NÚMERO 7 AÑO 4
ISSN: 2007-9648
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Las piezas múltiples EN LA ESCULTURA
LAS PIEZAS MÚLTIPLES EN LA ESCULTURA
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NOTA EDITORIAL
Dina Comisarenco Mirkin 9
ARTÍCULOS TEMÁTICOS
De la escultura contemporánea: algunas nociones básicas María de los Ángeles Pereira 18
La escultura cubana durante los años 1960-1970: una revisitación necesaria Mei-Ling Cabrera Pérez
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Presentación: Multiples in Sculpture Sarah Beetham y Amanda Douberley
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“An Army of Bronze Simulacra”: The Copied Soldier Monument and the American Civil War Sarah Beetham
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Claes Oldenburg’s Geometric Mouse Amanda Douberley
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Multiples in Late Modern Sculpture: Influences Within and Beyond Daniel Spoerri’s 1959 Edition MAT Leda Cempellin
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PERSPECTIVA CRÍTICA
Territorios velados: México, Esplendores de treinta siglos, el canon de la cultura oficial y su uso en la diplomacia cultural Susana Pliego Quijano 91
ENTREVISTA
Ser uno con el universo: entrevista a Ángela Gurría Dina Comisarenco Mirkin 96
DOCUMENTOS
Herencia (2002-2014), instalación móvil y viva Máximo González e Iván Buenader
100 De mármol Damián Comas RESEÑAS
105 Diccionario de escultores mexicanos del siglo xx de Lily Kassner Miriam Kaiser 108 Untangling the Web: Gego’s Reticulárea-An Anthology of Critical Response, de María Elena Huizi y Ester Crespin editado por Mari Carmen Ramírez y Melina Kervandjian Dina Comisarenco Mirkin
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nARTÍCULOS ierika
ATEMÁTICOS R T Í C U LO S T E MÁT I CO S
Claes Oldenburg’s Geometric Mouse Amanda Douberley Instructor, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism School of the Art Institute of Chicago
[email protected]
NIERIKA. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS DE ARTE, Año 4, Núm. 7, enero-junio 2015 / ISSN: 2007-9648
Fig. 1. Claes Oldenburg, Geometric Mouse, Scale X – Red, 1971. Painted steel, 18 feet high. Collection Houston Public Library, Tex., City of Houston, Texas. © 1971 Claes Oldenburg (Photo by the author).
Research for this essay was supported by a Vivian L. Smith Foundation Fellowship at The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas. I thank Michelle White, Toby Kamps, and Geraldine Aramanda for facilitating my research, and Fredericka Hunter for discussing her role in bringing Geometric Mouse to Houston. I thank also two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this essay. Finally, a very special thanks to Claes Oldenburg.
Abstract Claes Oldenburg is widely known for his large-scale, site-specific sculptures, initiated by Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks in 1969. Created during the same year, Geometric Mouse falls out of the narrative trajectory initiated by this significant work. Nevertheless, it is arguably the most selfreflexive of Oldenburg’s early public art projects, and unique within the artist’s oeuvre for its combination of a small-scale multiple with a large-scale sculpture. Through Oldenburg’s exploration of mass production, industrial fabrication, and branding, Geometric Mouse reveals the stakes of making public sculpture not only at a crucial moment in the artist’s career, but also at a decisive turning point in the history of public art in the United States. Key Words: Claes Oldenburg, Geometric Mouse, public art, branding, industrial fabrication Resumen Claes Oldenburg es un artista muy reconocido por sus esculturas monumentales y sitio específicas, comenzando por Labial (Ascendente) sobre huellas de orugas de 1969. Creada durante el mismo año, Ratón geométrico, no entra en la misma trayectoria narrative iniciada por esta significativa obra. Se trata sin embargo, de una de las obras más auto reflexivas dentro de los primeros proyectos artísticos públicos de Oldenburg, y constituye una obra única del artista por su combinación de multiples de pequeña escala con una escultura monumental. A través de la exploración de la producción masiva, la fabricación industrial y la marca, Ratón geométrico de Oldenburg revela los riesgos de realizer escultura pública no solo en un momento crucial de la carrera del artista, sino además, durante un momento decisive de la historia del arte público en los Estados Unidos. Palabras clave: Claes Oldenburg, Geometric Mouse, art público, marca, fabricación industrial
laes Oldenburg’s Geometric Mouse, Scale X – Red (1971) stands outside the public
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library in Houston’s Civic Center (Fig. 1). It is made up of a square with two rec-
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tangular windows punched out for eyes, and two circles that are the mouse’s
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ears, with a more organic appendage that Oldenburg identified as “the nose.” Two small circular “tear drops” attached to the end of chains trail out of the eyes. One corner of the square head and the edge of the nose are bent, so the sculpture appears to sink into the pavement upon which it stands. Scale X is quite large, with an “ear” diameter of 9’. It does not tower over the observer and can be approached from all sides. Today, the bright red sculpture greets visitors driving into downtown Houston from I-45, its geometric simplicity complementing the strong lines of the building behind it. In November 1975, when Oldenburg and the fabricator Donald Lippincott, with the help of a team of workers, first erected the sculpture, they sited it on the other side of the building, close to the library’s main entrance. The sculpture stood in the plaza between architects S.I. Morris and Eugene Aubry’s new library, a six-story octagonal building faced in granite, with window walls that