SpeesBookLookPak
With text by Anouk Beckers, Iris de Leeuw and Harm StevensIntroduction by Tonya Sudiono
“This publication shows how clothing can be a tool to protest. Speespak as a protest against the taboo on touch in the sixties in the Netherlands, but also against the idea that people are trapped in a rhythm that is determined by work. Booklook as a protest against the dominant fashion system, wherein clothing is valued as commercial goods but within Booklook, clothing is valued for their social, historical and political instead.”
Speespakken 1966 at the exhibition Amsterdam Magic Centre-Art and Counterculture 1967-1970,
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2018. Photo Gert-Jan van Rooij.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2018. Photo Gert-Jan van Rooij.
Discover how a trouser leg can spark a revolution
For this third issue, with title SpeesBookLookPak, Booklook initiator Anouk Beckers (1990) teams up with artist Iris de Leeuw (1944), who designed the Speespak in 1966. Booklook issue 3, unfolds into a jacket (the cover, publication part 1) and a pair of trousers (publication part 2).
The topic discussed in this issue is Speespak, an artwork made by Iris de Leeuw in 1966. It was a ‘playsuit’ for Homo Ludens: the playful human of the future. This modular suit provoked contact and created personal space. The trouser legs can be swapped with other players.
The text on the jacket, SpeesBookLookPak, is written by Anouk Beckers and Iris de Leeuw. It’s a conversation and correspondence between Anouk and Iris and affords an intergenerational glimpse of their activism and reclamation of space as artists and women.
The trousers share the chronicle in 14 modules Speespak: From Attic to Rijksmuseum, written by Rijksmuseum curator Harm Stevens (1969). The text describes the political, cultural, artistic and personal context in which the Speespak originated as a product of the Maastricht (NL) artist collective Luuks. Below you can read two fragments from Harm Stevens’ text.
This publication publishes the patterns of the iconic Speespak ’66 as an invitation to make the suit yourself. This Booklook edition also launches the Speespak ’66 into the present. Unfolded, SpeesBookLookPak becomes a pattern for the jacket and trousers of the brand-new Speespak ’26.
To present us, through play, with an alternative future.
Fragment from Chronicle SPEESPAK: FROM ATTIC TO RIJKSMUSEUM
By Harm Stevens, Curator History Department, Rijksmuseum
One day in January 2011, I embarked on a Speespak (Spacesuit) recall campaign together with artist Iris de Leeuw (1944), the maker of the Speespak. A few weeks earlier, I had visited Iris at her home in ’s-Heer Abtskerke in the Dutch province of Zeeland to see her archive of colourful sixties’ screen-printing work, which screamed LUUKS WHAMM SPEES at us from the table, and to take a look at the rare remains of the 1966/67 Speespak. I had first read about the Speespak in the book Imaazje! De verbeelding van Provo 1965-1967 (Imaazje! The Imagination of Provo 1965-1967) by historian Niek Pas. Could other Speespakken have been preserved here and there in the Netherlands?
From our own workplaces – I from my office at the Rijksmuseum, Iris from her home – Iris and I approached people by e-mail and telephone to ask whether they perhaps still had their 1966/67 Speespak hanging in their wardrobes (“Good morning, my name is Harm Stevens, I am a curator at the Rijkmuseum and – hum – I was wondering whether you might still have your Speespak?”). An odd question perhaps, but as a curator responsible for the twentieth century at the Rijksmuseum’s History department it does well to ask odd questions.
The yield from the recall initiative was not inconsiderable, although the pink suit, the lakpijp (vinyl leg) and the suit with printed images sadly remained things we still only knew about from hearsay. Nonetheless, a year after the start of the recall appeal, the outcome hung on seven coat hangers in Iris’s studio. The red Karl Marx suit decorated with stamped heads of Karl Marx was a windfall: not a Speespak but nevertheless a garment Iris had made in 1966. The last one to be retrieved was the lilac Speespak that was discovered “in a dark corner of a cupboard in the attic,” Iris mailed, adding: “I will wash it and pamper it. So, we now have a pretty good selection of suits and related objects!”
