In the reconstructed Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s beloved Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–1988) is joined by a number of new sculptures, including Katharina Fritsch’s ultramarine blue Hahn/Cock (2013/2017). The scale of these two works—the spoon is 51 feet long, while the rooster stands at a height of 24 feet—suggests a special kinship. But as Victoria Sung finds, there’s more than size that matters to the creators of these outsized anti-monuments, including shared attention to the gender politics of public sculpture.
London’s historic Trafalgar Square may seem like an unlikely place to occasion the meeting of two of today’s most celebrated sculptors. Yet this public memorial to the 19th-century battle from which it takes its name has inspired sculptural proposals from a number of contemporary artists, among them Claes Oldenburg and Katharina Fritsch. The square’s triumphant statues of admirals, generals, and major-generals—anchored by a giant, 170-foot shaft of granite—are perhaps typical of the phallic, masculine posturing found in cities across Europe and America.
When Oldenburg traveled to London in 1966, he had already developed strong feelings toward large-scale public monuments. “Sex + power in neoclassical setting,” he once scrawled in a notebook in response to the Washington Monument and others situated along the National Mall in Washington, DC. He may have been thinking along similar lines when he visited Trafalgar Square and looked up at the stony likeness of Lord Horatio Nelson, the battle’s hero, confidently commanding the towering Corinthian shaft.
“Most of the grand sites in any city have already been taken by monuments,” Oldenburg reflected, prompting him to substitute existing monuments with imaginary ones. For London, he proposed replacing Nelson’s Column with an automobile gearshift: “Not only would the gearshift be a modern version of a column, but it’s also an appropriate monument because of the constant traffic congestion in Trafalgar Square,” he later commented, questioning the continued relevance of a centuries-old memorial in the face of such immediate concerns as daily traffic jams. Though never realized, his proposed gearshift would change direction at regular intervals, redirecting traffic, and it would “move with a jolt that makes pigeons scatter in the air.”
“The Poetry of Scale”
Scale is a wonderful way of changing things. When you’re a little kid you take your finger and bring it closer and it gets bigger, and you can’t figure out why it gets bigger because it feels like the same thing; and then you bring it over here and it gets smaller. When you ponder these things that are very simple things that everyone lives with you find it rather strange. I found scale—when you make something large—transforms it completely.
—Claes Oldenburg, opening day conversation on the occasion of the exhibition Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties at the Walker Art Center, 2013
Claes Oldenburg’s interest in large-scale, urban interventions began in the mid-1960s with his series of so-called proposals for colossal monuments. These (for the most part) fantastical proposals consist of familiar objects enlarged to proportions normally reserved for national monuments. In his notebooks, candlesticks, baseball bats, and faucets become enlarged to Brobdingnagian dimensions, planted in the middle of cityscapes and countryscapes alike.
While in London, Oldenburg began to use postcards of popular tourist destinations as the ground material for his proposals. Aided by cheaply printed matter, such as widely circulating advertisements found in magazines and newspapers, he was able to superimpose objects of different scales onto these birds-eye views of the city at a pace well-suited to his quick wit and penchant for free association.
London Knees (1968) conflates bare knees, made common by the advent of the miniskirt, with columns and other architectural supports. The feminine legs can be seen as a response to what the artist later called a “phallic obsession” inherent in London’s monuments: “I became obsessed with phallic forms (I have a general inclination to see phallic forms, but I am not wrong in seeing London as obsessed with them).”
Like his smaller-scale soft sculptures of everyday objects of consumption, the monuments seem to celebrate the present moment rather than reflect on a past historical event; they commemorate neither the public nor the heroic, but the personal and the overlooked. Oldenburg’s works seem to operate on a different timeline of history—that associated not with the collective experiences of a nation or a people, but rather with the life cycle of a consumer product. Take Oldenburg’s Colossal Eraser on Alcatraz Island (1976): the proposal consists of a typewriter eraser—an object the computer has since made obsolete—with its rubber wheel partially submerged in San Francisco Bay. The imagined function of the eraser suggests a desire to erase, rather than uphold, the history of this offshore federal penitentiary.
