Torn Notebook -- The Unveiling

Claes Oldenburg

"The Lincoln project of course didn't begin as a notebook. It began as all of our projects do, by us coming to the place and trying to take the measure of it in our terms, and join our feelings with the feelings that we found there. And we visited museums here. We drove around and we talked to people and we recorded things and then we went back to New York and we looked at what we had recorded."

"And so the solution presented itself to make this notebook, which contained the things that we were thinking about. But really emphasize the process and emphasizes also the collaborative nature of the process, which consisted of duality of two parts that were held together with a spiral, so that no matter how much stress and tension there was the spiral held and they worked together."

"And so we devised a plan for using the handwriting of each of us -- just as we had in the Bottle of Notes. I would write my observations, which were in form of the objects. Coosje would write hers in her hand, which were the contextual things. That would alternate on the pages and also they would change directions so that when you read on forwards, the other one would read backwards."

"The spiral of course has a metaphoric significance that it is a tornado, which had been used many times in the work. We have never experienced one -- we are not looking to do that -- but it is a very vivid thing in the imagination. And that is part of the sculpture as well as the general feeling of wind and openness to nature, and the passage of nature through wind and light through the sculpture."

Photograph of Claes and Coosje at the unveiling, by Larry W. Sheffield, ©1996