appeared to open the interior of the library to the city outside, and the Spanish Renaissance style building it replaced, which would become an archive and study center. Geometric Mouse helped to identify the new library building and became a landmark within the civic center, guiding pedestrians to the library plaza, which the architects hoped would become a place of public gathering.1 About 3 ½ hours drive north of Houston on I-45, there is another Geometric Mouse. This exemplar stands outside the Meadows Museum of Art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. When Houston City Council and the city’s art commission were considering the purchase of Scale X, its detractors presented the Meadows Museum Mouse – which had arrived at SMU in 1970 – as one reason not to proceed; after all, there was already a Geometric Mouse in Texas. Yet the two sculptures are not quite the same. The Geometric Mouse at the Meadows Museum is smaller than Scale X, with an “ear” diameter of 6’, and is painted black. While Scale X is unique, the Meadows Museum Mouse is one of six sculptures that make up the Geometric Mouse edition at this size, called Scale A.2 Taken all together, there are in fact hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Oldenburg’s Geometric Mouse. He represented them in Scales of the Geometric Mouse (1971), a drawing that shows Scale X on top of a pyramid of mice at different scales: the six exemplars of Scale A; then Scale B, a red aluminum sculpture produced in an edition of 18; and at the bottom Scale C, a black aluminum multiple produced in an edition of 120. Not pictured is Scale D, the “Home-made” Mouse, a white cardboard multiple produced in an unlimited edition. With a 6” diameter ear, it is a reproduction of the prototype for Scale C. Geometric Mouse is an exercise in scale, both in terms of its physical size (the progression from an object that might fit in one hand to a large-scale sculpture) and number (as the Mouse decreases in physical size, its edition becomes larger). Oldenburg summarizes: “the ubiquity and reproductive capacity of mice made them a perfect symbol of multiplicity.”3 Oldenburg is widely known for his large-scale, site-specific sculptures, which have been commissioned by communities around the world, and beginning in 1977 they were made in collaboration with Coosje van Bruggen, the artist’s wife. Typically these projects combine some aspect of the site’s history or culture with Oldenburg’s quite personal and often idiosyncratic responses to the area. Paint Torch (2011), commissioned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (PAFA), is Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s most recent large-scale project. The fiberglass and aluminum sculpture combines a blue paintbrush with an orange torch that is set on a 60 degree diagonal and stands more than 50’ above the
1 Geometric Mouse, Scale X – Red was first conserved in 1992 and relocated to its current site following conservation treatment in 1999. Originally, the sculpture was painted reddish-orange. It was subsequently painted OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) red at the request of the artist. 2 All six had entered public collections by 1975: 1/6 Empire State Plaza, Albany, NY; 2/6 Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX; 3/6 Private collection, then in 1975 purchased by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; 4/6 Moderna Museet, Stockholm; 5/6 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; 6/6 Museum of Modern Art, New York. Three exemplars are painted black. The Moderna Museet Mouse is blue, and in a nod to Sweeden, the MoMA Mouse is white. The Walker Mouse is yellow. 3 Oldenburg, Claes. “Geometric Mouse, Scale C; Geometric Mouse, Scale D ‘Home-Made’,” in Claes Oldenburg: Multiples in Retrospect, 1964-1990, New York, Rizzoli, 1991, p. 108.
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ground. An orange “glob” on the sidewalk directly below the brush suggests paint; both the
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tip of the paintbrush, which Oldenburg calls the “blip,” and the “glob” on the ground are illumi-
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nated at night. The sculpture fulfilled the brief of PAFA director David Brigham for a work that would stand between the museum and the school, in a redesigned plaza “that would lead people in the direction of the city’s ‘Museum Mile’.” Oldenburg writes, “The Academy School was known for teaching traditional methods and had not given up the brush, which also suited a Museum that honors the art of American painting in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.” Oldenburg further associates Paint Torch with the Torch of Liberty, “a popular
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Oldenburg, Claes. “Paint Torch,” http:// oldenburgvanbruggen. com/largescaleprojects/ painttorch.htm (accessed 17 August 2014). The artist’s website features a complete chronology and case histories of the large-scale projects. See also Claes Oldenburg: Large-Scale Projects, 1977-1980, New York, Rizzoli, 1980, and Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen: Large-Scale Projects, New York, Monacelli Press, 1994. 5 For plop art and a definition of sitespecificity, see Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2002, especially chapter 3, “Sitings of Public Art: Integration Versus Intervention.” 6 The sculpture is featured in just one stand-alone article. See Patton, Phil. “Oldenburg’s Mouse,” Artforum 14, March 1976, pp. 51-53. Benjamin Buchloh discusses the Mouse theme, but not the sculpture, in his excellent essay on Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum. See Buchloh, Benjamin. “Annihilate/Illuminate: Claes Oldenburg’s Ray Gun and Mouse Museum,” in Achim Hochdörfer with Barbara Schröder (eds.), Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties, New York, DelMonico Books/Prestel; Wien, Mumok, 2012, pp. 214-77.
