the concept is executed. After showing the work for the first time in the museum we learned that it is not possible to show it for a very long time, not only because of the degradation of the material, but also because of the smell and the allergic reaction some of our visitors happened to develop. I hope this is helpful. Kind regards, Els