All of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s public sculptures are linked to messages of various sorts; however, in this text, it is their dialogue with urbanism and architecture that we seek to summarize, drawing on our book about their artistic work.¹

In 1981, with the work Flashlight installed on the University of Las Vegas campus, Oldenburg and van Bruggen applied some of the points expounded in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas. Like Venturi and Scott Brown, Oldenburg and van Bruggen defended the idea of a new popular symbolic art. For Venturi and Scott Brown, Las Vegas provided stimulating examples of a symbolic architecture in opposition to the formalism of the modernists. Likewise, Oldenburg and van Bruggen created a symbolic sculpture tied to social and artistic messages that took a stance against the artistic formalism defended by Clement Greenberg’s disciples. They share Venturi and Scott Brown’s critique of modernism, notably represented by Mies van der Rohe, faulting it for being confined to a sparse and unacknowledged symbolism that glorifies technology and the industrial world. Further targets of Venturi and Scott Brown’s objections are the heroic and anachronistic bombast of the modernists, their taste for the monumental, notably expressed in skyscrapers, their elitism and their authoritarian urban theories tied to the ideology of the tabula rasa; a critique with which Oldenburg and van Bruggen also agree. Venturi and Scott Brown attempted to invent a new functional and symbolic architecture in drawing from the ideas of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg’s pop art. For instance, Venturi and Scott Brown observe that one can use ordinary elements in architecture that become singular through a simple change in scale, a technique that pop artists such as Oldenburg and Lichtenstein adroitly applied.

Nevertheless, with Flashlight Oldenburg and van Bruggen clearly indicated their departure from Venturi and Scott Brown’s postmodernism. The black Flashlight, which is the beacon of two cultural buildings on the campus, is placed upside down and lights the ground faintly, thus countering the flash and glare of the Las Vegas lights. Flashlight relativizes the importance of Venturi and Scott Brown’s Learning From Las Vegas. The sculpture denounces the mediocrity of Las Vegas’ kitsch architecture and is set apart from the dubious art of signboards. It opposes Venturi and Scott Brown’s praise of the ugly and ordinary in architecture. Oldenburg and van Bruggen, of course, erected ordinary objects in public space, but this is to reveal the contemporary grotesque that spreads a generalized insignificance and leaves no place for the sublime.

The ordinary becomes critical with the artist duo and the sculptures go beyond a mere negative diagnostic of contemporary society. The everyday and utilitarian object, which is rendered in a large-scale in their sculptures, acquires a semantic richness, its form transforming the object’s ordinariness. Likewise, Oldenburg and van Bruggen reject Venturi and Scott Brown’s position regarding the rehabilitation of the conventional and familiar in architecture. Creating large-scale objects sometimes involves rendering them in a staggering and wonderful manner, as Oldenburg and van Bruggen did with sculpture, such as Bottle of Notes (1993).²

The surrealist transfiguration of the everyday is something the artist duo has not forgotten. In defending the conventional in architecture, Venturi and Scott Brown inaugurated the most conservative form of architectural postmodernism, one that breaks with experimentation and creation to meet the populist expectations of a conformist public. Venturi and Scott Brown rightly observed that the leisure society that followed in the wake of industrial society had rendered obsolete the modernists’ puritan valorizing of work and industry. But their complacency in regard to Las Vegas leisure is not something that Oldenburg and van Bruggen adhere to. In a 1975 drawing, the pop artist ironically associated his Chicago Batcolumn with the Las Vegas style. The Batcolumn is in fact linked to gambling and entertainment, but as a large-scale bat, it also signals that leisure can be deadly and dangerous.

In 1976, Pool Balls, the concrete sculpture displayed in Münster (Germany), similarly associates gambling with violence.³ This work consists of large-scale pool balls, which can also be viewed as cannonballs. Oldenburg here partakes in the caustic critique of the leisure society that Wolf Vostell put forth with his works in concrete. Flashlight, which is guided by Adorno’s “ideal black,” is not in keeping with the consensus of taste that was put forward in Venturi and Scott Brown’s original and influential book on the gambling capital. In 1982, an Oldenburg and van Bruggen sculpture  was erected in Krefeld close to the Esters House designed by Mies van der Rohe. It is a self-portrait of van Bruggen in a semi-abstract form that was conceived of in part as an objection to Mies’ thought. One can detect the duo’s interest in Robert Venturi’s book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which defends the idea of a paradoxical and meaning-filled art against the semantic silence of Mies’ modernism.

With the Cleveland Free Stamp sculpture (1983-1991), the artists pursued their critique of skyscrapers. At first, Free Stamp was intended to be a sculpture adorning the neo Art Deco of the Standard Oil skyscraper in the city’s downtown. The work was specifically designed for this site. But in the end, the sponsors refused it, sensing, among other things, the artists’ opposition to the Rockefeller Trust. Free Stamp comprises a satire on the American restoration of downtown city centres, which are dominated by the architectural emblems of capitalist bureaucracy. The postmodernist architecture of skyscrapers has added few new elements; its avowed symbolism turns out to be as poor as the unavowed symbolism of the modernists. Free Stamp indicates that neutrality and conformism have gained the upper hand in restored, administered and monitored downtowns. The sculpture, which displays the word “free,” signals that freedom is no longer on the program of contemporary urbanism and that the creative freedom of public sculpture is threatened by its sponsors. As is often the case in Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s sculpture the work can be seen in several ways. The Free Stamp can be viewed as a mushroom: a large-scale fungus that threatens the architectural site, or as a fitting reminder of nature within Cleveland’s urban grid, all the while lying on its side in front of a skyscraper that blindly sings the praises of rationalism.