symbol in a city proud of its part in the American Revolution.”4 While Geometric Mouse, Scale X - Red seems appropriate to the Houston Public Library, the sculpture has a fundamentally different relationship with its site when compared with a work like Paint Torch. Geometric Mouse was not made for any particular place; its scale and symbolism were not dictated by the constraints of a specific site but operate instead according to the logic of multiplication. Indeed, with its sitelessness, abstracted geometric forms, and fabrication in painted steel, Geometric Mouse is arguably the one sculpture by Oldenburg that comes closest to the ubiquitous “plop” art that populates cities across the United States.5 Although Geometric Mouse is Oldenburg’s most ubiquitous sculpture, it is also the least discussed.6 At the same time, Geometric Mouse is unique within the artist’s oeuvre for its combination of a small-scale multiple with a large-scale sculpture. Oldenburg had the first Geometric Mouse fabricated in 1969, a pivotal year in his career, when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York celebrated his achievements with a retrospective exhibition and he realized Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969), the first of his large-scale projects.7 If Geometric Mouse falls out of the narrative trajectory initiated by this crucial work, in what follows I contend that it is the most self-reflexive of Oldenburg’s early public art projects. In making Geometric Mouse in a range of materials –from steel to cardboard– and varied edition sizes –from a unique large-scale version to a small-scale multiple produced in an unlimited edition– Oldenburg probed what it means for a sculpture to be public, combining the democratic spirit of the multiple with the supposed openness and accessibility of public art. Through Oldenburg’s exploration of mass production, industrial fabrication, and branding, it reveals the stakes of making public sculpture not only at a crucial moment in the artist’s career, but also at a decisive turning point in the history of public art in the United States. Lippincott Inc. fabricated the first Geometric Mouse–Scale A for inclusion in Oldenburg’s retrospective exhibition at the MoMA, which opened in September 1969. The sculpture’s simple design allowed Geometric Mouse to be fabricated in steel and sited outdoors, yet the mouse subject had occupied the artist for quite some time. He first used it in studies for a poster for his 1963 solo exhibition at Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles, drawing explicitly on Disney’s cartoon character, Mickey Mouse. Next he combined the head of a mouse with the profile of a movie camera in masks worn by performers in Moveyhouse in 1965. The following 7
In contrast with the “large-scale projects” Oldenburg developed for specific sites, his “sited works,” which include Geometric Mouse, function less like traditional monuments and more like objects that might be displayed in a gallery or museum. For the two categories and related works, see Platzker, David. “Selected Exhibition History, with Large-Scale Projects and Sited Works,” in Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1995, pp. 53659. Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks was erected in Beinecke Plaza at Yale University in May 1969. Commissioned by a group of students and faculty, the sculpture of a lipstick mounted vertically on a tank chassis was presented to Yale as a gift and installed between a World War I memorial and the president’s office, without university approval. Oldenburg envisioned the Yale Lipstick as a podium, with a tip that would inflate to announce new speakers. Following its installation, Lipstick was vandalized almost immediately, and then permitted to deteriorate. The sculpture remained in the plaza for ten months, until Oldenburg had it removed. He had Lipstick remade for permanent installation at Yale’s Morse College in 1974. For more on Lipstick at Yale, see Williams, Tom. “Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969,” Grey Room 31, Spring 2008, pp. 116-144. See also Smith, Katherine. “The Public Positions of Claes Oldenburg’s Objects in the 1960s,” Public Art Dialogue 1, March 2011, pp. 25-52.
year, the mask became the basis of Oldenburg’s plan for “a museum building in the shape of
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a ‘Geometric Mouse’.”8 It also appeared on the letterhead Oldenburg printed for correspon-
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dence related to his 1966 solo exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and then served as a logo for the MoMA retrospective. Banners hung outside the museum announcing the exhibition; they were the soft counterparts to the hard Geometric Mouse sculpture exhibited in the MoMA sculpture garden. The fabrication of Geometric Mouse coincided with Oldenburg’s residency at Walter Elias Disney (WED) Enterprises as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art and Technology program. Two months before Oldenburg’s retrospective opened at MoMA, Disney pulled out of the agreement to realize one of the artist’s proposals, as I will discuss below. The Mouse proliferated through announcements for the traveling exhibition and circulated with the movement of both printed graphic images and works of art. Its geometric simplicity made the Mouse legible as a logo and easy to fabricate in steel. Eventually, Oldenburg formulated the Mouse as an exercise in scale, creating the sculpture in five different sizes defined by the diameter of the ear, from 6” up to 9’. Between 1969 and 1971, the first three versions of Geometric Mouse - Scale A were fabricated, each acting as an advertisement for the next. In 1971, Oldenburg introduced the possibility of individual ownership of the Mouse with the production of Scale D and Scale C, realized at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. Lippincott Inc. also produced Scale B and Scale X, the largest Mouse.9 Oldenburg claims, “The group may be considered one piece in which many people own shares,”10 thus similar to corporate stock, but the meaning of the Mouse also changes at each scale, and through the adventures of each individual member of the Mouse family.11 Scale became a key issue in 1960s sculpture, as critics reflected on early commissions for public sculpture and artists sought to win new commissions by increasing the size of their work. In “Blowup—The Problem of Scale in Sculpture,” the critic Barbara Rose faults a number of large-scale works for being “merely enlargements (often gigantic blowups) of forms conceived on a table-top scale.” These blowups “strike one as merely inflated,” whereas successful examples “justify their scale.” Rose’s prime case in point is Pablo Picasso; she calls the works by this artist executed for sites across the United States “aggrandized versions” of “modest works.”12 Rose blames photography for the transformation of “the intimate livingroom art of early modern sculpture into… outdoor monuments,” because photographs distort the scale of these objects.13 One simply cannot blow up a small-scale maquette into a monumental sculpture in the same way one enlarges a photograph. Rose’s imaginary viewer is a prospective patron, envisioning a table-top model blown up to a large size. According to Rose, the increasing scale of contemporary sculpture is due, in a way, to the “demand on the part of American institutions as diverse as banks, churches, museums, schools, airports and municipalities for impressive, monumental objects to decorate their premises and enhance their images.”14 Though such patrons provide artists with new opportunities to execute their proposed large-scale sculptures, Rose faults these same patrons for the poor quality of many commissions: “the leading purchasers of monumental sculpture… cannot make any significant discrimination of value because they are unable to separate the impact of scale from that of quality.” Sheer size “gives even inferior work an imposing presence,” impressing “the less-knowing patrons of the new sculpture.”15 What is more, patrons are “willing to substitute the status of the master’s name for the creation of a masterpiece.”16 The result is colossal Picassos dropped into city plazas and parks. To further illustrate her point, Rose asks the reader to imagine “the nightmarish vision of a fifty-foot Degas bronze dancer.”17
Oldenburg, Maartje, “Chronology,” in The Sixties, p. 292. 9 In 2013, Oldenburg and Gemini published Geometric Mouse, Scale E, “Desktop,” a painted aluminum sculpture mounted on a signed and numbered aluminum base, in an edition of 50. 10 Oldenburg, Claes. “Geometric Mouse,” in Barbara Haskell, Object into Monument, Pasadena, Calif., Pasadena Art Museum, 1971, p. 110. 11 The establishments of both Gemini G.E.L. and Lippincott Inc. (originally called Lippincott Environmental Arts) in 1966 were crucial to Oldenburg’s realization of Geometric Mouse. Both firms regularly partnered with the artist in subsequent decades. For Gemini, see Fine, Ruth. Gemini G.E.L.: Art and Collaboration, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; New York, Abbeville Press, 1984. For Lippincott Inc. see Davies, Hugh Marlais, Artist & Fabricator, Amherst, Fine Arts Center Gallery, Univ. of Massachusetts, 1975, and the collection of photographs from Lippincott Inc.’s archive, Lippincott, Jonathan D., Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. The best source on Oldenburg’s early work with Lippincott Inc. is Oldenburg: Six Themes, Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 1975. 12 Rose, Barbara, “BlowupThe Problem of Scale in Sculpture,” Art in America 56 (July-August 1968), p. 82. Picasso’s Untitled sculpture for the Chicago Civic Center was dedicated in August 1967. His Bust of Sylvette was installed the following year at New York University’s University Village in Manhattan. 13 Ibid. p. 83. 14 Ibid. pp. 83, 86. 15 Ibid. p. 86. 16 Ibid. p. 87. 17 Ibid. p. 83. 8
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Fig. 2. Alexander Calder, La Grande Vitesse, 196769. Painted steel, 43 feet high. City of Grand Rapids, Michigan (Photo by the author).
