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"Stedelijk Base" Tag


Panasonic Toot-A-Loop R-72


Friday, October 26, 2018

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‘It’s an S it’s an O, it’s a crazy radio! Toot-A-Loop!’ that was the phrase of the famous transistor radio called the Toot-A-Loop. The Toot-A-Loop… We both got mesmerized by this yellow thing that was laying behind glass in the Stedelijk Base and we knew that this was the piece that we wanted to do research on. At first we thought it was a weird mobile device, later on we read that it was a transistor radio, a transistor radio where the designer was unknown from, something that made us even more curious.

Because of the fact we speak different languages, we decided at first to do our online research separate, Philipphine did it in french and Sena in English. We were curious about the fact if the results in the browser would be different because of the language. We soon saw that the information was almost identical so we decided to do the research in one language.

Our research began with first going on Google, we typed in Toot-A-Loop and Google gave us a lot of links and pictures of the radio, the first link that popped up was Wikipedia, of course.

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This information about the Toot-A-Loop that Wikipedia gave us was comparable on almost every website, there was nothing more, nothing less.

After Wikipedia we went to the websites of different museums, almost every museum website was disappointing, because they didn’t had a lot of information about the object, they all got a picture of their own Toot-A-Loop with a short text (or no text!) about when it was made etc. but nothing more. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam gave us some book references, something that we could definitely use later.


The many pictures on Google were linked to auction sites and even Marktplaats (the ‘Dutch Ebay’)  we saw that a lot of people were selling their old Toot-A-Loop or already sold them, so there is still a lot of interest in the radio, it hasn’t lost its popularity. The selling price of the radio was quite various,  for example on Marktplaats the radio would be sold for around 30 euros, but on the auction sites it would cost around 100 euros.

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We also found youtube videos, videos where people were most the time trying to explain how the radio works, we noticed that the videos were quite recent and that the people who commented under the videos were most of the time talking about how they would (and still love) the radio, so a lot of people from earlier generations.

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After long clicking, link after link, (it must have been the last Google search page) one of us ended on this Italian radio website where we finally found some new information about the radio, they  mentioned the name of the designer, somebody called ‘J.M. Willmin’, after reading this we started to Google the name of this designer, the only information about the designer that Google gave us was linked to the Toot-A -Loop. Later on we found an antique website where they were also talking about J.M. Willmin as the designer of the Toot A Loop, we sent them an email with the question where they got there information from, this is what they answered

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We think that the name J.M. Willmin was made up by Panasonic so the radio would sell better abroad (in countries like the US and UK),  this is probably why we couldn’t find anything about this designer.

After our online research we went to the library of the Stedelijk Museum and the library of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, thanks to the book references we found online we were able to find books that mentioned the Toot-A-Loop. The information we found per book was different, in the first book, Twentieth-century ornament by Jonathan Michael Woodham, the Toot-A-Loop was used as an example to show something about the Japanese design of the 1960s/1970s further then that there was no information about the Toot-A-Loop itself. In the second book we found, Radio Zeit by Isabel Brass, there was more information about the radio, but nothing we hadn’t read before.

That was something that surprised us, because books carry this magic trustworthiness with them, you should be able to find everything that you want to know in a book, at least that’s what we thought.

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It’s strange that there is only limited information about such a popular radio on the internet and in the books. Maybe we should use our imagination to answers the remaining questions.

With this in our minds we started to think about other purposes the Toot-A-Loop could have had, the Toot-A-Loop was designed to put around your wrist, so it could also be a kind of jewelry. We found out that Marc Jacobs probably got inspired by the Toot-A-Loop. Our imagination helped us already a bit, we are curious what you will find!

A commentary on the Lower Level Gallery display design for the STEDELIJK BASE


Monday, February 19, 2018

–>On December 14, 2017, the Stedelijk Museum opened its doors to inaugurate the curatorial re-purposing and display of their permanent collection. Under the influence of the research and architectural design of OMA/AMO’s Rem Koolhas and Federico Martinelli, STEDELIJK BASE presents on the Lower Level Gallery, a display and curatorial experiment.

I attended the festivities and found myself overwhelmed by the masses gathered, and the maze of thin steel panel-structures overloaded with works. The crowd of Art enthusiasts traveled the space restlessly and it became a dense environment where all senses where assaulted. Every corner of the space was utilized and the works where closely displayed, interacting and clashing with each other both in context or physically, showing in this first installment of the exhibition pieces from the 1800’s to 1980’s in a great hall tracing endless possible routes by means of the a set of slim self standing steel panels from which most of the artworks where hung or held. Its kind of hard to talk or read about this exhibition if you haven’t seen, so if you are reading and haven’t, and can’t see the animation below, click on the black box.

 

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I have visited the exhibition repeatedly in the past month to informally survey the thoughts and reactions of spectators on day-to-day basis, to get a broader sense of how this specific architectural endeavor on artwork display has been perceived. Eavesdropping conversations and asking around, I’ve heard all kinds of inclinations towards this unexpected environment:   A young student anxiously disapproving a Barnett Newman cornered by a pile of chairs collaged into a wall that, in her opinion, deflated the experience of such a powerful painting into a piece of an absurd scalene puzzle where great art works where being interrupted.

A couple eagerly wandering about the labyrinthine pathways, surprised by the fact that every direction their eyes turned to, there was either a piece provocatively displayed or in conversation with another, that otherwise could have never been intertwined. I myself have been in a constant state of flux about how I feel about it, as in the many visits I have payed to the show I could relate in separate occasions to one or both of the previously mentioned comments, both retrieved from my time in  the BASE’s lower level, dismissing the first floor more or less entirely, due to its conventional curation and display that is densely misted over the experience and for some, controversy of the former. In fact, in the last few visits I didn’t even pass by the first floor and proceeded to focus on the lower level.

Looking for more insight on the stimuli behind the final decision to discharge an overload of works  in this particular manner, I consulted the statements made by the people behind this project. Martinelli expressed in a publication in the OMA’s web project description, that the design and display was highly bound to the way in which and due to the multimedia means of communication function, from a users perspective, people have become prone to focus, process and compare abismal amounts of information. As a way to homologate these tendencies, the disposition and amount of works in the gallery, are in fact, a reflection of these communicative behaviors, where artistic perspectives can be assimilated.

That being said, I still am not sure if I fully appreciate the collection’s display management. If, in deed, it seems to have managed a dialogue between works and compiled and engaging environment to freely associate and compare different works, this does not necessarily mean that it has a positive repercussion on the value some pieces can have by themselves. Even though I felt the heavy devaluation of certain works have been a consequence of this overcharged curation, I have to mention that it has been the very reason I returned and have been in a constant state of critical thinking regarding the reasons behind STEDELIJK BASE’s curatorial experience.

I realize that the dominant ways of communication are shifting the way we perceive things, but should we let them stimulate the way in which we view everything else? Are our lives so strictly joint to  the high tides of rapidly flowing information that it is becoming the standardized form of perception? Is this merely a superficial association? How can we evaluate it, in any case?


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