Don’t worry: there are also stuffed animals in the Groote Museum, the Artis Zoo in Amsterdam reopened and modernized this week after 75 years. And skeletons and skulls, and seeds of plants. Still: this is nothing like a classic natural history museum. And that was not the intention. Today’s visitor is allowed to leave the museum ‘overwhelmed, touched and confused’, as Karlien Pijnenborg (head of the Groote Museum & Academy) happened after she had entered the museum for the first time.
There is also attention for plants. An undervalued species, Haig Balian, the museum’s artistic director, said Monday when presenting his reborn brainchild. We still know far too little about it, he says. ‘Man wants to go to the moon and to Mars, but has no idea how exactly the root systems of plants fit together under our feet’.
The Groote Museum wants to make up for that. But in a contemporary way.
Self-reflection
Where since 1855 the members of Natura Artis Magistra visited the rooms that were soon filled with shells, skulls, skeletons and stuffed animals, the building has now been completely renovated and modernized, while retaining the old atmosphere and style. The museum (just like the zoo) just survived World War II, but had to close its doors in 1947 due to financial circumstances.
Now the renovation has not only reopened a museum, but also built a bridge to modern times with new museological views. Where nature – which at the time of its foundation also casually included non-Western peoples – used to be exclusively behind display glass and Western, inquiring people placed themselves outside it, that separation has now been emphatically lifted. Man is now a (tiny) part of that much larger nature, is the overarching idea behind this museum.
That realization is rubbed in from the start. Anyone who now ascends the authentic double staircase that leads to the East and West Halls still enters the old plank floor of yesteryear, but at the same time arrives at an empty space with a huge three-dimensional question mark only in the middle. The tip consists of a cube with mirrored sides. Thus, upon entering, the visitor is already ready for one major self-reflection, seems the intention. Or, as artistic director Haig Balian put it: ‘We must first realize what and who we are in order to reshape our own life and the relationship with other life on earth’.
The ambitions are very high in this museum. Art, science and nature are linked. Artis natura magistraas the Zoological Society christened itself when it was founded in 1838 – nature as the teacher of art.
To make this clear, the compilers took the human body as their starting point. ‘The museum has twelve zones in which a part of the body, such as the heart, the eyes or the brain, is the starting point. The visitor will move, observe, smell, listen, feel, taste and stand still and will sometimes be confused for a while’, according to the text accompanying the presentation of the Groote Museum.
The Oostzaal is thereby ‘a dynamic place, a space of participation and interaction’, ‘breaking with traditional museum concepts’ and a space ‘for encounters and gatherings’. And all of this is of course ‘multidisciplinary’, because ‘a biologist simply has a different perspective than a philosopher or an artist’.
Odor tunnel
So roll up your sleeves. Unlike any other painting exhibition, the Groote Museum of Artis requires visitors to work hard. It must, whether or not together with museum staff, ‘research big questions’ and ‘form a new view’ on art, science and nature, but ‘which one is up to the visitor’.
During that expedition there is a lot to touch or operate. Buttons can (no: must) be pressed, headphones on and (digital) projections set in motion. With earcups, look up at four video screens showing the larynx of four singing choir members, and see how our vocal cords work.
Spectacular is the scent tunnel, conceived and designed by scent expert Ton van Harreveld: a dark corridor through which the visitor walks while different scents are spread from the black walls in various places. It is not intended to recognize a smell, but to investigate which memories, thoughts or associations it triggers in each one. “Maybe you suddenly remember a forgotten love or throw up in the playground.”
Also nice: ‘climate artist’ Thijs Biersteker designed a visual representation of the sap flow from the two-hundred-year-old plane tree on the square in front of the museum, just in front of the cooped up spoonbills and avocets of Artis. The installation is connected to a sensor in the tree via a pipe. In this way, the viewer can see, looking outwards, how many liters of water the tree transports internally per hour. 1.4 liters at the time of viewing (last Monday morning – in winter it will be considerably less). For comparison, there is also a similar sensor that measures the visitor’s water balance based on the visitor’s heart rate – considerably more than the tree outside.
clitoris
The word ‘eclectic’ seems coined for this museum. In the zone over the womb, the creators reflect on reproduction, the main goal of every life. And that’s another opportunity for a beaver shot of a chimpanzee, underneath the six-foot-long dried penis of a blue whale, or, a little further down, a plastic model of the human clitoris. Enter your own deeper thoughts here. In the meantime, another thought: the wall tile text for a collection of old illustrations of apple varieties. It reads: ‘Everyone can count the seeds of an apple, but no one can count the apples of a seed’.
