Читать книгу Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Cleveland’s Free Stamp - Edward J. Olszewski - Страница 13

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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 park that had been the site of citizens’ weekend garden 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 of sightings for navigation, as well as the idea of eclipse. The interior script 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.