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Calder made his first truly monumental stabile, Teodelapio (1962), for the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. At 59’, its central arch is tall enough for a car to drive underneath. Later that year, Calder began his collaboration with the French ironworks, Etablissements Biémont, which became his primary fabricator. The firm allowed him to produce large-scale sculptures on speculation that were exhibited and sold by his dealers in France and the United States, including works such as Le Guichet (1963) at Lincoln Center in New York. Calder also received many commissions during the second half of the 1960s for sculptures designed for specific sites, including La Grande Voile (1966, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge); Crossed Blades (1967, Australia Square Tower, Sydney); Man (1967, Expo ’67, Montreal); El Sol Rojo (1968, Summer Olympics ‘68, Mexico City); Les Trois Pics (1968, Winter Olympics ‘68, Grenoble); The Gwenfritz (1969, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.); and La Grande Vitesse. In general, the commissioned stabiles are much larger than those Calder had fabricated on speculation, but both share the same formal vocabulary that is conditioned by their industrial production. I discuss the development of Calder’s monumental stabiles in Douberley, Amanda Ann. “The Corporate Model: Sculpture, Architecture, and the American City: 1946-75.” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Texas at Austin, 2015.
Opportunities to commission public sculpture had undergone a marked increase the year before Rose published her article, when the National Council on the Arts (NCA) announced a matching grant of forty-five thousand dollars for Grand Rapids, Michigan, to initiate its “Sculpture Project,” eventually renamed the “Art in Public Places” program. Two years later, the city celebrated the installation of La Grande Vitesse (1969), a 43’ tall, bright red steel stabile by Alexander Calder (Fig. 2). The Sculpture Project was established to insert significant works of art into major civic spaces. These sculptures were meant to add an expressive element to the urban environment and serve as focal points for city life, similar to most traditional public monuments. Yet in a departure from this tradition, the NCA explicitly forbade the use of the grant for commemorative sculpture of any sort. Rather than a sculptural monument that spoke about the past, the NCA wanted to introduce monumental sculpture by the best contemporary artists into the urban environment. The Grand Rapids Calder fulfilled these goals, bringing a significant new work by the country’s foremost living sculptor to an American city. The Sculpture Project had great potential, but as critics like Rose understood, the margin for error was huge. Procedures for selecting artists as well as artworks needed to be tested, and many of the NCA’s policies were in fact established on a trial-and-error basis. What is more, with few opportunities for commissions, the number of artists with experience designing and fabricating works at a scale large enough and in materials suitable for permanent installation outdoors was quite small. Calder had streamlined the process of designing, fabricating, and installing monumental stabiles like La Grande Vitesse over the previous decade, to the point that such industrially produced sculptures became a veritable industry in their own right, yet he was the exception rather than the rule.18 For patrons like the NCA, this meant choosing conservatively, at least at first. But for artists like Oldenburg, the late 1960s was a time of experimentation, when the possibilities for large-scale sculpture seemed quite open. Oldenburg had turned his attention to large-scale sculpture in 1965, when he made his first proposals for Colossal Monuments. In these drawings and collages, Oldenburg inserted everyday objects into the urban environment so that they often appeared colossal.19 19
See Claes Oldenburg, Proposals for Monuments and Buildings, 1965-69, Chicago, Big Table Publishing Co., 1969.
