Mad about MAS

A few days ago, I mentioned MAS, the Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp, and if you are ever in that city, I highly recommend a visit.

It opened in 2011 to create a home for several different (and disparate!) collections and smaller museums. Half of the building is open for free, particularly to see the view from each floor through the undulating windows and from the roof, which you reach by a series of escalators:




As with most museums, I quickly became overwhelmed with the exhibits, but a few things will stick with me.

The exhibit on celebrations informed me of Antwerp's Ommegang parade tradition, which ended in 1958 after centuries. It reminds me of our local Mayday parade by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater.

The poster on the left is for 1958, that last year:


The giant's head shown in the poster is one of the recurring characters:


The giant is part of the city's founding myth, in which a Roman soldier cut off the hand of a giant who was extracting tolls from people who wanted to cross the river where Antwerp now stands. A hand has been Antwerp's symbol since its founding.


Athena is also an important figure in the city, so she was part of the parade as well, even though it was based on Christian symbolism generally and was held on Assumption (August 15).


Giant fish "floats" were also part of it, as shown in this painting and these models:


The second thing I learned about in the celebration exhibit was the existence of dance organs. As the accompany text informed me,

Dance organs are a Belgian phenomenon. Around 1900, these were unusually popular, particularly in Antwerp and Brussels, but also in the south of the Netherlands. Antwerp builders like Mortier and Decap became the market leaders in this ceremonial industry.

The organs were ingenious machines that got people dancing. They were created before the invention of radio. The organ rental sector became a strong competitor to dance orchestras.

Dance organs were rented for fairs and parties and given a permanent home in dance palaces and roadside cafes. They could be enormous and were fitted with moving parts, self-playing instruments and lighting effects. Most were repeatedly updated to suit the changes in style and taste in music. As from the 1960s they were forced to bow down to the DJ.

In Antwerp there is still one cafe with a dance organ: Cafe Beveren.

This is the Mortier Anvers organ:


It's described this way:

In 1877, Theofiel Mortier began selling and renting out dance organs. As early as 1895 he also began building his own and in the early 20th century Mortier was the market leader. His company in the Antwerp district of Dam employed staff of almost one hundred.

For decades this pipe organ was rented out for fairs, markets and parties. In 1979 the city of Antwerp purchased this Antwerp icon. The fully restored Mortier organ was given a ceremonious reception as a top item in the MAS collection.

Across from it in the room was the more recently built FRANGEMA organ:

This Goliath organ with 121 keys was a revolutionary invention.... Organ books with punched holes were able to operate and enormous range of records thanks to the presence of 121 pins.

The organ dating back to 1947 was modernized on several occasions. In 1961 it was given its present look and its name FRANGEMA, which is a combination of the first letters of the name of those renting out the organ, the two Teugels brothers and their wives: FRancoise, ANtonia, GEorges and MArcel.

I really wanted to get down to the Cafe Beveren to see the last operational dance organ, but I didn't make it there.

The other exhibit that both overwhelmed and informed me was called Antwerp a la Carte, about food and its effects in Antwerp throughout its history. It's a gigantic display of thousands of interesting and beautiful objects, but I wanted to highlight one piece that is among the best information displays I've ever seen:


This three-dimensional graphic shows how far various types of food had to travel to reach Antwerp at three different points in time, 1550, 1900, and today. The range of foods increases at each point in time as well. In this close-up, you can see that the number of kilometers shown in the concentric circles increases by order of magnitude from 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000:


The key shows the method of transportation on the left and the types of food on the right (in three languages):


Finally, one last thing from the Antwerp a la Carte exhibit... sprouting from the benches along one wall (which were a welcome sight when I needed a rest from all the standing and intellectual stimulus!) were these sets of plastic piping. What do you think they are?


The label made it clear once I got close enough: pull out the stoppers at the end of either pipe and smell a particular odor from the city, from the harbor or the markets or modern food production.

It was a very cool way to round out an already-thorough exhibit, and part of an overall excellent example of modern museum design and implementation.