Starting in 1976, Oldenburg began to collaborate with his partner Coosje van Bruggen on what they called large-scale projects—site-specific sculptures that helped realize the earlier lyrical proposals in different urban and rural settings. The late Walker director emeritus Martin Friedman commissioned the duo to create a fountain for the 1988 opening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and after several site visits they presented Spoonbridge and Cherry. Oldenburg and van Bruggen took to the passive form of a resting spoon, placing the familiar tabletop instrument on the ground, sans base, and suggesting a function (a spoon bridge) that is imaginative if not real. The sculpture is completed, literally, by the cherry on top—van Bruggen’s contribution—with a gentle sprinkling of water spraying from the tip of its delicately curved stem.
Their commission defies the conventions generally associated with monuments: instead of verticality, they offered horizontality; instead of solidity and mass, they offered the slender curve of a spoon, which, with arched back, looks ready to spring into action (one can easily imagine jumping onto the base of the spoon such that the cherry, perched precariously on its tip, is catapulted into the air). Finally, the fleshy cherry and the metallic spoon seem to reference two common components of commemorative war statues—the body and the artillery with which it is generally armed, though in characteristic Oldenburgian fashion, it becomes unclear who is wielding what or what is wielding whom.
Can Spoonbridge and Cherry be viewed as a monument to Minneapolis? The resulting sculpture has many associations with its immediate surroundings: Oldenburg and van Bruggen liked that the raised bowl of the spoon suggested the bow of a Viking ship, a nod to Minnesota’s Nordic roots, and they had the spoon fabricated at an industrial boat-making factory. Considering the long winter months, they saw the silver color and edges of the spoon as suggestive of the sharpened blades of ice skates, and of course, when topped with snow, “the cherry turns into a mouthful of ice cream sundae.”
This thoughtful site-specificity equipped the duo to gamely respond to a question from a curious young visitor at the sculpture’s 1988 unveiling: “Why not a fork?” With their ready wit, they remarked, “Because we’re dealing with a lake, and a lake is like a soup bowl; you wouldn’t eat soup with a fork.” Seen in this light, Spoonbridge and Cherry transforms Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, into a vast tabletop set with many soup bowls.
Thirty years after the unveiling of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s commission for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn/Cock stands more than 20 feet tall at the north end of the Garden. The German sculptor has cited Oldenburg as an important early artistic influence; in fact, she lived in the city of Münster, where in 1977 Oldenburg and van Bruggen were commissioned to create three Pool Balls on the occasion of the outdoor sculpture festival Skulptur Projekte Münster. “I was a young student there, and I made watercolors of them,” Fritsch recalls. “Oldenburg thought a lot about form. He also added colors. He worked with things that existed—he blew them up. That is also how I proceed. It is really about sculpting.”
Like Oldenburg, Fritsch takes everyday, familiar objects and renders them strange through slight alterations in material, scale, and especially color. The enlarged rooster has taken on a shockingly bright blue hue, as if its feathers have been submerged in a can of paint. The matte application of pigment renders the sculpture almost flat when seen in profile: “[Color] evens it out, makes it abstract—like a visual sign, an icon,” Fritsch has said, pointing to her interest in creating three-dimensional sculptures that look like two-dimensional images.
Standing atop a trapezoidal base designed specifically for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Hahn/Cock will command even more space than in previous presentations—the imposing structure draws our attention upward much in the same way as a pulpit, or a niche that houses statues of saints might in cathedrals or other religious architectures. Furthermore, the sharp-edged, geometric shape flattens the roundedness of the sculpture, rendering it pictorial against the downtown Minneapolis skyline.
In the Twin Cities, Fritsch’s Hahn/Cock takes on a new meaning. Perhaps an association with Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, that fabled pair from American folklore with origins in Minnesota’s northwoods. Or perhaps a nod to the farmlands of the Midwest, with the rooster that crows in the morning and adorns the tops of weather vanes. Like Spoongbridge and Cherry that came before it, we welcome the many associations Hahn/Cock is bound to inspire.
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)