He described the process of proposing monuments as “composing with a city,” and often
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envisioned monuments for specific locations.20 Barbara Haskell writes, “[The Colossal Mo-
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nument drawings] function as a concentrated symbol, defining places by condensing their meaning into objects which may refer to the physical nature of the places… the emotions and history of the places, the inhabitant’s social habits and styles.”21 In 1960 Oldenburg began clipping advertising images from newspapers and magazines, which he pasted onto sheets of 8 ½ x 11” paper. Sometimes these sheets feature a single image; others include several images in combination. The images are the stuff of Oldenburg’s art –food, clothing, cigarettes, household appliances, furniture, and other consumer products– and the clippings gave Oldenburg a ready store of material to draw upon in his work. When the artist embarked on a period of intensive travel during the early 1960s, the practice of perusing local newspapers and magazines also became a way for Oldenburg to familiarize himself with a new environment.22 The clippings contributed to the abrupt changes of scale seen in his Colossal Monument drawings and “studies for these often took shape in the clippings, as drawings or collage elements superimposed onto a photographic image of a potential site.”23 For example, in his notebooks, Oldenburg glued found images of a gearstick and a rear view mirror onto postcards of Trafalgar Square, with each clipping proposed as a replacement for Nelson’s Column. One source for his iconic Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks is a notebook page showing tubes of lipstick as a replacement for the Fountain of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, London. “At the time, it seemed only natural to envision such an alternative,” he writes, “since fashion magazines were full of dynamic advertisements for lipstick, emphasizing the phallic nature of the subject.”24 It was one thing for Oldenburg to imagine his Colossal Monuments through collages and drawings; it would be quite another to realize one of these proposals in three dimensions. In a way, he arrived at his large-scale works by first focusing on small-scale objects and expressed his growing fascination with industrial technology and fabrication through the production of multiples. Multiples are small sculptures produced in relatively large editions that became popular among artists during the mid-1960s.25 As Maria Gough has observed, this was the culmination of a “dream of the democratization of the work of fine art through its potentially infinite mass-reproduction and dissemination, and thereby contestation of its traditional status as a unique object.”26 Indeed, Oldenburg’s first commercial editions, the painted cast resin Baked Potato (1966) and the Plexiglas relief Tea Bag (1966), appeared in portfolios along with works by other artists.27 Yet for Oldenburg, multiples were primarily an outlet for experimentation with unfamiliar materials and processes. The best example of this is Profile Airflow (1969), a project that Oldenburg has characterized as paralleling “the American inventor’s adventure.”28 The Chrysler Airflow was the first streamlined car and a subject of Oldenburg’s work during the mid-1960s. For the multiple, his second edition with Gemini G.E.L., Oldenburg envisioned a relief suspended over an image.29 To meet the artist’s specifications for a transparent relief “of a consistency like flesh,” Ken Tyler of Gemini sought collaborators in California industry, eventually working with a manufacturer of polyurethane.30 During this “technological period,” Oldenburg says, “I thought of myself more or less as being a person without any basic skills, only a thinker, so that all of the skills lay outside of me in a 28
Oldenburg, Claes. Interviewed by John Loring, “Oldenburg On Multiples,” Arts Magazine 48, May 1974, p. 44. Oldenburg’s first project with Gemini was Notes, a portfolio of lithographs published in 1968. 30 When the first group of reliefs began to discolor, they were returned and remade in a manner Oldenburg compares to an automobile recall. A successful lawsuit was brought against the supplier of chemical ingredients. According to Oldenburg, “it was an acting out or re-enactment of non-art activity that fascinated me, to make-believe that I was really creating a new car or something like that.” See “Oldenburg on Multiples,” p. 44. 29
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Oldenburg, Claes. “Ball Cock (for Thames),” in Haskell, Object into Monument, p. 34. 21 “Claes Oldenburg,” in Haskell, Object into Monument, p. 10. 22 Oldenburg published a selection of his notebook pages as Notes in Hand, London, Petersburg Press, 1971. For Oldenburg’s clippings, see Temkin, Ann. “Claes Oldenburg’s Clippings: An Introductory Tour,” in The Sixties, pp. 130-55. 23 Temkin, “Oldenburg’s Clippings,” p. 142. 24 Oldenburg, Claes. “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,” in Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen: Large-Scale Projects, p. 210. 25 Stimulated by George Maciunas’ Fluxus editions, the popularity of multiples spread with the establishment of firms that produced them, such as Multiples Inc. Thomas Lawson cites the experience of operating The Store (196162) as foundational for Oldenburg’s multiples. See Lawson, “Candies and Other Comforts: An Erotics of Care,” in Multiples in Retrospect, pp. 11-17. 26 Gough, Maria. “The Art of Production,” in Germano Celant (ed.), The Small Utopia: Ars Multiplicata, Milan, Fondazione Prada, 2012, p. 31. 27 Oldenburg created Baked Potato for 7 Objects in a Box (1966, edition of 75), which also included multiples by Allan D’Arcangelo, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Tanglewood Press published the portfolio. Oldenburg created Tea Bag for 4 on Plexiglas (1966, edition of 125), which also included multiples by Phillip Guston, Barnett Newman, and Larry Rivers. The portfolio was published by Multiples Inc. Baked Potato and Tea Bag were both fabricated by Knickerbocker Machine & Foundry Inc., New York.
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factory somewhere, and all I had to do was to figure out ways of galvanizing these people
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into doing something. I had to give them some sort of object that they could identify with
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and be interested in then all sorts of interesting processes would begin.”31 Oldenburg has described his multiples as “the sculptor’s solution to making a print,” democratizing owners-
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Ibid. p. 43. Oldenburg also views the multiple as a way of “coming to grips with urban surroundings,” which he characterizes as being defined by new technologies: “The fact that you are surrounded by machinery all the time, and that in everything you do there’s something technological being done to you and how you can personalize that or relate to it… That’s what goes on all through the creation of the multiples is overcoming the machine or getting used to the machine or living with the machine; adapting it, making it less hostile or distant.” Ibid. p. 45. 32 Oldenburg, Claes. “Baked Potato, Tea Bag,” in Multiples in Retrospect, p. 34. 33 Oldenburg, Claes. Interviewed by Judith Goldman, “Sort of a Commercial for Objects,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 2 (JanuaryFebruary 1976), p. 118. 34 Prather, Marla. “Claes Oldenburg: A Biographical Overview,” in Anthology, p. 6. 35 He continues, “Tony Smith, the sculptor, for example, works in simple geometric forms; the great advantage he’s got is that he can enlarge the basically simple form of the cube in much the same way a building’s form can be expanded and enlarged.” He also worried about subject matter, saying, “I was afraid that what is lyrical and believable in an imaginary form might be banal and unnecessary in fact. A 50 foot puppy dog or a 650 foot teddy bear might be merely a painful eyesore, very unpoetic.” Jeff Koons’ 40’ Puppy (1992), a gigantic Highland terrier covered in flowering plants, tests this idea. See Oldenburg, Claes. Interviewed by Paul Carroll, “The Poetry of Scale: Interview with Claes Oldenburg,” in Proposals for Monuments and Buildings, pp. 26-27.
