Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Cleveland’s Free Stamp. Edward J. Olszewski
Oldenburg and van Bruggen, which he was unable to pursue until after her divorce. The couple spent the summer of 1977 in Allegan, Michigan, from which they commuted to work on buildings to house the Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing in Chicago. They were married in Allegan on July 22, 1977.
In 1978 Oldenburg and van Bruggen realized that the art gallery was a confining space for displays of limited duration and decided to devote themselves to making permanent outdoor works, referred to as “large-scale projects,” or “private works in public places.” Van Bruggen moved to New York accompanied by her children, Paulus and Maartje, and the family settled in two side-by-side lower Manhattan lofts which served as their offices, studio, warehouse, and residence.
In 1982 van Bruggen participated as a member of the selection committee for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, which included the couple’s Spitzhacke (Pickaxe) commission. Van Bruggen was the author of books and catalogues, including monographs on Bruce Nauman (1989) and John Baldessari (1990), and wrote articles and reviews for Artforum, in addition to working with Oldenburg on exhibitions and sculpture installations. The couple also coauthored several volumes on their projects over the years. Van Bruggen became an American citizen in 1993.
Germano Celant curated an extensive retrospective exhibition of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1995, which then traveled to Los Angeles, New York, London, and Bonn.
Van Bruggen succumbed to cancer in January 2009.
3
SCULPTURAL COLLABORATIONS
For the casual reader not closely familiar with the sculptors’ artistic career, a brief overview of their public art leading to Free Stamp might be helpful. Earlier installations provide a context for the Cleveland sculpture. Although their corpus of works continued to flourish after the Cleveland project, my treatment of later works will be peripheral. Batcolumn (Chicago, 1977) merged a modern pasttime, baseball, with an ancient, revered architectural element. Because the bat has no up or down unless held, the column association was necessary to give it its enduring verticality. Umberto Eco has characterized the venerable nature of the column, which persists against the winds of time, an object of wonder with an aristocratic touch.1 He has further inventoried its aspects as a witness of vanished greatness, the mast of time casting a shadow of melancholy, as obstinate, slender, solitary, rising. For the Roman architect Vitruvius, the column was a metonym for place, such as the Roman Forum, and a signifier of the importance of location, a necessary stage set for tragedy to underscore the seriousness of a drama. In the Renaissance the column was associated with Samson and Hercules and the cardinal virtue of fortitude. Oldenburg mentioned being stimulated by Alfred Loos’s submission for the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition in the shape of a Doric column. Batcolumn was thus rich with cultural and historical allusions independent of its setting, and with an architectural significance linking it to the surrounding buildings. The project was funded by the Art in Architecture Program of the General Services Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. As an early public sculpture project, Batcolumn set the stage for Free Stamp to come.
With the twenty-ton Crusoe Umbrella in Des Moines (fig. 10, 58 × 37 × 37 feet), the artists began one of their early collaborations, creating a sculpture that would quickly become identified with another American city, the Iowa state capital.2 This was followed by an even more humble subject, a split button, which became a sculpture for the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia in 1981.
Figure 10 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Crusoe Umbrella, 1979, corten steel painted with polyurethane enamel, 33 × 37 × 56 ft. (10.1 × 11.38 × 17.1 m). Nollen Plaza, Civic Center of Greater Des Moines, Iowa. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio.
The Roman historian Pliny noted that the history of art is embedded in the history of things. In 1962 George Kubler, in The Shape of Time, distinguished between the trivial and formal in artistic themes, touching on the history of buttons as a trivial example, their only variants comprising size, shape, and decoration.3 Any struggle historically with difficulties in the function of buttons was generally of little duration.
Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Split Button, in front of the library on the Philadelphia campus, stands as a formal response to Kubler’s challenge, recognizing the importance of these necessary gadgets in the conduct of daily life. Kubler observed how “every innovation reduces the duration of its class,” by which I take him to mean that Split Button, like Free Stamp and other of their works, makes future permutations on buttons, hand stamps, trowels, flashlights, and so on more complicated.4
Whereas the rate of change in language is gradual because communication controls it, the symbolic language of sculpture may be freer in presenting new ways of experiencing the world, particularly as artistic development does not follow a linear or an evolutionary path. T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock observes, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” the meanness of the common spoon suggesting the shallowness and brevity of his life. As with the button, the history of the hand stamp represents a duration of minimal change, of trivial pattern, which is to say a span of little measure, because our sense of history is predicated upon change and variation. Yet events without continuity would be chaos. The universal functionality of spoon, button, or flashlight, however, redeems their histories from undue chaos.
Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s heavy-duty Las Vegas Flashlight (1981) for the University of Nevada campus set a precedent for Free Stamp at 38 feet and 74,000 pounds, and offered a variant on Batcolumn with its industrial flutings and capital-like top (fig. 11).5 Like Clothespin, it was illuminated at its base, a necessary detail to locate the black sculpture during nighttime. Situated between a theater and library, it was a modest note on a college campus to signify the seriousness of scholarship against the glaring lights of the nearby Vegas Strip. Similar illumination was considered for Free Stamp at one stage; its meaning was also explained through metaphor, similar to Spitzhacke (Pickaxe) in Kassel.
The artists linked the 1982 Spitzhacke (39 feet 9 inches), on the banks of the Fulda River in Kassel, Germany, metaphorically to the colossal eighteenth-century bronze Hercules on the hill above.6 Kassel was the home of the Brothers Grimm, and the sculptors used a mythological approach in their association with the demigod, by suggesting that Hercules, leaning on his club in a relaxed and canonical pose, had just hurled the giant ax. The motif of the handle perpendicular to the arc of its bite offered a formal purity and symmetry that was only accented by its tilt. The object in its clarity is understood at a glance, so clean as to be comprehended in its three-dimensional totality from any side. As the Batcolumn was sanctioned by antiquity, so Kassel provided a historical context for Spitzhacke.
Figure 11 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Flashlight, 1981, steel painted with polyurethane enamel, 38 ft. 6 in. × 10 ft 6 in. (11.73 × 3.2 m). University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
The sculptors’ python-like Gartenschlauch (Garden Hose) in Freiburg, Germany (fig. 12, 1983, 35 feet 5 inches × 20 inches × 410 feet), undulates sensibly and sensitively, winding and arching across a public park from its giant faucet, without intruding on the openness of the park or seriously impeding those traversing it. It is reminiscent of Jason’s dragon that “covered acres and acres” and Beowulf’s dragon “gliding in looped curves.” The sculptors chose this subject for a redesigned public