001
Maarten Baas by Anton Corbijn 2016
Is it true you’re working on a book about your work?
“ No, not really. In recent years I’ve often been asked to make a book about my work. That seemed to me like a bad idea. I hardly file at all, I’m super unstructured and generally don’t like to look over my shoulder. It’s usually others who interpret my work while I move on to new projects. The furniture, films and installations I express myself in are reality, while a book is more theoretical. As a creator you want to develop things that don’t yet have a theory. An explorer doesn’t want to discover a country that’s already on the map. Moreover, if something is fixed, if there are rules about something, then I want to enquire and discover what kind of reality is lurking behind.”
You seem to always want to escape rules, or expectations people have of you, why?
“No idea. I just like to play around with rules. It’s a kind of hobby of mine, just like others enjoy working on cars. That’s why applied arts spoke to me more than fine arts. Now I work with visual artists, architects, writers, film-makers and many more specialists from other disciplines. This merged in my most recent exhibition, Maarten Baas Makes Time, where everyone came together from different corners to form a whole. In the long run we’re all searching for the same thing. In order to realise my ideas I have to work with a construction worker one day and with a magician the next. At one point I wanted to become a set designer. I view my own work as décor for a story I’m telling. Or actually for the story the public comes up with.” You don’t belong to any of those disciplines?
002
“Oh, all those restrictions between disciplines are just made up. And where they seem to be fixed I like to shake them up, haha! ‘Having a style is like being in jail’ is a wellknown quote from Anthon Beeke, who has inspired me since college. It’s important to keep everything open. The magic is somewhere between the lines.”
You say you don’t look over your shoulder, but tell us about your plans for the future?
What’s the title of your book going to be?
“I’ve never had a plan or strategy. I just look from the moment itself, or shall we say a half year ahead. I surf a bit on the waves of time. My path is a sort of stroll where I determine at most the next step. If there were a trace-tracker of my walk you could look back to see that I sometimes zigzag, sometimes move straight ahead. Sometimes running, sometimes slow, sometimes on track and sometimes way off. I trust that my intuition is wiser than my head.” Are you just walking or perhaps fleeing?
“Hmm, good question! Maybe neither. Let’s say I’m playing. Tag perhaps. No, Hide & Seek!” What do you seek?
“No clue… I foster the not knowing, in order to keep the door to every jail open.” Okay… well then, where do you seek?
003
“Somewhere in the voids… Between ratio and feeling, between what we know and don’t know, between nature and culture, between freedom and limitations, between the truth and a lie. That’s why making a book about my work feels so unnatural to me. It has an order, it suggests logic, as if there’s a conclusion.”
004
005
006 SMOKE detail
007
SMOKE table 2004, collection Groninger Museum, Groningen (NL)
012 SMOKE Red and Blue chair by Gerrit Rietveld 2004, collection Centraal Museum, Utrecht (NL)
013
SMOKE Zig Zag chair by Gerrit Rietveld 2004, collection San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (USA), Die Neue Sammlung, Munich (DE) + others
I.
Rook
(NL)
‘... Want alles wat ik zie, bestaat zo ontzettend...’ Alexis de Roode, Geef mij een wonder
Kijk, sist het vuur, zie de wereld als een warenhuis, bewoond door koopzieke idioten. De historie hoopt zich op in de prachtigste spullen, allemaal voor jullie, het beste van het beste van het beste, zeg dan maar eens nee tegen die gek in jezelf. Je kunt niet alles hebben want waar laat je het. Alle schoonheid hier bestaat zo onaanraakbaar, ongenaakbaar. Wat neem je mee als je huis in brand staat? Een minnaar zong: ‘mijn liefste’ en een dichter schreef: ‘het vuur’. Niemand zegt: de ruimte voor iets nieuws, en juist dát is mijn geschenk.
016
Kijk, laait het vuur, naar wat ik maken kan met vlammenhanden. Niets laat zich scheppen zonder verwoesting. Kijk. Wat blijft moet branden.
