Double trouble becomes double triumph

In the last few years I’ve carried out a whole lot of projects for and with Peter Geusebroek. The last big project was for a huge block of flats in Amsterdam’s ‘Indische Buurt’. My plan was to erect giant photos across the enormous façades at various entrances: a photo of the building’s façade that had been demolished to make room for the new one, ensuring that old and new remained connected. It would be a façade with wallpaper, a door here and there, crosscut walls and sometimes even a toilet against a tiled wall. I wanted to incorporate real doors, toilets and window frames into the photo. The plan underwent a few changes, but the idea of the photo with real elements in it endured. 

 

When we were already well on, it emerged that not only was the photographer who was to photograph the façades heading for a nervous breakdown and almost bankrupt, but to make matters worse, his laptop had crashed and all his files seemed to have disappeared. The few photos that were left, which were poor quality too, meant it was impossible to achieve the original design. I wanted to give up on the commission. But that wasn’t immediately accepted: there were quite a number of people who had bought their houses on account of the artwork, I was told. So a new plan had to be devised. We came up with an alternative idea quite quickly. We would cover the walls completely with doors. However, the few doors we had rescued from the scrapyard weren’t enough. But then again, as part of an idiotic deal involving an enormous quantity of timber, I had ended up with a huge number of doors and I had been at a loss about what to do with them. I devised a sort of structure made from timber doorframe jambs into which the doors would be fitted like a jigsaw that could simply be placed against the wall. It was actually a much better plan than the original one. 

When we were busy in production, we received a phone call to say that there had been a slip-up in the construction process. They had forgotten to put in the meter cupboard, which was to have been incorporated in the wall from top to bottom, and now it would have to be set against the wall like a carbuncle. I could see our magnificent façade of old doors going up in smoke. Feeling pretty annoyed, to say the least, I began working on finding a solution. It turned out to be dead easy: we sawed the frames and the doors at internal and external angles so that we could simply work round the meter cupboard. In the end, due to the ornate details, the bulge sticking out from top to bottom became the most attractive bit of the project. 

 

Doors and windows occupy a prominent place in my work. I had just graduated and was still doing my military service, when for the very first time I had the idea that a cabinet could be made from a door and I made the first ‘door-cabinet’ in my father-in-law’s workshop. This resulted in a solo exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1996. Since then, we have made objects, installations and projects with doors on a very regular basis. This year, we presented a ‘steel-display-case-door-cabinet-installation’ at the Salone in Milan, entitled Oude Ramenkast (Old Window Display Cabinet), as part of the collection. The essence of this installation is that a whole lot of display cases are piled one on top of the other. Because the sizes are governed by the window frames, the compositions are always whimsical and partly determined by chance. 

 

The idea of sawing the window frames and doors to fit round the corner makes it possible to create large installations in pre-determined sizes. The enormous cabinet that acts as a dividing wall between the living room and the kitchen in the Wonderkamer (Wonder Chamber) is the result of more than twenty years of work and should be seen as Eek en Ruijgrok’s current “state of the art”.