From Pop to
Prodigious Public Scuplture

From the reporting of Kent Wolgamott, Lincoln Journal Star
and David Ochsner, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Public Relations

Imagine being an artist in 1445. Sculptors like Donatello and Ghiberti had captive audiences. Erect an equestrian statue in the sleepy Italian town of Padua and people came to marvel. What else were they going to do? Watch Nick at Nite?
Now we are in an age when folks eat meals in their cars and where information is trumpeted at you from all sides -- television, billboards, junk mail, telemarketers -- an age when advertisers sit in tall buildings and devise even more ways to insert messages between your synapses.
Donatello had it made.

Those lofty monuments of the past, although still beautiful, may seem quaint and remote in this age marked by the horrors of two world wars, widespread famine and the possibility of instant atomic death. Yet artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen have brought the monument back to the people, using the images of our time to leave their mark in the lexicon of art history.
"The artists are very aware of their place in history," says former Sheldon Art Gallery curator Daphne Deeds.
The wind-blown folds of the pages recall folds of drapery and the defiant stance of one of the most famous works of classical antiquity, the Nike of Samothrace. Oldenberg and van Bruggen have taken the sense of scale and importance of classic public sculpture and added modern subjective references to the genré. They do it by seeing modern life for what it is and without abandoning the heroic ideal.

From Pop to Public
Oldenburg first received international attention through his association with the Pop Art movement in the late 1950s. During that time artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and others reacted to images associated with popular culture and consumer society. The movement was also a reaction against the abstract expressionism which had dominated painting in the U.S. in the 40s and 50s. Pop artists took everyday objects and transformed them with ironic and often funny consequences.
In the late 50s, Oldenburg staged "happenings" at his Ray Gun Theatre. In 1961, he opened an actual store on Second Street in New York filled with painted plaster versions of consumer objects that were attractively priced -- for as low as $199.99. Later he took hard, rigid objects like kitchen and bathroom fixtures and produced soft, collapsing versions out of cloth, vinyl, canvas and plexiglas. Critics wrote that he transformed everyday objects into metaphors of the self, creating new forms that were both ambiguous and surreal, like Dali's limp Camembert watches.
But Oldenburg was uncomfortable with the Pop label. In a 1961 exhibition catalogue, he bluntly states: "I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum." At the same time he began proposing monumental sculptures, like a mammoth teddy bear for Central Park or an ironing board for SoHo. He had a hard time finding patrons willing to build them.
Finally, in 1969, his ala mater Yale University commissioned Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, a 24-foot high lipstick tube on tank tracks.

That was followed by Giant Three-Way Plug for Oberlin College in 1970. This giant electrical plug was a hard, bronze and CorTen steel version of a soft sculpture done years earlier. And like all of his work, these gigantic sculptures began as quickly sketched ideas in one of the notebooks that Oldenburg always carries.
Oldenburg's collaboration with Coosje van Bruggen on large-scale sculptures began in 1976 with the installation of Giant Trowel at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands. An art historian and writer, van Bruggen has collaborated with Oldenburg since then. They were married several years later.
The artist known for soft sculptures had moved to mammoth sculptures built out of the hardest materials available. "Monolithic" does describe many of these works -- including Batcolumn, installed in front of Chicago's Social Security Administration Building; and Clothespin, located in Centre Square in Philadelphia. They went on to build giant pool balls, a Crusoe umbrella, a flashlight, split button, hats, a garden hose, and a stake that could be used to used to tether giant horses that pierces two floor of the Dallas Museum of Art. They have build a spoonbridge with a cherry perched on it, a monument to the last horse, binoculars that are part of a building, and a bicycle that is so buried that you only see the small parts of the wheel, peddle, seat and handlebar rising above ground.
Critics recognized that the couple projects Pop Art themes forward, transforming art known for transience into very permanent works. In the process, Oldenburg and van Bruggen have freed Pop art from gallery walls and delivered it to the masses. And there has always been a sense of playfulness in the work. The sculptures require an enormous amount of thoughtful planning, yet they often appear haphazard, as though they were "scattered" around the world by some forgetful giant.
The internationally-recognized husband and wife team have collaborated on nearly 30 large-scale sculpture projects in the U.S. and around the world. "We've tried to locate each one in a different part of the world, both climatologically and culturally," says Oldenburg.
In the last few years, the sculptures have changed again. Rather than returning to "softness," they have become visually "lighter." Oldenburg said he began to work with lighter forms in part due to "pressure from Coosje to get away from the traditional masculine mode of monolithic sculpture."
In 1994, they built an Inverted Collar and Tie in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In it, a man's stripped necktie blows in the wind almost 40 feet into the air. That same year, they completed a series of four Shuttlecocks that seem to bounce around the heavy architecture of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Torn Notebook continues the exploration of lightness.
As whimsical as their work is, the artists are serious: "We are not a joke. We are deadly serious about our art," says van Bruggen. "(Rene´) Magritte said of his painting of a pipe, 'This is not a pipe.' We say this is not a shuttlecock, it is a sculpture . . . These days people read and theorize about art, but very few are able to perceive art. That is what this is all about."

The Notebook in Lincoln
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery director George Neubert considers Torn Notebook to be one of the most personal works of Oldenburg and van Bruggen to date: "The notebook is at the root of his creative process. It reveals the innermost thinking of the artist. I don't know of a piece that better reflects their 20-year collaboration."
"Claes went from Pop Art to redefining what is public sculpture," says Neubert, a fellow sculptor who has known Oldenburg for more than 30 years. "When you look at the last half of the 20th century, Claes is one of the key and pivotal geniuses who broke through and re-defined what is an appropriate subject for a democratic society. The timing couldn't be better for us. He is internationally respected as one of the true contributors to the re-establishment of the public monument."
The sculpture garden of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery has a national reputation for its collection of works by the top contemporary sculptors. With the unveiling of "Torn Notebook," a new monumental work by internationally renowned artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, the garden has a new centerpiece.
"Because of its location, because of the content of the work, it will instantly become a signature piece for the Sheldon and the outdoor collection," said Sheldon director George Neubert. "But it also becomes a new landmark for downtown Lincoln."

An hour-long documentary on "Torn Notebook" has been produced by the Nebraska ETV Network and has aired nationally on PBS. The program looks in depth at Claes and Coosje's work, the process of designing and building the sculpture, and the symbolic meanings of the piece.