Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen

January 13, 2012 2:29 AM

Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen
posted by beshtya (7 comments total)

At my old job, I'd often walk past the split button.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:06 AM on January 13, 2012

I understand the impulse of an artist to hit on a fantastic idea and then want to replicate that success over and over and over again, but I can't imagine living that way. I'll take Picasso's endless curiosity over the fine tuning of a idea (Oldenburg, Lichtenstein) any day.
posted by gwint at 7:06 AM on January 13, 2012

My partner loves Claes Oldenburg. I feel like we haven't really visited a city until we've spotted one of the sculptures, sometimes by accident, increasingly on purpose.
posted by cobaltnine at 7:52 AM on January 13, 2012

I always thought Spoonbridge and Cherry would be an awesome police duo.
posted by retronic at 8:46 AM on January 13, 2012

I'll take Picasso's endless curiosity over the fine tuning of a idea (Oldenburg, Lichtenstein) any day.

Oldenburg is hardly an extreme example of the "endless fine turning of an idea" (like, say, Robert Motherwell or Josef Albers or John McCracken). I could easily find you a bunch of Oldenburgs that no one who didn't know their art history would identify as being by the same artist. Even the late works (take some iconically identifiable object and make it BIG) show a staggering formal variety (clothespins don't much resemble swiss army knives). But more to the point, I think this is just two different forms of the artistic temperament. You have your restless experimenters who continually reinvent themselves and your endless refiners, who stake out a certain space of exploration and then tinker with all the minutest variations of effect within that space. I don't think you can usefully say which approach is "better." Georgio Morandi is one of the great minimalist tinkerers, for example, but I can find as much drama in the slight rearrangement of a few objects from one work to another of Morandi's as there is between, say, a work of analytic cubism and a work of synthetic cubism by Picasso.
posted by yoink at 10:11 AM on January 13, 2012

I think I've seen only three of these large-scale works in the flesh, most recently Trowel II at PepsiCo headquarters. I say this only to plug PepsiCo's magnificent sculpture garden -- an A-list collection which is a) large, b) immaculately kept and presented, and c) free to the public. Better still, it's easily combined with a visit to the underrated collection at the Neuberger Museum across the street, and the somewhat close Storm King Art Center (car depending).

But I digress. I love this stuff, especially the giant 'FREE' stamp outside of Cleveland city hall. It gets me every time. Thanks, OP!
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:22 AM on January 13, 2012 [1 favorite]

I will go to substantial lengths to see Oldenburg pieces whenever I travel. I have a decent photo in which I'm standing in front of "Houseball" in Berlin, for example, and another of my younger son in the eye of the "Safety Pin". The single best art exhibit I have ever seen was the Oldenburg exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington, DC in 1995.
posted by wintermind at 11:57 AM on January 13, 2012 [1 favorite]