hip of his work.32 Yet scale is involved here, too, as Oldenburg has pointed out. His interest lies in the “structure of multiplication and quantity, in quantity as scale.”33 By collaborating with fabricators to produce multiples, Oldenburg enlarged the scale of his work, creating objects that make up for their small size with the possibility of increased distribution and circulation. The year 1969, when Oldenburg completed the Profile Airflow, marked a significant “period of technological expansion” for the artist that coincided with the production of his earliest monumental sculptures, including Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks and Geometric Mouse.34 The challenges of large scale and complex engineering were compounded in the case of Oldenburg, who had envisioned works that could not simply be assembled from cut steel welded to create simple geometric forms. In an interview, Oldenburg explained: “I have to decide whether I really want to convert my fantasy to real projects, and on what terms this can be done. One problem is that the shape of my objects makes it harder to build them than if they had abstract forms like cubes or cones.”35 In search of a solution to this problem, Oldenburg established a studio in North Haven, Connecticut, close to the fabricator Lippincott Inc. He also traveled frequently to Los Angeles to participate in the Art and Technology program, established in 1967 by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The program matched artists with companies that agreed to provide whatever workspace, equipment, materials, and technical assistance the artist might need to complete an agreed-upon project. It grew out of a belief that artists would benefit from access to new technologies, and that artist residencies had great potential to increase corporate patronage of the arts. Initially skeptical, Oldenburg took a pragmatic approach to the program.36 He explained, “[F]irst of all I had to ask myself what is it in my work that requires technological assistance on the scale that this program will give me.”37 Tuchman matched Oldenburg with Disney, the home of Mickey Mouse –long an object of fascination for the artist– as well as the sophisticated animatronics that had made Disneyland a global attraction. It was hoped that the corporation’s theme park division could somehow help Oldenburg make one of his fantastic monuments a reality. Oldenburg visited Disney’s workshops in November 1968, and during the first half of 1969 traveled frequently to southern California, where he developed two proposals, both of which involved animatronics. Oldenburg envisioned Giant Ice Bag (1969-70) as an outdoor sculpture that rested on the ground, with a pink vinyl skin topped by a cap that would slowly turn, telescope up and down, and tilt, similar to “a searchlight at a Hollywood opening.”38 In addition, he proposed a Theater of Objects, also known as Oldenburg’s Ride, which would feature a group of mechanical sculptures enclosed in a large amphitheater, similar to the rides at Disneyland. For the proposal, Oldenburg drew on a group of kinetic objects he had contemplated several years earlier, including “a giant toothpaste tube, which rises and 36 Oldenburg told the New York Times, “As far as I’m concerned, the Yellow Pages provide enough technology for me.” Quoted in Maurice Tuchman, “Claes Oldenburg,” in Tuchman, Art & Technology: A Report on the Art & Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967-1971, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971, p. 241. See also Crawford, Holly. “Temporary Bedfellows: Claes Oldenburg, Maurice Tuchman and Disney,” in Holly Crawford (ed.), Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices, Lanham, Maryland, Univ. Press of America, 2008, pp. 187-98 and De Fay, Christopher R. “Art, Enterprise, and Collaboration: Richard Serra, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Claes Oldenburg at the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 19671971.” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Michigan, 2005. 37 Ibid. p. 242. 38 Ibid. p. 250.
falls, and is raised by the paste”; “a pie case, in which pies would gradually disappear as if they
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were being eaten, and then be reassembled”; and “a ‘chocolate earthquake’ made of giant
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chocolate bars, which would shift precariously, crack open, and settle back.”39 When Disney dropped out of the program due to the high cost of realizing any of Oldenburg’s proposals, Tyler stepped in and helped bring the 18’ Giant Ice Bag to fruition.40 It was included in the New Arts exhibition, which the Art and Technology Program organized for the United States Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan.41 If Oldenburg’s experience at Disney confirmed his suspicions about collaborating with corporations, then it also may have helped to cement his partnerships with Gemini G.E.L. and Lippincott Inc., the two firms that eventually produced the five scales of his Geometric Mouse. Oldenburg does not just celebrate the multiple by making some of his works in large editions; his art is exceptionally open to multiple meanings and interpretations, which Oldenburg himself promotes in his writings.42 The studio Oldenburg set up in 1969 near Lippincott Inc. in New Haven was infested with mice, so, the artist writes, “a rodent subject was unavoidable.”43 Yet surely his recent experience in Los Angeles with Disney played a role, too.44 Oldenburg is part of what Robert W. Brockway calls the “Mickey Mouse Generation,” children who grew up during the Great Depression and first knew Mickey from the films of the 1930s. In fact, Oldenburg was born just two months after Mickey Mouse made his screen debut in Steamboat Willie, which opened at New York’s Colony Theater in November 1928. The connection with film is made explicit by the Geometric Mouse’s form; the box topped with two circles echoes the shape of early movie cameras.45 The Mouse is Oldenburg’s only large-scale sculpture based on an animal form, and its symbolism can be tied to the archetypal quality of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse. Brockway points out that anthropomorphized animals symbolize “the collective shadow which corresponds to the most primitive, archaic level of the human mind—the level which links us with our animal past.” The shadow is often encountered in myth as the trickster, “the archaic and universally encountered god who, according to Jung, evokes… the seamy side of the personal unconscious.”46 Early Mickey Mouse cartoons adapted the slapstick style of period comedians, which “emerges from childlike impulsiveness, dream fantasy, and visual poetry.”47 The latter could just as easily describe Oldenburg’s art, especially his Colossal Monuments.48 Oldenburg has characterized Geometric Mouse as a thinker, sleeper, and also a symbol of death. As he told Martin Friedman in an interview, “In my view the Mouse is cerebral. It is autobiographical. It refers, perhaps, to my thinking process.” In this way Geometric Mouse corresponds with Oldenburg’s role in collaboration during the late 1960s –his “technological period”– when he first began working with industrial fabricators to realize his ideas. The Mouse could also be sleeping or half-awake, which Oldenburg relates to “another representation of the mouse where there’s a cross in each eye, which is a traditional way in the comics to show people in a state of unconsciousness.” Oldenburg drew inspiration from Constantin 45 Mickey, on the other hand, is all circles. The artist who drew Mickey, Ub Iwerks, attributes Mickey’s enduring popularity to the fact that his face is made up of three circles, making him a Jungian archetype for wholeness. John Hench, Vice President of Walt Disney Enterprises and one of Oldenburg’s partners in the “Art & Technology” program, underscores the power of Mickey’s form through comparison with his chief rival of the silent film era: “Felix the Cat didn’t get anywhere. He has points all over him like a cactus. He has practically disappeared while we couldn’t get rid of Mickey if we tried.” See Brockway, Robert W. “The Masks of Mickey Mouse: Symbol of a Generation,” Journal of Popular Culture, Spring 1989, p. 32. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. p. 28. 48 Oldenburg has stated, “The GM is its own shadow,” though the association is more likely tied to the connection with cinema projection. See Oldenburg, Claes. “Notes on the Geometric Mouse Subject,” in Anthology, p. 346.