But the Free Stamp is also an electric light bulb that parodies the electric extravaganza of skyscrapers and their pseudo rationality. This calls for a comparison between the duo’s analysis of skyscrapers and Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’ diagnostic of Manhattan. Since the 1960s, Oldenburg has taken an interest in Salvador Dalí, creating drawings of an edible and soft architecture. Dalí is also Koolhaas’s major reference in Delirious New York; in Madelon Vriesendorp’s illustrations for the Dutch architect’s book, the skyscraper’s libidinal component is clearly foregrounded, as it is in Oldenburg and Dalí’s drawings. Like Oldenburg, Koolhass points out that the functionality and rationality of the skyscraper are simulacra and that its appearance is usually off-putting, as though its scale were a challenge to any aesthetic. According to the architect’s particularly brilliant analysis, the skyscraper in fact is subject to continuous change behind its façade; its interiors are subordinated to fashion, corporate racketeering and the progress of functionalism. The skyscraper is a commodity, a consumer object, an edible and cannibalistic building that is continuously devouring itself.

Koolhass is fascinated by Manhattan’s density and its specific urban identity, being crystallized in certain luxurious skyscrapers that are more like vertical cities than buildings. In this case, Oldenburg and van Bruggen do not adhere to the architect’s fascination for an architectural and urban fantasy to be created through technical means. In following a Dalí inspired program, the Manhattan architects have fully expressed their delusions of grandeur and luxurious hedonism under the guise of the skyscraper’s rationality. The skyscraper’s puritan appearance can, according to Koolhass, hide a libidinal and delirious interior, one that is often fragmented and chaotic. According to the architect, the boundlessness of these skyscrapers is the product of a phantasmagoria that is fascinating in its own right. Guided by Dalí’s gaze, this analysis of Manhattan turns the monstrous into something seductive. On the other hand, the artist duo looks at the city through the eyes of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Federico García Lorca. It is the unimaginable brutality of the megalopolis and its towering buildings that is recounted in Journey to the End of the Night. As for Lorca, he discovered New York during the  crisis of 1929 and, in A Poet in New York, reflects on the city, depicting the mire, blood and ashes. Oldenburg and van Bruggen associate the skyscraper with the death drive. This is made manifest in a 1971 drawing that compares the skyscraper to a vertical cemetery, and in a 1968 collage that intermingles the John Hancock Center and a funerary statue in a Chicago cemetery. What finally is overshadowed in Delirious New York is the violence of the megalopolis, which Mendelssohn and Le Corbusier knew how to see and denounce.

Oldenburg and van Bruggen showed a strong interest in Frank O. Gehry’s architecture, notably by collaborating on his design of an advertising agency in Los Angeles (Chiat/Day Building, 1991). They designed the central part of the building giving it the shape of a pair of binoculars (Binoculars, 1991). They thus quote commercial California architecture, these small buildings in the shape of objects that have almost completely vanished and that Reyner Banham considered as one of the ingredients of Los Angeles’ distinctive city spirit. The artist duo formally improved this type of building, making it genuine architecture rather than a temporary structure, giving it a significance that goes far beyond the functional symbolism of commercial architecture. The binoculars, which are placed upside down, are a symbol of blindness.

It is not about celebrating the visionary talents of advertising. What is suggested is sightlessness, notably that of those concerned with Los Angeles’ urbanism. The binoculars are the triumphant and ironic door into the advertising agency’s parking lot. The architecture here is subjected to the omnipresent rule of car pollution, something that Lewis Mumford had already observed in his time when he denounced the systematic manner in which Los Angeles was being invaded by highways and parking lots. The blind binoculars evoke the difficulty of finding one’s way in a city whose cancerous sprawl leaves one without bearings, as Kevin Lynch has pointed out. Looking ironic and ludic, Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s building resembles a blockhouse without an opening to the exterior world. Claes Oldenburg’s 1960s architecture projects of a brutalist style reappear here. The building is ambivalent. This humorous construction oscillates between popular architecture, linked to pleasure, and an aggressive architecture linked to war. The hallucinatory component of the large-scale object corresponds to the Hollywood context and its illusions. In a 1960 collage, Oldenburg associated binoculars with a crotch and a building. In Los Angeles the binoculars are anthropomorphic. The body that is repressed by architecture shows through. Eros haunts the building. In paying careful attention to the elephantine aspect of Binoculars, one discovers zoomorphic architecture. Oldenburg and van Bruggen here share some of the characteristics of Gehry’s architecture. In the wake of Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, the architect designed a mimetic architecture for the Fishdance Restaurant in Kobe (1986) for example, and for the interior of the DG Bank in Berlin (2001).

In Prague, drawing inspiration from Oldenburg’s London Knees (1966), Gehry designed a building linked to Eros (Nationale-Nederlanden Building, 1996). The secret complicity between Gehry and Oldenburg and van Bruggen ultimately resides in their desire to liberate art and architecture from their subordination to rationalism. They share the same carnivalesque and celebratory inspiration. Two works are emblematic of this affinity. In 2004, Gehry created a Dionysian work, Hotel Marques de Riscal (Elciego, Spain), which is a superb example of solar deconstruction. This hotel is an echo of the duo’s public sculpture Gartenschlauch (Garden Hose) (1983) in Freiburg im Breisgau, which is a Rabelaisian homage to wine, dance, movement, unhindered play, freedom, tolerance and flexibility.⁴ Gehry’s sculptural architecture at times is inspired by the symbolic sculpture of Oldenburg and van Bruggen, which, in its way, deconstructs architecture and clears the way for new possibilities.

Translated by Bernard Schütze

Éric Valentin is a lecturer at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne (France). He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne as well as doctorate in contemporary art history, and he is qualified to supervise research in aesthetics. He is the author of two books on Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen and is currently preparing a book on Joseph Beuys titled Art, politique et mystique.