Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Cleveland’s Free Stamp. Edward J. Olszewski
plots. The designer of the park, Klaus Humpert, created a geometric pattern as a foil to the graceful calligraphy of 410 feet of curved pipe for the hose, 20 inches in diameter.7 The design was complicated and required special engineering by a German firm that was fabricating two thousand miles of natural gas pipeline for the Russian government. The thirty sections of curved pipe terminate in a small pool with a trickle of water.
The same year, Oldenburg and van Bruggen proposed a suspension bridge for Rotterdam in the form of a pair of giant curved screws.8 The project never materialized, but the artists continued to explore it in soft versions and sculptures of varying sizes. An elegant Screwarch was finally installed in 1984 at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (fig. 13). A report in the Wall Street Journal in 1985 indicated that a screw sculpture had once been suggested for the Frank J. Lausche State Office Building in downtown Cleveland, which is now the site of David Smith’s geometric arch sculpture Last, and implied that the patron had refused it because of the unintended connotations of the word “screw.”9 The incident was indexed in a Darcy cartoon in the Plain Dealer that played off both the screw and the rubber stamp.10
Figure 12 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Gartenschlauch (Garden Hose), 1983, steel painted with polyurethane enamel, two elements in an area approximately 6,000 ft2 (357.4 m2). Faucet: 35 ft. 5 in. × 8 ft. 12 in. × 7 ft. 1 in. (10.8 × 2.7 × 2.2 m); hose: 410 ft (125 m) length × 20 in. (0.5 m) diameter. Stühlinger Park, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
Figure 13 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Screwarch, 1983, aluminum painted with polyurethane enamel, 12 ft. 8 in. × 21 ft. 6 in. × 7 ft. 10 in. (3.86 × 6.55 × 2.39 m). Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
During the germination of the Cleveland project, Spoonbridge and Cherry in Minneapolis (1988, 29 feet 6 inches) was the sculptors’ second attempt at a fountain sculpture.11 It was funded by a $500,000 gift to the Walker Art Center from Frederick R. Weisman for director Martin Friedman’s planned sculpture garden. The cherry is precariously balanced on the edge of the spoon, on the verge of sliding into the bowl. A mist issues from its stem, while water flowing at its base adds a naturalistic shine to the fruit before collecting in the bowl of the spoon. That same year, van Bruggen and Oldenburg visited Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica studio, where they examined his model of downtown Cleveland (fig. 14). The three had worked together on other projects and were engaged by Peter B. Lewis, president of Progressive Insurance, to collaborate on an office building close to the BP headquarters with a sculpture garden near city hall. The projects never materialized.
A period of prodigious activity accompanied the installation of Free Stamp with the Paris Bicyclette Ensevelie (Buried Bicycle) and Miami Dropped Bowl with Scattered Slices and Peels. It was followed by the 68-foot Mistos (Match Cover) for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics; Bottle of Notes (Middlesbrough, England, 1993); and Shuttlecocks (Kansas City, 1994). The international scope of these projects should have reassured doubters of the sculptors’ Cleveland project.
Figure 14 Frank Gehry, Coosje van Bruggen, and Claes Oldenburg in the Frank Gehry Studio, Santa Monica, California, 1988. Photo by Sidney B. Felsen. © 1988
Figure 15 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum and fiber-reinforced plastic painted with polyurethane enamel. Four shuttlecocks, each 17 ft. 11 in. (5.5 m) high × 15 ft. 1 in. (4.6 m) crown diameter and 4 ft. (1.2 m) nose cone diameter, sited in different positions on the grounds of the museum. Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
Shuttlecocks was never a problem commission for the Nelson-Atkins Museum, although it did generate controversy in the local media (fig. 15).12 Its genesis took a meandering path and produced many study drawings, unlike Free Stamp, which was an idea that the artists conceived Minerva-like on first seeing the site. Shuttlecocks was the result of numerous drawings, with the draftsman playing on the name as an anthropomorphic “birdie” with phallic allusions, images of a basketball caught in a net, the shuttlecock as the mane of a reclining lion/sphinx, standing on its feathers as a teepee, or the feathers collapsed and spread out like a starfish or octopus, all reflections of the artists’ intuitive ability to perceive similarities in dissimilar elements.
Oldenburg is a superb draftsman, but Cleveland was blessed with fewer graphic speculations because the idea for the stamp occurred spontaneously when the sculptors first saw the pad that the architects had provided for a sculpture. Although its origins were less in flux than those of other sculptures by the artists, the genesis of Free Stamp was fluid and complex in other ways, the result of collaboration and repudiation (as will be discussed).
Both artists delighted in novels and poetry, and these interests were manifested in their artworks. The 35-foot Bottle of Notes for the port city of Middlesbrough is just that, a bottle made of writing (fig. 16). Free Stamp was the first large sculpture to incorporate writing with its single, powerful FREE. But Oldenburg could not bottle up his years of English literature at Yale, particularly his interest in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which expressed itself in public sculptures that made Lilliputians of their spectators. Van Bruggen completed the project with her recollection of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1833 short story “Manuscript Found in a Bottle.” Calligraphy is popping out of the bottle in Gartenschlauch (Garden Hose). Crusoe Umbrella also contains a favorite literary reference, and further writing would emerge in Torn Notebook (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1996).
Figure 16 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Bottle of Notes, 1993, steel painted with polyurethane enamel, 30 × 16 × 10 ft. (9.1 × 4.9 × 3.1 m). Central Gardens, Middlesbrough, England. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
Like the assembled Batcolumn and Crusoe Umbrella, Bottle of Notes appears perforated in its fabricated openings. It repeats the serpentine forms of Screwarch in the ascending vortex of its lettering given the shape of a bottle, with a second, swirling note inside. Middlesbrough was the birthplace of the intrepid seafarer Captain Cook. Bottle of Notes departs from the popular theme of a ship in a bottle,13 inverting that association with its tilting verticality (a cant of 17.5 degrees), and its message rejecting the conventional note of desperation sent from a deserted island. The tilt challenges the idea of monumentality and thus durability, and suggests a bottle washed up on shore. The sculpture also recalls the isolated refuge of Robinson Crusoe and the sculptors’ umbrella for Des Moines, Iowa, with its theme of a voyage into the unknown and play with scale.
The outer script quotes from Cook’s journal on his first voyage, in an entry from June 1769: “We had every advantage we could desire in observing the whole of the passage of the Planet Venus over the Sun’s disc.”14 Chosen by van Bruggen, the passage stresses the importance