Smoke
(EN)
‘... Because everything I see, exists so incredibly...’ Alexis de Roode, Give me a miracle
Look, the fire hisses, think of the world as a department store, inhabited by idiotic shopaholics. History piles up in things of greatest beauty, all for you, the best of the best of the best, imagine saying no
SMOKE by Ingmar Heytze, poem based on SMOKE collection
I.
to that fool inside you. You can’t have everything cause where would you put it. All the beauty here exists so untouchable, unapproachable. What would you save if your house were ablaze? A lover sang, ‘my dearest’ and a poet wrote: ‘the fire’. No one says: the space for something new, and precisely that is my gift.
017
Look, the fire roars, at what I can make with flaming hands. Nothing can be created without destruction. Look. What will remain, must burn.
026 CLAY chair 2006, collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (FA) + others
027
PLAIN CLAY chair, coffee table + fan 2010, collection The Edelkoort Design Collection, Paris (FA)
044 PLAIN CLAY vestibule 2012, private commission for Stephanie Comer + Rob Craigie
045
PLAIN CLAY vestibule 2012, private commission for Stephanie Comer + Rob Craigie
062 CARAPACE cabinet 2016, various private collections
063
CARAPACE cabinet 2016, various private collections
076 REAL TIME Grandfather clock with bell detail
077
REAL TIME Grandfather clock with bell 2014, collection National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (AU)
084 REAL TIME Schiphol clock 2016, Lounge 2, Schiphol (NL)
085
REAL TIME Schiphol clock stills
118 Maarten Baas the Alchemist by Erwin Olaf 2016
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Maarten Baas the Alchemist by Erwin Olaf 2016
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Burning Hill House chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh
The settle acquired a mythical status in my memory of childhood. I was certain it was of immense value and beauty. Many years later, when I bought my first place, my father offered to ship the old settle down to me as a housewarming gift. I was delighted and eulogised to my wife about the treasure we were about to receive.
When it arrived, my memories were given a reality check. The settle was a beast. Ugly. Uncomfortable. Impractically heavy. Full of woodworm holes. Covered in a sickly brown varnish.
I put him, fire wand in hand, on the cover of the magazine I was editing at the time.
I shipped the settle to the Netherlands in a crate, along with a handwritten I decided it should be burned. message saying ‘Happy smoking!’ Or Smoked. A few weeks later, the crate returned. Inside was the I had known Maarten for object of solid grace I remema few years already and bered from my formative had travelled to his studio to watch him blow-torching years, only blacker and more lustrous. And now of great antiques, which he transvalue, both personal and mogrified into striking blackened phoenixes. I saw actual. him scorch a grand piano Hidden inside the settle for Li Edelkoort; I saw him was the note I had written, singe a set of rare dining chairs for a secretive private with the edges burned away like a pirate map. client (and was forbidden from taking photos). Marcus Fairs
MARCUS FAIRS founder and editor of Dezeen, London (GB)
When I was young, in our house, we had an old wooden settle. It was a hefty bench of unknown origin or vintage. It had a high panelled back and lidded voids beneath the seats where you could hide things.
Fabio Novembre
see page 10-11
been able to amaze me. He has increasingly become the prophet of imperfection, the preacher of uncertainty, in between the fire of Smoke and the liquid surfaces of Clay. He is instinctive, I’ve never heard him talking for a long time, he prefers using his hands in parallel with his mind. He is great at giving shape to the crazy time we live in, but he is also fascinated by the meaning of time itself and by the time to come: I’d like to be around in 200 years to check out the results of his New Forest and the Tree Trunk chair. In Italy we have a very strong sense of family, so calling someone ‘brother’ is a big deal. I’ve been calling Maarten my little brother since we first met. The big family of Design needs the sensibility and the commitment of people like Maarten!
