Figure 15 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum and fiber-reinforced plastic painted with polyurethane enamel. Four shuttlecocks, each 17 ft. 11 in. (5.5 m) high × 15 ft. 1 in. (4.6 m) crown diameter and 4 ft. (1.2 m) nose cone diameter, sited in different positions on the grounds of the museum. Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
Shuttlecocks was never a problem commission for the Nelson-Atkins Museum, although it did generate controversy in the local media (fig. 15).12 Its genesis took a meandering path and produced many study drawings, unlike Free Stamp, which was an idea that the artists conceived Minerva-like on first seeing the site. Shuttlecocks was the result of numerous drawings, with the draftsman playing on the name as an anthropomorphic “birdie” with phallic allusions, images of a basketball caught in a net, the shuttlecock as the mane of a reclining lion/sphinx, standing on its feathers as a teepee, or the feathers collapsed and spread out like a starfish or octopus, all reflections of the artists’ intuitive ability to perceive similarities in dissimilar elements.
Oldenburg is a superb draftsman, but Cleveland was blessed with fewer graphic speculations because the idea for the stamp occurred spontaneously when the sculptors first saw the pad that the architects had provided for a sculpture. Although its origins were less in flux than those of other sculptures by the artists, the genesis of Free Stamp was fluid and complex in other ways, the result of collaboration and repudiation (as will be discussed).
Both artists delighted in novels and poetry, and these interests were manifested in their artworks. The 35-foot Bottle of Notes for the port city of Middlesbrough is just that, a bottle made of writing (fig. 16). Free Stamp was the first large sculpture to incorporate writing with its single, powerful FREE. But Oldenburg could not bottle up his years of English literature at Yale, particularly his interest in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which expressed itself in public sculptures that made Lilliputians of their spectators. Van Bruggen completed the project with her recollection of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1833 short story “Manuscript Found in a Bottle.” Calligraphy is popping out of the bottle in Gartenschlauch (Garden Hose). Crusoe Umbrella also contains a favorite literary reference, and further writing would emerge in Torn Notebook (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1996).
Figure 16 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Bottle of Notes, 1993, steel painted with polyurethane enamel, 30 × 16 × 10 ft. (9.1 × 4.9 × 3.1 m). Central Gardens, Middlesbrough, England. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
Like the assembled Batcolumn and Crusoe Umbrella, Bottle of Notes appears perforated in its fabricated openings. It repeats the serpentine forms of Screwarch in the ascending vortex of its lettering given the shape of a bottle, with a second, swirling note inside. Middlesbrough was the birthplace of the intrepid seafarer Captain Cook. Bottle of Notes departs from the popular theme of a ship in a bottle,13 inverting that association with its tilting verticality (a cant of 17.5 degrees), and its message rejecting the conventional note of desperation sent from a deserted island. The tilt challenges the idea of monumentality and thus durability, and suggests a bottle washed up on shore. The sculpture also recalls the isolated refuge of Robinson Crusoe and the sculptors’ umbrella for Des Moines, Iowa, with its theme of a voyage into the unknown and play with scale.
The outer script quotes from Cook’s journal on his first voyage, in an entry from June 1769: “We had every advantage we could desire in observing the whole of the passage of the Planet Venus over the Sun’s disc.”14 Chosen by van Bruggen, the passage stresses the importance of sightings for navigation, as well as the idea of eclipse. The interior script contains a poem by van Bruggen from her collection of verse Memos of a Gadfly (1987): “I like to remember seagulls in full flight gliding over the ring of canals.” White lettering is used for the outside, with blue lettering for the interior note. The visitor can enter the bottle to read the note within, recalling something of the original plan for Free Stamp of a repository containing inscriptions at its base.15
Journeys are a theme of perennial interest, a fundamental topos for life. It is the focus of classical literature, the voyage essential to Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Why travel, where does it lead, and how does it end? Dante began both his Purgatorio and Paradiso as sea voyages borne by “the ship of his genius.” Because pilgrimage involves a temporal progression, it becomes a measure of human existence. The idea of uncharted water becomes a metaphor for artistic creativity, for sculptural innovation. The sculptors initiated the venerable joining of artistry with voyage in Crusoe Umbrella, and they continued the venture in Bottle of Notes. Their navigation was a search for the melding of form with appropriate content.
The sculptors completed Torn Notebook in 1996 for the University of Nebraska with notebook leafs perforated by writing. Unlike the solid, cursive writing of Bottle of Notes, the writing of Torn Notebook consists of script as negative spaces in disassembled notebook pages blowing in the wind, recalling the disparate forms of Bicyclette Ensevelie (Buried Bicycle) and Dropped Bowl with Scattered Slices and Peels. The notion of dispersion seems to contradict the idea of a notebook used to assemble thoughts and a sculpture as an integral volume. The resulting inverse tension between the writer’s normally bound musings now in monumental scale also comments on the nature of a book to exist in multiples. Here Dante’s eloquent narrative in Paradiso 33:85–87 is called to mind: “I saw gathered . . . , bound up by love into a single volume, all the leaves scattered through the universe” (C. H. Sisson translation). The artists’ conception for their project has something of Dante’s visionary experience (and of their mutual affection) bound in a sculpture.
Figure 17 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Torn Notebook, 1996, stainless steel and aluminum painted with polyurethane enamel. Three elements: notebook, 21 ft 10 in. × 23 ft × 26 ft 1 in. (6.7 × 6.4 × 8 m); page (1), 10 ft × 14 ft 1 in. × 7 ft 1 in. (3.0 × 4.3 × 2.2 m); page (2), 11 ft 8 in. × 8 ft 7 in. × 8 ft 2 in. (3.6 × 2.6 × 2.5 m). Madden Garden, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska. Photo by John Spence. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
Commissioned by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery on the university campus, the sculpture consists of a torn spiral notebook and loose sheets with writing by the artists (fig. 17).16 Oldenburg’s notes consist of objects observed for use, van Bruggen’s of lines of poetry—the texts are in reverse of one another. The inscriptions on the aluminum sheets that served as notebook pages were made with high-pressure water cutting. That metal can be cut by concentrated water flow or focused laser light is a marvel of modern technology that the sculptors pursued as conditions dictated.
Cupid’s Span (San Francisco, 2002) (fig. 18) was a return to the bow-like purity of Kassel’s Spitzhacke (Pickaxe). An arrow pins its bow to the ground, with the bow taking a boat-like shape while its string echoes the suspension cables of the nearby San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The feather of the arrow becomes a sail. Such metamorphoses are typical play in the
