Virtual presentation: Waiting for the Witch Doctor

It is with great joy that we invite you to join us live on Thursday September 17th at 4.00pm CEST, for an interactive online interview with author and former Rijksmuseum Fellow Janna Schoenberger. We will celebrate the publication of Waiting for the Witch Doctor: Robert Jasper Grootveld’s Scrapbook and the Dutch Counterculture, the most recent book in the Rijksmuseum Studies in History series.

Thursday September 17th, 4pm

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This event will feature photos from the scrapbook and films of its subject, the ludic anti-smoking magician, Robert Jasper Grootveld (1932–2009). Curator Harm Stevens will be your interviewer and host, and viewers are encouraged to participate in the live Q&A.

When?

  • Date: Thursday, September 17th, 2020
  • Time: 4pm CEST

How to watch?

  1. Click on the button above "Join". The link will be available later on.
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Robert Jasper Grootveld

publicatie Amsterdam-based counterculture protagonist Grootveld was a prophetic artist who addressed politically and socially charged issues related to consumerism, race and gender. Grootveld is known for his role in the happenings near the sculpture Het Lieverdje on the Amsterdam Spui. But he is also the missing link among the sea of canonical figures of the time, from Provo anarchists Roel van Duijn and Luud Schimmelpennink to cabaret performer Wim Sonneveld, painter Constant Nieuwenhuys and writer Simon Vinkenoog, to name but a few.

Grootveld’s Scrapbook, an assemblage of photographs, newspaper clippings and more, is a raw visual ego document that offers a glimpse into the life in the Amsterdam counterculture in the early 1960s.

In Waiting for the Witch Doctor, Janna Schoenberger presents the Scrapbook as the key to the unexpected dimensions of the idiosyncratic and activist oeuvre of a man whose prophecies about the ‘addicted consumers of tomorrow’ still ring true.

Biography Janna Schoenberger

Janna Janna Schoenberger is a lecturer at Amsterdam University College, where she teaches modern and contemporary art. Dr. Schoenberger completed her doctoral studies in Art History at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York in 2017. Her dissertation, Ludic Conceptualism: Art and Play in the Netherlands, 1959 to 1975, is the first extensive study of art in the Netherlands in the 1960s and ‘70s. It investigates ludic art through a diachronic thread of play that extends from the first iteration of Constant’s New Babylon in 1959 to the death of Conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader in 1975. In 2018 – 2019, Dr. Schoenberger was the Johan Huizinga Fellow at the Rijksmuseum and a Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Yale University’s Beinecke Library.

Made possible by the Johan Huizinga Fund/Rijksmuseum Fund