How "Torn Notebook" was
conceived, designed, & built

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

Where did the idea for creating a gigantic torn notebook come from? According to Oldenburg and van Bruggen, the idea came from a lifetime process of working and a happy accident.
For over 30 years, Claes Oldenburg has carried a notebook, usually tucked in a shirt pocket and filled with sketches and jottings. Coosje van Bruggen has also picked up the process. As the notebooks fill up, good ideas are torn out, discussed by the partners, and pasted into new notebooks. Finally the discarded notebooks are torn in half.

George Neubert, Sheldon director and longtime friend of the artists, calls Torn Notebook one of the most personal works of the artist team 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."
But despite that history, it was a happy accident that suggested the approach for Lincoln's sculpture. Early attempts to design the Sheldon commission included sketches of a popped kernel of corn and a triple decker sandwich. One day, as Oldenburg was tearing up some drawings while van Bruggen was doing the same to a failed piece of writing, the pages "all flew together on the wall on their way to the garbage can," van Bruggen said. The pages came together in a form that the couple recognized as an interesting combination of text and pages. That accidental coming together of forms became a wall hanging called, "Memos of a Gadfly," one of the precursors to "Torn Notebook."
"It's interesting to see the first attempt to create a bit of a floating sail and (sentence) fragments coming together accidentally," Oldenburg said.
"That was sort of the origin of the form of the piece. Then this was adapted by Coosje and I working together on the project. We went to the site, we took notes and we observed things. That was back in '93. Then we thought about it for awhile as we do, for several months and we tried to find a form for our observations of the site," Oldenburg said. The pages in the notebooks are literally reproductions of notes Oldenburg and Van Bruggen took during their Lincoln trip.
"My notes tend to be in the form of objects, such as roller skate, something I might want to develop into a sculpture. Her impressions tended to be more poetic phrases with associative contextual suggestions, like "desert ocean of grasses,"' Oldenburg said. "We made a selection of the ones that looked the most interesting when they were written and sort of fit together. Then we divided them, so Coosje's were on the top and mine were on the bottom and they alternated. Then they were alternating backwards and forwards. So if you look at one page, you might have mine up at the top and forwards and hers below and backwards. And if you turn the page, it's the other way around."
The construction of "Torn Notebook," like all large-scale sculptures, began with a small model "which gives us the feeling of what the big one is going to look like," Oldenburg said. The sculptors then passed that model on to an engineer who helps the artists plan the large version of the sculpture.
"Torn Notebook" was made and assembled at Tallix, an art fabricator in Beacon, New York, before being taken apart, loaded on to three semi-trailers and driven to Lincoln.
A Time Line of the Process
1986 - Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery Director George Neubert makes initial contact with Claes Oldenburg to inquire of his interest in producing a sculpture for the Sheldon. Because of too many pending projects, Oldenburg asked Neubert to contact him later.
5-26-92 - Neubert sends a follow-up letter to Oldenburg renewing the offer. For Neubert, pursuing a piece by Oldenburg and van Bruggen was a natural, if the Sheldon's sculpture garden was to meet the museum's mission of creating a definitive collection of 20th Century American art.
10-16-92 - Oldenburg makes his initial visit to Lincoln.
12-2-92 - Presentation to the Sheldon Advisory Board which authorized a study and commissioned a maquette (small version of the proposed sculpture). Even though Oldenburg and van Bruggen have placed sculptures across Europe and the United States, and just placed a piece in Tokyo, the university's powers were jittery about asking the artist to do a piece in conservative Lincoln. So, the sculptors meet with administrators, members of the local art community and business executives as they plan the work.
1-15-93 - Contract for Oldenburg and van Bruggen to develop a large-scale sculpture proposal is signed.
6-10-93 - Oldenburg and van Bruggen make their site visit to Lincoln and take the notes that literally became part of "Torn Notebook."
12-13-93 - The final maquette of "Torn Notebook" is presented to University of Nebraska-Lincoln administrators.
12-22-93 - The maquette is presented to and approved by the Sheldon Advisory Board.
6-10-94 - The maquette is publically unveiled. It would be displayed at July Jamm the next month and at Sheldon in August.
10-13-94 - National Endowment for the Arts grant application is submitted.
12-18-94 - CBS "Sunday Morning" segment on Oldenburg and van Bruggen features preliminary work on "Torn Notebook."
2-3-95 - Site drawings forwarded to Oldenburg and van Bruggen.
3-2-95 - Contract signed to produce "Torn Notebook."
1-3-96 - "Torn Notebook" is raised upright at Tallix, the Beacon, N.Y., factory where the sculpture was made.
3-21-96 - Oldenburg visits Sheldon to discuss the final placement of the sculpture.
4-12-96 - Project meeting with architects, landscape personnel and others to discuss park development and sculpture installation.
5-15-96 - Neubert visits artists in New York to determine final placement of sculpture.
6-3-96 - Approval from the university's Aesthetics Review Committee is granted.
6-10-96 - Construction begins at 12th and Q streets.
8-19-96 - Installation of "Torn Notebook" begins on the site.
8-23-96 - Installation of "Torn Notebook" completed.
8-25-96 - "Torn Notebook" is covered in preparation for the unveiling.

Although elements of the sculpture have direct Nebraska references -- the tear on the pages is an outline of the Platte River -- and the piece was specifically designed for its location, Oldenburg said it is a bit of an overstatement to call "Torn Notebook" a commentary on Lincoln.
"We don't want to go too far along that route. It's more like an intuition about the place. It has a lot to do with landscape. It has a lot to do with formal elements as well - what a place looks like, the scale of the place," Oldenburg said. "For example, Lincoln has a rather low skyline so you don't want to do a sculpture there like "Batcolumn" in Chicago which is all about vertical. You want to do something that more or less spreads the horizontal, which is what this sculpture does. Things like that are very important for making the right sculpture in the right place."
Oldenburg says all of his works are experiments in form creation: "The most important thing human beings can do is create with forms. Our last projects are similar to architecture . . . the scale has to be just right for them to function," says the artist as he rather absent-mindedly thumbs through a small, battered notebook. "But it is not only about form, but also about experiments in the imagination. The work is always derived from experience, in a certain time and place. It is a monument to a moment in time and place . . . the sculptures serve as landmarks, time markers, emblems."

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.