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I came across Maarten’s work when it was first showcased at the Salone del Mobile in 2003. I was perfectly aware that Arman had worked on the exact same approach 20 years before, but we were not in an art gallery and this young Dutchman was evolving the process and fixing charred material with epoxy resin and upholstering seats to make real furniture. It was not ‘the-day-after-Pompeii syndrome’, it was the day before an era of uncertainty and Maarten was best placed to prefigure it. At that time, I was building my own house and I wanted to reproduce that sense of uncertainty in my living room. Asking Maarten to make boiserie and then burn it was my attempt to filter the domestic symbol of bourgeois values through the bonfire of vanities. We inevitably became friends; the great talent of this young man fascinated me. Since then he has always
FABIO NOVEMBRE architect, Milan (IT)
Burning memories and a bonfire of vanities
Making time
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INGMAR HEYTZE author and poet, Utrecht (NL)
“There’s only X amount of time. You can do whatever you want with that time. It’s your time.” Lou Reed
On 21 October of last year, I stepped into an old warehouse in Eindhoven. I was supposed to write twelve short poems that day for the exhibition Maarten Baas Makes Time, which ended up being a race against the clock, though it worked out in the end. The heart of the exhibition was formed by twelve wooden chests about the size of a bus stop, placed in a circle like hours on the dial of a giant clock. Each chest had a horizontal window on the front, turning them into huge peep boxes. In the middle of the circle was a large jug of whitewash, slowly being turned mechanically to prevent coagulation. A bright spotlight turned the surface into a shining mirror. Upon closer look you could see that on the edge of the jar, black letters were being scattered into the water by a sort of print head.
These were lines of prose that could only be read shortly before they were stretched further in the maelstrom to end up thoroughly stirred, mixed, disappeared. The poems started to pour in once I saw the chests one by one. There was a peep box where two white-coated types attempted to make time, with complicated experiments, magnetic reels whizzing back and forth and other paraphernalia belonging in an old-fashioned science laboratory – or actually, a boy’s fantasy of one. The desire to make time is as alchemistic in nature, as the search for the philosopher’s stone. By making time, you make everything: space, power, money, immortality. It’s a good thing those two people in that cubicle will never see their experiment succeed. In another chest was a glass case, in which a wooden clock was being consumed by woodworm. Within eighty years the clock will have disappeared. Next to the clock, a video was being played showing people who said nothing other than their age. I jotted down: “Freeze it if you want to see time pass / Leave something alone until you experience how it disappears.”
When the exhibition opened, the warehouse was transformed to a small, nocturnal, private world where everything was different than outside – and you still had the feeling of being home, that this could seriously be ubiquitous and infinite, that this internal world matched its external counterpart in complexity. It was impossible not to participate – even if just for your presence and the time you spent there. As at every good exhibition, no one asked themselves if this was an artsymuseum thing, what the artists meant, how to behave. You just had to be present and to experience it, just like with time, your own time, that you always have with you, with each count one count less.
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In another chest, adorned as office stand, an official-looking figure drummed his fingers on the table in boredom. Three loose, mechanical hands drummed along with him. And there were nine other cubicles, all appealing to the wonder of time, the last great mystery – and the melancholy of its inevitable passing, and that we will disappear into it completely, stirred as lines of prose in a jug of whitewash.
In 2002, Maarten Baas made his debut with SMOKE. After this international breakthrough, he quickly followed up with his CLAY collection and REAL TIME clocks. His work has frequently been purchased by museums and collectors, and has won prestigious prizes. As the jester of the art and design world, Baas surprises and inspires his audience in an intelligent, poetic and often humorous way. The New York Times and Time Magazine have called Maarten Baas one of the most influential designers of our time. In Hide & Seek, various experts (including Li Edelkoort, Fabio Novembre, Wim Pijbes, Ingmar Heytze and Brendan Cormier) describe his work and career. Based on photographs by Anton Corbijn, Erwin Olaf and others, this book takes you on a wondrous trip through the most important works of this elusive artist.