Ticking clocks, a charred coat rack and farcical carnival music. The exhibition Hide and Seek by designer Maarten Baas in the Groninger Museum surprises, alienates and entertains.
When you enter the exhibition, the first thing you see is a blackened piano in front of a pastel green wall. Along with two cupboards and an old-fashioned sled, the keyboard belongs to Baas' 2002 graduation project Smoke. For this project, he set fire to baroque pieces of furniture to give them a second life as design objects, half charred.
With these charred works of art, Baas shows right away who he is: someone who wants to take his place in the design world by force with idiosyncratic projects. By now, he has managed to secure this spot quite well. After his graduation project, which won him international acclaim at lightning speed, he won prize after prize after prize, culminating in Design Miami's renowned Designer of the Year award: he was the youngest designer ever to win it.
CLOCK ROOM
The centre room Real Time is dedicated to ‘time and impermanence’. The room is filled with clocks: stately clocks and clocks projected onto the walls. The tall timepieces attract the most attention because it looks like people are standing in them. With a black marker they draw the hands, which they polish off after every minute and, now just a bit further, draw again. By focusing on doling out time, Baas attempts to put the viewer in an almost meditative state to escape the everyday pressures of time.
‘Time is a great theme’
This escape from time pressure and stress is brought to a true climax in one specific work. This one is not in the exhibition, but in the departure hall at Schiphol Airport. Where hurried travellers try to catch their flights and the stress level reaches its peak, a clock hangs where a man appears to be standing, calmly drawing and brushing away the minute hands.
‘Time is a great theme,’ Baas stated in an interview with the VPRO. That it is one of his favourite themes is also evident in the fact that the subject comes up several times at the exhibition. For example, the blackened furniture symbolises impermanence and the clocks very literally represent the passage of time. And although Baas' work ranges from design to art to theatre, time continues to run through his work as a common thread.
CARNIVAL HITS
As the clocks tick soothingly, catchy, festive carnival music plays in the background. The rousing tune is slightly out of place in this calm, nearly silent museum, but for that very reason it stimulates the curiosity all the more to find out where it is coming from.
Those who follow the cheerful melody will end up in a room that’s practically the fairgrounds. In the centre, a bulky disco ball spins, casting dancing glimmers on the walls, where playful distorting mirrors either make the viewer ten pounds heavier or their hips disproportionately large.
The lively space comes as a whimsical surprise, but also provokes shock. Yet it is precisely this shocked response that is Maarten Baas' goal. In fact, this carnival room, which he designed for the annual Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan, was intended to denounce the prevailing conventions about creativity and design. For five years he was absent from this international design event because it all became a tad too decadent and wasteful in his view. In 2014, Boss ‘returned to the circus, with a whole circus,’ as he put it himself in an interview with Bright Ideas. With his comeback, titled Baas is in Town, he immediately won the Best Impact award, which was celebrated with a polonaise, of course.
Actually, Baas' work is not that intense — like Rodin's bronze sculptures one floor below — and that is rather refreshing.
The exhibition Hide and Seek, Maarten Baas will be on display at the Groninger Museum until 24 September 2017.
Text: Franciska de Beer
Image: Detail Grandfather Clock: Maarten Baas, Grandfather Clock self portrait, Real Time 7 series, Groninger Museum
Smoke Hall: Maarten Baas, Smoke, Hide and Seek, 2002, photo: Marten de Leeuw, Groninger Museum
Boss is in Town room: Maarten Baas, Baas is in town, Hide and Seek, 2014, photo: Marten de Leeuw, Groninger Museum
Real Time Room: Maarten Baas, Real Time, Hide and Seek, 2009, photo: Marten de Leeuw, Groninger Museum