Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Cleveland’s Free Stamp. Edward J. Olszewski
contains a poem by van Bruggen from her collection of verse Memos of a Gadfly (1987): “I like to remember seagulls in full flight gliding over the ring of canals.” White lettering is used for the outside, with blue lettering for the interior note. The visitor can enter the bottle to read the note within, recalling something of the original plan for Free Stamp of a repository containing inscriptions at its base.15
Journeys are a theme of perennial interest, a fundamental topos for life. It is the focus of classical literature, the voyage essential to Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Why travel, where does it lead, and how does it end? Dante began both his Purgatorio and Paradiso as sea voyages borne by “the ship of his genius.” Because pilgrimage involves a temporal progression, it becomes a measure of human existence. The idea of uncharted water becomes a metaphor for artistic creativity, for sculptural innovation. The sculptors initiated the venerable joining of artistry with voyage in Crusoe Umbrella, and they continued the venture in Bottle of Notes. Their navigation was a search for the melding of form with appropriate content.
The sculptors completed Torn Notebook in 1996 for the University of Nebraska with notebook leafs perforated by writing. Unlike the solid, cursive writing of Bottle of Notes, the writing of Torn Notebook consists of script as negative spaces in disassembled notebook pages blowing in the wind, recalling the disparate forms of Bicyclette Ensevelie (Buried Bicycle) and Dropped Bowl with Scattered Slices and Peels. The notion of dispersion seems to contradict the idea of a notebook used to assemble thoughts and a sculpture as an integral volume. The resulting inverse tension between the writer’s normally bound musings now in monumental scale also comments on the nature of a book to exist in multiples. Here Dante’s eloquent narrative in Paradiso 33:85–87 is called to mind: “I saw gathered . . . , bound up by love into a single volume, all the leaves scattered through the universe” (C. H. Sisson translation). The artists’ conception for their project has something of Dante’s visionary experience (and of their mutual affection) bound in a sculpture.
Figure 17 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Torn Notebook, 1996, stainless steel and aluminum painted with polyurethane enamel. Three elements: notebook, 21 ft 10 in. × 23 ft × 26 ft 1 in. (6.7 × 6.4 × 8 m); page (1), 10 ft × 14 ft 1 in. × 7 ft 1 in. (3.0 × 4.3 × 2.2 m); page (2), 11 ft 8 in. × 8 ft 7 in. × 8 ft 2 in. (3.6 × 2.6 × 2.5 m). Madden Garden, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska. Photo by John Spence. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
Commissioned by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery on the university campus, the sculpture consists of a torn spiral notebook and loose sheets with writing by the artists (fig. 17).16 Oldenburg’s notes consist of objects observed for use, van Bruggen’s of lines of poetry—the texts are in reverse of one another. The inscriptions on the aluminum sheets that served as notebook pages were made with high-pressure water cutting. That metal can be cut by concentrated water flow or focused laser light is a marvel of modern technology that the sculptors pursued as conditions dictated.
Cupid’s Span (San Francisco, 2002) (fig. 18) was a return to the bow-like purity of Kassel’s Spitzhacke (Pickaxe). An arrow pins its bow to the ground, with the bow taking a boat-like shape while its string echoes the suspension cables of the nearby San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The feather of the arrow becomes a sail. Such metamorphoses are typical play in the sculptors’ projects. Here they turn love into a voyage. The arrowhead is buried, so we cannot know if it is lead or gold, if love is denied or returned. But this is San Francisco, so we can assume that digging would reveal gold. Other works by the artists include the 18-foot Lion’s Tail (1999), hung out of a gallery window in Venice; the 59-foot Ago, Filo, e Nodo (Needle, Thread, and Knot, 2000) in Milan, and Dropped Cone (2001, 39 feet 10 inches × 19 feet) in Cologne, Germany. Van Bruggen placed her 70-foot-high Spring in Seoul, South Korea, in 2006. The 51-foot Paint Torch (2011), dripping a creamy blob of orange pigment at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, was installed after Coosje’s death in 2009.
Figure 18 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Cupid’s Span, 2002, stainless steel, structural carbon steel, fiber-reinforced plastic, cast epoxy, and polyvinyl chloride foam, painted with polyester gelcoat, 64 ft. × 143 ft. 9 in. × 17 ft. 3/8 in. Rincon Park, San Francisco, California. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s forms bring to light new aspects of the world’s content. They do not so much mirror nature—which in their case is the nature of technology and urban culture—as offer a unique apprehension of the world. The sculptors enhance seeing with artistic vision, trusting their intuition to awaken us beyond ourselves. They choose and reduce forms to crystallize visibility. Crystallographers who characterize crystalline molecular compounds perform in their analyses a series of what are called symmetry operations through various axes. Those compounds which have the fewest symmetry operations are the least complicated crystals because the structure repeats itself through different operations. Oldenburg and van Bruggen often choose objects of the highest symmetry, such as a baseball bat, pickaxe, flashlight, clothespin, hand stamp, with a garden hose, bicycle, or dropped bowl introducing complications to the symmetry of the objects.
With their decision in 1977 to dedicate themselves to public sculpture, Oldenburg and van Bruggen turned the city into a gallery where there is always free and open access to the artworks without hourly restrictions or a limited run. Furthermore, their choice of subjects and placements freed sculpture from architectural manipulation and political servitude, which is to say from ideological polemics. The insinuation of art into urbanism was not just an afterthought or meant to fill a gap or create a vista. Their sculptures were intended as an art of the people or the individual rather than one of ideology. They made the diurnal realm in which society functions the subject of their art, and enhanced urban space by freeing the city from the tyranny of its history.
The sculptors explored their imaginative forms through models and drawings to yield new possibilities. Once problems were solved, their works revealed an inner logic and imparted a sense of authority and power that they never surrendered. The incongruous associations and disjunctive overlaps in the sketches resolved themselves into simplified forms in the large sculptures. Oldenburg and van Bruggen developed a collaborative style that gave legitimacy and authenticity to their public works.
Figure 19 Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Monument for Mill Rock, East River, New York: Slice of Strawberry Cheesecake, 1992, soft-ground etching and aquatint, 25 × 29-1/2 in. (63.5 × 75 cm). Edition of sixty, 10 AP, BAT, BN, HC, 2 PP, TP, © 1992 Claes Oldenburg. Photo by Ellen Page Wilson.
Oldenburg had played with various concepts for monumental projects over the years, many never executed and some not feasible, but these he recorded in drawings and prints, such as his Proposed Monument for Mill Rock, East River, New York: Slice of Strawberry Cheesecake (1992) (fig. 19). But there were also some feasible projects that faced rejection.
4
REJECTION AND RECUPERATION
Free Stamp was not the sculptors’ first experience with rejection, although they often resolved the incidents in a satisfying fashion. Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser (1976) in fallen form was refused by a corporate patron for a proposed specific site, but several revised versions were made, two of which can