George Kubler, in The Shape of Time, distinguished between the trivial and formal in artistic themes, touching on the history of buttons as a trivial example, their only variants comprising size, shape, and decoration.3 Any struggle historically with difficulties in the function of buttons was generally of little duration.
Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Split Button, in front of the library on the Philadelphia campus, stands as a formal response to Kubler’s challenge, recognizing the importance of these necessary gadgets in the conduct of daily life. Kubler observed how “every innovation reduces the duration of its class,” by which I take him to mean that Split Button, like Free Stamp and other of their works, makes future permutations on buttons, hand stamps, trowels, flashlights, and so on more complicated.4
Whereas the rate of change in language is gradual because communication controls it, the symbolic language of sculpture may be freer in presenting new ways of experiencing the world, particularly as artistic development does not follow a linear or an evolutionary path. T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock observes, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” the meanness of the common spoon suggesting the shallowness and brevity of his life. As with the button, the history of the hand stamp represents a duration of minimal change, of trivial pattern, which is to say a span of little measure, because our sense of history is predicated upon change and variation. Yet events without continuity would be chaos. The universal functionality of spoon, button, or flashlight, however, redeems their histories from undue chaos.
Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s heavy-duty Las Vegas Flashlight (1981) for the University of Nevada campus set a precedent for Free Stamp at 38 feet and 74,000 pounds, and offered a variant on Batcolumn with its industrial flutings and capital-like top (fig. 11).5 Like Clothespin, it was illuminated at its base, a necessary detail to locate the black sculpture during nighttime. Situated between a theater and library, it was a modest note on a college campus to signify the seriousness of scholarship against the glaring lights of the nearby Vegas Strip. Similar illumination was considered for Free Stamp at one stage; its meaning was also explained through metaphor, similar to Spitzhacke (Pickaxe) in Kassel.
The artists linked the 1982 Spitzhacke (39 feet 9 inches), on the banks of the Fulda River in Kassel, Germany, metaphorically to the colossal eighteenth-century bronze Hercules on the hill above.6 Kassel was the home of the Brothers Grimm, and the sculptors used a mythological approach in their association with the demigod, by suggesting that Hercules, leaning on his club in a relaxed and canonical pose, had just hurled the giant ax. The motif of the handle perpendicular to the arc of its bite offered a formal purity and symmetry that was only accented by its tilt. The object in its clarity is understood at a glance, so clean as to be comprehended in its three-dimensional totality from any side. As the Batcolumn was sanctioned by antiquity, so Kassel provided a historical context for Spitzhacke.
Figure 11 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Flashlight, 1981, steel painted with polyurethane enamel, 38 ft. 6 in. × 10 ft 6 in. (11.73 × 3.2 m). University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
The sculptors’ python-like Gartenschlauch (Garden Hose) in Freiburg, Germany (fig. 12, 1983, 35 feet 5 inches × 20 inches × 410 feet), undulates sensibly and sensitively, winding and arching across a public park from its giant faucet, without intruding on the openness of the park or seriously impeding those traversing it. It is reminiscent of Jason’s dragon that “covered acres and acres” and Beowulf’s dragon “gliding in looped curves.” The sculptors chose this subject for a redesigned public park that had been the site of citizens’ weekend garden plots. The designer of the park, Klaus Humpert, created a geometric pattern as a foil to the graceful calligraphy of 410 feet of curved pipe for the hose, 20 inches in diameter.7 The design was complicated and required special engineering by a German firm that was fabricating two thousand miles of natural gas pipeline for the Russian government. The thirty sections of curved pipe terminate in a small pool with a trickle of water.
The same year, Oldenburg and van Bruggen proposed a suspension bridge for Rotterdam in the form of a pair of giant curved screws.8 The project never materialized, but the artists continued to explore it in soft versions and sculptures of varying sizes. An elegant Screwarch was finally installed in 1984 at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (fig. 13). A report in the Wall Street Journal in 1985 indicated that a screw sculpture had once been suggested for the Frank J. Lausche State Office Building in downtown Cleveland, which is now the site of David Smith’s geometric arch sculpture Last, and implied that the patron had refused it because of the unintended connotations of the word “screw.”9 The incident was indexed in a Darcy cartoon in the Plain Dealer that played off both the screw and the rubber stamp.10
Figure 12 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Gartenschlauch (Garden Hose), 1983, steel painted with polyurethane enamel, two elements in an area approximately 6,000 ft2 (357.4 m2). Faucet: 35 ft. 5 in. × 8 ft. 12 in. × 7 ft. 1 in. (10.8 × 2.7 × 2.2 m); hose: 410 ft (125 m) length × 20 in. (0.5 m) diameter. Stühlinger Park, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
Figure 13 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Screwarch, 1983, aluminum painted with polyurethane enamel, 12 ft. 8 in. × 21 ft. 6 in. × 7 ft. 10 in. (3.86 × 6.55 × 2.39 m). Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
During the germination of the Cleveland project, Spoonbridge and Cherry in Minneapolis (1988, 29 feet 6 inches) was the sculptors’ second attempt at a fountain sculpture.11 It was funded by a $500,000 gift to the Walker Art Center from Frederick R. Weisman for director Martin Friedman’s planned sculpture garden. The cherry is precariously balanced on the edge of the spoon, on the verge of sliding into the bowl. A mist issues from its stem, while water flowing at its base adds a naturalistic shine to the fruit before collecting in the bowl of the spoon. That same year, van Bruggen and Oldenburg visited Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica studio, where they examined his model of downtown Cleveland (fig. 14). The three had worked together on other projects and were engaged by Peter B. Lewis, president of Progressive Insurance, to collaborate on an office building close to the BP headquarters with a sculpture garden near city hall. The projects never materialized.
A period of prodigious activity accompanied the installation of Free Stamp with the Paris Bicyclette Ensevelie (Buried Bicycle) and Miami Dropped Bowl with Scattered Slices and Peels. It was followed by the 68-foot Mistos (Match Cover) for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics; Bottle of Notes (Middlesbrough, England, 1993); and Shuttlecocks (Kansas City, 1994). The international scope of these projects should have reassured doubters of the sculptors’ Cleveland project.
Figure 14 Frank Gehry, Coosje van Bruggen, and Claes Oldenburg in the Frank Gehry
