Torn Notebook - People: The Artists

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Claes Oldenburg

"I am for an art, political--erotical--mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum."
--Claes Oldenburg, 1961

"The things you write down do come back and haunt you and they never go away."
-- Claes Oldenburg, 1996 response to the above comment

How do you balance the image of the writing with the Notebook?
"In making a sculpture with writing, there is a question of balancing the two so they work together and one doesn't overwhelm the other. So part of that is rendering these things in a formal way by perforating the sheets so that the writing is actually part of the sculpture and has a form that changes all the time with the light and the position, which all sculptures should do. They should totally be changeable in the round."

On color...
"The Torn Notebook, I guess is pretty severe if you think of it, it's black and white, but we want to choose just the right black and just right white so that they have a coloristic effect. And then of course there is the element of the silver, so there really is three colors involved. And it, the thing about outdoor sculpture is that a lot of the effect is supplied by nature."

"What's not true is that the art is about expanding the meaning of the object. It's about using the object as a container of feelings, emotions, and ideas and communicating it. It's really about communicating."
-- Claes Oldenburg

Public art and creating controversy...
"Public art is great when it generates controversy, because then you have a king of dialogue. And it's terrible if you just have some nondescript abstract work sneak in and just stand there. People just go by it all the time and they don't think twice. So I think it's good when you have a dialogue. And this dialogue can be about a lot of things. It can be about art. It can be about content. It can be about the right choice."

Coosje van Bruggen and The Partnership

People

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