Artwork resembling empty beer cans mistakenly thrown in bin by Dutch museum mechanic

THE HAGUE – A mechanic at a Dutch museum tried to be helpful and chucked what looked like two empty beer cans in the rubbish bin.

It turned out it was an art exhibit, which was saved by the museum.

The artwork, titled All The Good Times We Spent Together, was created in 1988 by French artist Alexandre Lavet, who has described his style as “mixing minimalism, contextual and conceptual art legacies”.

It was displayed at LAM, a museum dedicated to food and eating in Lisse, the Netherlands, a town roughly 40km south-west of Amsterdam.

The artwork was not merely composed of two used cans, as the museum took pains to point out on its webpage.

“If you look closely, you will discover that the dented and empty cans are hand-painted,” the museum said in describing the work. “Every detail has been painted onto the cans with precision, using acrylic paint.”

It added, rather plaintively: “Lavet’s piece required a lot of time and effort to create.”

The cans were exhibited inside the museum’s glass lift shaft, designed to look “as if they were left behind by construction workers”, according to the museum’s website.

But their artistic value was lost on a mechanic, who saw them displayed in a lift and threw them in the rubbish bin.

Ms Froukje Budding, a spokeswoman for LAM, told AFP that art pieces are often left in unusual places – hence the display in a lift.

“We try to surprise the visitor all the time,” she said.

Curator Elisah van den Bergh returned from a short break and noticed that the cans had vanished.

She recovered them from a bin bag in the nick of time as they were about to be thrown out.

Ms Budding told AFP: “We have now put the work in a more traditional place on a plinth so it can rest after its adventure.”

She stressed there were “no hard feelings” towards the mechanic, who had just started at the museum.

He had been covering for the museum’s regular technician, who was well acquainted with the building and its exhibits, according to its website.

“He was just doing his job,” she said.

Museum director Sietske van Zanten said: “Our art encourages visitors to see everyday objects in a new light.”

“By displaying artworks in unexpected places, we amplify this experience and keep visitors on their toes,” added Ms van Zanten.

With this in mind, said Ms Budding, the cans are unlikely to stay on their traditional plinth for long.

“We need to think hard about a careful place to put them next,” she told AFP.

Life can be perilous for an unconventional work of art.

Prominent British artist Damien Hirst assembled a work in a London gallery in 2001 that included candy wrappers, newspapers, coffee cups, ashtrays and, yes, empty beer bottles.

After a gala opening night, the work lasted only a few hours before a cleaner threw it away. Much of the work was saved from the bin, however, and Hirst said he found the episode amusing.

A 1.5m-tall cake sculpture from 1979 by American Pat Lasch vanished from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the consensus was that it had probably been tossed.

“It’s like losing my mother,” Ms Lasch lamented.

Work by artists Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari at Museion, a museum in Bolzano, Italy, consisted of 300 empty Champagne bottles, confetti and cigarette butts, to give the look of the remnants of a wild party.

Quite a job for the janitors, but they nonetheless conscientiously cleaned it all up in 2015, even sorting the glass separately for recycling.

Enough of the work was recovered for reconstruction.

There was a sadder end for an installation by German artist Gustav Metzger at the Tate Britain in 2004.

Part of the work was a bag of rubbish. Unsurprisingly, it was taken out with the other rubbish and thrown in a crusher. It was fished out, but was considered too badly damaged to repair.

The artist supplied a new bag of rubbish. AFP, NYTIMES