Torn Notebook - People: Marla Prather

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Marla Prather
Associate Curator, 20th Century Art
National Gallery of Art

"Oldenburg's works are not static objects."
-- Marla Prather

On Claes Oldenburg...
"You can come upon an Oldenburg and at first you are not quite sure what it is, and that moment of mystery I think is wonderful. And then everything sort of breaks through. So very often you do encounter Oldenburg first as form. And you see this long shiny black thing with tentacles and it's lugubrious and large and looming -- then you look at it and realize it is a collapsed fan, old fashioned fan."

"His vision is always active and he is always looking and is always watching and his mind is always processing this tangible world of objects around him. "

"There is a kind of warm and sensuousness in Claes' work. There is always with Claes, this approach to the object -- whether is it a drawing or a sculpture -- to have a kind of close physical, hand wrought interaction with the object."

On the partnership...
"Making art is a very solitary kind of enterprise. And having a partner must be a very rewarding thing, especially when it is a partner like Coosje where Claes has this kind of sounding board and the ability to have this kind of dialogue with someone about an object."

On the art...
"Public art by its very nature is controversial, because a lot of people have opinions about what occupies their land. Their large scaled projects are not so much obviously about commemorating something, documenting something in a moment in history of some event, but it is more about their personal encounter with a place."

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