Another playful feature with a double bottom is the empty row of showcases with the only caption: ‘Room for what we don’t know yet’. This is perhaps the most important space in the entire museum, which immediately raises the philosophical question ‘what is emptiness?’ – an issue that is also discussed in the adjacent room by crawling into a tent and experiencing how much space there is still for other visitors.
The Message is certainly not shunned in the museum. A series of projections of earth globes on a screen, with texts about the human life pattern: ‘If everyone lived like the people in Asia, we would need 2.0 Earths to maintain our current lifestyle.’ The text is followed by variants with ‘the people in North America’ (4.8 Earths, as much as European man) and South America (2.7 Earths). Also elsewhere, our consumption behavior is questioned (‘How much stuff do you need? What does ‘need’ mean?’)
At the zone about sound and a world map with the last quiet areas on the globe, a quote is written around the display case: ‘It is sad that when nature speaks, man never listens.’
dizzy
Meanwhile, silence is also hard to find in the Groote Museum itself: from time to time the ‘disruptive’ sounds of a hammering woodpecker, a thundering train or a laughing woman can be heard. They are the fruits of the soundscape that filmmaker and sound artist Pablo Lamar designed for the museum.
The crux of that message is the descending realization: ‘You appear to be connected to everything that lives, down to your tiniest fibres. And much more dependent than you thought.’ In other words: because we cannot do without nature, we should be more careful with it.
Does this all work? It cannot be denied that while wandering through the Oostzaal and the Westzaal, you can hear the brains crackling at the conference tables between the soundscapes. So much has been devised, so much that is touched upon or referred to, and there is so much to discover and think about, that it soon threatens to become dizzy.
The ambitions of the Groote Museum in the new style (a crucial part of the Artis Masterplan 2030, which should cost around 100 million euros) are also a potential pitfall. The more the visitor has to discover or think up for himself, the greater the danger of overfeeding, after which nothing lasts. Which is in line with the dizzying connections around existential issues such as the origin, function and future of our existence (and that of the entire cosmos).
Points of attention for the organizers of the museum: some explanatory texts are written in creamy white script on the windows of showcases, but due to the light and (light) background they can only be read with many steps back and forth.
The entrance fee can also be a bit difficult for an average family: 17.50 euros per person from 13 years. If you don’t have a discount card or other pass, the four of you will just lose 70 euros. At the same time: in few other museums, the realization sinks in so well that money is only relative in the light of existence.
Museum without collection
The living animals in the park, the dead in the associated building. That was what the founders of Zoological Society Natura Artis Magistra had in mind in 1838. The collection grew so quickly that within a few years it became too large for the museum. Fish, crabs, lobsters, snakes and sponges moved to the aquarium on the same property. Many skeletons were housed in the hippo house, native animals, Japanese objects and the insect collection ended up in the library building.
Because the number of members also increased, it was decided in 1850 to create a new members’ room: the Groote Museum, the first museum building in Amsterdam. It was designed by Jan van Maurik.
After the closure due to financial problems in 1947, the natural history collection with tens of thousands of animals, skins, bellows and bones was transferred to a university building on the Mauritskade. Since 2011, this collection has been in the possession of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden. The Groote Museum is now a museum without its own collection.
Artis fined
During the renovation of the 19th-century national monument Het Groote Museum, parts of the monumental layers of stucco and paint were lost. According to Artis, the project leader had misread the permit and without consultation removed all the stucco, including an old, painted marble imitation, from the walls and ceilings. A legal violation. The Public Prosecution Service has launched an investigation and has fined Artis 3000 euros, according to artistic director Haig Balian.
Info
The Groote Museum, Plantage Middenlaan 41, Amsterdam is open every day from 12 May from 10 am to 6 pm and on Thursdays until 10 pm.