However, the Rijksmuseum did not commit to purchasing the Speespakken straight away. The initial reaction was no doubt that the suits were not part of the (art)historical canon, and no-one was prepared to stick their neck out and see the Speespak as more than a sixties’ curiosity. In 2013, however, the complete series of Ontbijt op Bed (Breakfast in Bed) magazines along with a group of posters and pamphlets by the Luuks/Ontbijt op Bed group, including the Speespak Echtheidscertificaat (Spacesuit Certificate of Authenticity) and order form, were incorporated into the Rijksmuseum Collection.
A pleasantly eccentric and confusing phase followed, with the Speespakken on loan at the Rijksmuseum, the Speespakken worn by a model in a quasi-photoshoot at the Rijksmuseum, my returning the Speespakken to Iris in their box on the back of my bike, the Speespakken on a washing line in the Mon Capitaine Gallery in Middelburg, and the Speespakken at the Laboratorium Nederland 1955-1970 symposium at the Rijksmuseum.
And then permission was granted from on high to acquire the Speespakken for the Rijksmuseum Collection. In the preceding months, the sixties’ world of happenings, protests, counterculture, homo ludens, Provo, and anti-institutional art had found its way into the Rijksmuseum Collection via all manner of printed matter, creating a natural context for the Speespakken. In 2016 they were assigned an object number: NG-2016-57-1 t/m 4.
Maastricht, June 1966
The earliest surviving complete Speespak, a jacket and trousers ensemble, is made in June 1966, mainly from orange curtaining, with silk-trimmed hems. The jacket has a cotton label screen-printed with the word Speespak, which becomes its trademark. The name Speespak is the outcome of discussions within the playful ‘laboratory’ of the Luuks artists collective (1966-1967) (the phonetically spelled Dutch word luxe meaning ‘luxury’), to which Hans Mol (1938-2019), Ger Brouwer (1938), Kees Graaf, Iris de Leeuw and – indirectly - Kees Slager belong. Mol, Brouwer and Graaf know one another from the Maastricht art scene around Artishock, an independent foundation for fine artists from which they had broken away in 1965 under the name Space Group.1
The Speespak is the prototiep (protoype) of a future garment with which they experiment. It is a leisure suit with unzippable components, designed for adaptation and for play. It is a suit for homo ludens, Latin for man at play. This cultural phenomenon is the brainchild of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) who in his study Homo Ludens. Proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultuur (Homo Ludens. Attempt to define the play element of culture, 1938) postulates the idea of play as the primary creative force.2
Space travel and Space Age aesthetics are an inspiring prospect for modern designers and popular culture in the mid-sixties. Playing with language is also popular in 1966, and written phonetically in Dutch, the English word ‘space’ is spelled spees and ‘spacesuit’ Speespak. The garment is designed to renew the stifling space between people. It is not a fashion product nor a consumer item, but workwear for the playful man/woman of the future, who according to Luuks exists in 1966.
1. Niek Pas, Imaazje. De verbeelding van Provo 1965-1967, 2003, pp. 251-255.
2. Johan Huizinga (with a foreword by W. Ottespeer), Homo Ludens, proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultuur, 2008.
Zij aan Zij, de vrouw in het kreatieve beroep (Side by side, women in creative professions). Screen print poster by Iris de Leeuw, Nijmegen, 1969. A women’s students’ association in Nijmegen invited Iris to make a poster for a teach-in about women in creative professions. It became a fiery image of two women glowing side by side as the original source of creativity. At the same time, de Leeuw, herself a woman in a creative profession, was asked to organise an exhibition with her works. This provided a counterbalance to the male speakers invited to the teach-in. Rijksmuseum collection.
Adams Rib, screen print poster by Iris de Leeuw on women’s emancipation, Utrecht, 1974. The image features a photograph of striking women in the clothing industry in Leeuwarden, emerging from an open vagina. The women were demonstrating for equal rights during their strike. Rijksmuseum collection.