39
Ibid. p. 244. Eventually Gemini produced Giant Ice Bag at three scales. The 18’ bag became Scale A, which is unique. In 1971 Gemini released Scale B (edition 25), with a 4’ diameter bag, and Scale C (edition 4), with a 12’ diameter bag. 41 Given the difficulty of realizing the project, Giant Ice Bag could also be read as symbolizing the “giant headache” brought on by art and technology collaborations. In 1971 Gemini released Scale B (edition 25), with a 4’ diameter bag, and Scale C (and edition of 4 was intended, though only 1 exemplar was produced), with a 12’ diameter bag. 42 I thank Jason LaFountain for bringing this connection to my attention and for pushing me to broaden my interpretation of Geometric Mouse. 43 Oldenburg, Claes. “Geometric Mouse,” in Haskell, Object into Monument, p. 110. 44 Oldenburg explicitly addressed this subject in an interview with Martin Friedman: “When I was in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969 talking to people at the Disney studios, there was a lot of talk about mice and lots of drawings of mice. One of the sources of the mouse image, one of the main sources, is the old type movie-camera in profile. We talked about the styles of drawing mice and how Walt Disney was the voice of Mickey Mouse— and about other things relating to the mouse subject.” Oldenburg, Claes. Interviewed by Martin Friedman, “Geometric Mouse,” in Six Themes, p. 33. 40
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Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse, which is only one letter away from being a mouse. As a skull, the
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Mouse refers to mortality and symbolizes death. “There’s also a relationship between analysis
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and death –the analytical intellect and death– because it’s an anti-flesh thing,” he told Friedman. “So there’s all that area to explore, that content where the Mouse is the prince of death
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“Geometric Mouse,” in Six Themes, p. 25. 50 For a deeper analysis of Oldenburg in Chicago in 1968, see Williams, “Claes Oldenburg in New Haven.” 51 Oldenburg has discussed brick throwing in relation to Geometric Mouse as well. In the interview with Friedman, Oldenburg recounts how Geometric Mouse relates to the cartoon animals of the early twentieth century. He describes Mickey as a “bourgeois-mouse” and Ignatz, the mouse from Krazy Kat, as an “outlawmouse.” “He was always the guy who was compelled to cause trouble by throwing a brick at someone,” said Oldenburg. The artist confessed to sympathizing more with “the antibourgeois mouse.” See “Geometric Mouse,” in Six Themes, p. 33. 52 The short is available online: http://www. slate.com/blogs/ browbeat/2013/06/21/ mickey_mouse_in_ vietnam_watch_long_ lost_1968_short_film_ by_milton_glaser.html (accessed 4 December 2014).
or a symbol of it.”49 Though Oldenburg’s work is rarely overtly political, Geometric Mouse can also be read against the political turmoil of the late 1960s. In 1968, the year before Oldenburg had the first Geometric Mouse fabricated, he traveled to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. There he was a victim of the police brutality unleashed on anti-war protesters by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Disgusted by the mayor’s actions, Oldenburg joined a boycott of Chicago’s art museums organized by a group of local artists. He also postponed a solo exhibition scheduled for Richard Feigen Gallery in Chicago that fall and instead participated in a protest exhibition at a gallery that included the work of nearly fifty artists.50 Oldenburg contributed a Colossal Monument drawing that showed the mayor’s head on a platter; like Geometric Mouse, it recalls Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse. In addition, he made a multiple with a Chicago fireplug that he saw as a souvenir of the events in Chicago. He intended to throw one through the gallery’s plate glass window.51 That same year, Milton Glaser and Lee Savage made an anti-war film called “Mickey Mouse in Vietnam.” In the short, Mickey Mouse, a symbol of optimism and American culture, joins the U.S. Army and is shot almost immediately upon his arrival in Vietnam.52 If Oldenburg grew up watching Mickey Mouse shorts in cinemas, the boys drafted in 1968 and 1969 were the same ‘Mouseketeers’ who had watched the Mickey Mouse Club as children at home on television.53 Indeed, we must not forget that Geometric Mouse –whether thinking, sleeping, or dead– is also crying, his tears chained to the windows that serve as his eyes. Whom or what does he mourn? Is it the fallen Mouseketeers in Vietnam? The brutalized rioters in Chicago? Or does his weeping express a general attitude of emotional exhaustion after the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s?54 Of course, the tears themselves have multiple meanings. Oldenburg writes, “The ‘tears’ (shade pulls) are like pods, finding the level of the surface on which the GM rests. Anchors to the bottom, double stethoscopes and monocles. The settling down on several points of contact suggests lunar landings.”55 Like many of Oldenburg’s large-scale projects, Geometric Mouse also comments on the history of sculptural monuments and more recent sculpture. Works on display in the Lippincott Inc. sculpture field were crucial for Oldenburg, who has described the influence of works in progress at Lippincott on his own sculpture, including Geometric Mouse: American soldiers chant the Mickey Mouse Club theme song at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). Earlier in the film, Sgt. Hartman confronts Pvt. ‘Gomer Pyle,’ yelling, “What is this Mickey Mouse shit?” He invokes yet another meaning of ‘Mickey Mouse,’ as “designating a person or thing deemed to be lacking in value, size, authenticity, or seriousness.” The derogatory usage has an interesting relationship with Geometric Mouse, since they both rely on scale. See “Mickey Mouse, adj. and n.” OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com. ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/view/Entry/117882?rskey=C1UKIP&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed December 05, 2014). Other works by Oldenburg that have been read against the backdrop of the Vietnam War include Placid Civic Monument (1967) and Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks. For the former, see Boettger, Suzaan. “A Found Weekend, 1967: Public Sculpture and Anti-Monuments,” Art in America 89, January 2001, pp. 80-85, 125. For the latter, see Williams, “Claes Oldenburg in New Haven.” 54 In a sense, the static, sad Geometric Mouse is the inverse of the animated, happy culture of Disneyland. 55 Oldenburg, “Notes on the Geometric Mouse Subject,” in Anthology, p. 346. Geometric Mouse made its own lunar landing in November 1969. Along with Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, and John Chamberlain, Oldenburg gave the sculptor Forrest Myers a drawing —Oldenburg’s featured a Geometric Mouse—that was reportedly etched onto a tiny ceramic wafer, affixed to one of the Intrepid’s legs, and blasted off into space on the Apollo 12 mission. In the drawing, Geometric Mouse appears similar to a tethered balloon, reflecting the lack of gravity in space and contrasting with the earth-bound Geometric Mouse sculpture that the artist has described as being “in love with gravity.” Oldenburg, “Geometric Mouse,” in Haskell, Object into Monument, p. 110. See also Glueck, Grace. “New York Sculptor Says Intrepid Put Art on Moon,” New York Times, 22 November 1969. 53
[T]he Marilyn Monroe Lipstick ‘thinks’ of the tilted planes of Bob Murray, which were much in evi-
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dence, and some other Ellsworth Kelly planes, though I put ‘eyes’ in the walls—windows, when it
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came to the Geometric Mouse. The Geometric Mouse pays its respects to Calder and to Smith, as well. The Yale Lipstick is, among other things, a variation on Newman’s Broken Obelisk—all three obelisks were then on the premises. It is also a fact that the name Lippincott made me favor the lipstick subject.56
56 Oldenburg, Claes. “Lipstick,” in Haskell, Object into Monument, p. 95.
In 1968, Lippincott Inc. reproduced the head of an Easter Island moai in a full-size edition for the International Fund for Monuments. The 6’ diameter ear of Geometric Mouse – Scale A is based on this sculpture, two casts of which sat for a time outside of the Lippincott Inc. shed. The monumental Geometric Mouse’s bright color and geometric steel plate suggest more recent monumental sculpture as well, including Calder’s La Grande Vitesse, the first successful commission of the NCA’s Sculpture Project, installed in Grand Rapids in June 1969. Geometric Mouse is arguably the most self-reflexive of Oldenburg’s early public art projects for the ways that it reveals the stakes of making public sculpture circa 1970. As a blown-up version of Oldenburg’s personal logo, Geometric Mouse plays on the signature style of modern masters like Calder, whose abstract monumental sculptures appeared all over the world during the 1960s and 1970s. Calder’s success in winning commissions like the one in Grand Rapids was rooted in part in his production not only of a reliable product, but also a recognizable one. Every stabile by Calder lends prestige to its owner through association with the artist’s fame; each Calder stabile is also an advertisement for the artist. Both processes rely on the ability of observers to recognize Calder’s work, making each sculpture a “Calder” as much as it is a work of art. With Geometric Mouse, Oldenburg uses his personal symbol to ape this process, showing how certain artists have become brands. Geometric Mouse also reflects on what it means for a sculpture to be public, both in terms of its siting as well as its circulation as an image. Oldenburg participated in a 1969 lawsuit that challenged the City of Chicago’s copyright of the untitled sculpture commissioned from Pablo Picasso and erected two years earlier in the Chicago Civic Center. For the lawsuit, he made Soft Version of the Maquette for a Monument Donated to Chicago by Pablo Picasso (1969), a copy of the maquette for the sculpture. Picasso’s maquette was key for the prosecution’s argument, which focused on a copyright notice that had been affixed to the rear base of the sculpture in the civic center just days before the dedication. With this notice, the Public Building Commission of Chicago asserted its right to require a license for commercial use of the sculpture’s image, with a schedule of fees. It also aimed to protect the sculpture by ensuring the quality and tastefulness of reproductions. A copyright notice had never been affixed to the maquette, however; in 1970, a federal judge ruled that since the sculpture was a copy of the maquette and the maquette had never been copyrighted, the city had no right to copyright protection.57 Oldenburg’s Soft Picasso affirmed that the civic center sculpture had been given freely to the people of Chicago and was in the public domain. Indeed, the multiplication of its image through postcards and cufflinks, trinkets and tchotchkes, and even artworks by other artists, is one way that a sculpture like the Chicago Picasso becomes public. By making multiplicity part of his work, Oldenburg himself supplied the souvenirs for Geometric Mouse with the small-scale, unlimited edition produced at Gemini.58 Geometric Mouse lays bare the limits of the iconographic inventory available to artists in an increasingly corporate consumer society. By drawing on Mickey Mouse, the logo of Disney as well as a popular cartoon character, Oldenburg drives home questions soon taken up by contemporary critics of public sculpture. In 1972, the year after Lippincott Inc. fabri-
57
For the lawsuit, see Stratton, Patricia Ann Balton. “Chicago Picasso.” M.A. thesis, Northwestern Univ., 1982. 58 On his visit to Chicago in 1968, Oldenburg was attentive to souvenirs showing the Chicago Picasso that were sold in the airport and around the city. See Oldenburg, Claes. “Chicago Picasso,” “Fireplug Cufflinks,” and “Fireplug Souvenir” in Haskell, Object into Monument, pp. 8586, 91.
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cated Oldenburg’s Geometric Mouse, Scale X – Red, Lawrence Alloway published “The Public
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Sculpture Problem.” In this provocatively titled article, the critic surveys developments in
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the field of public sculpture during the previous few years. According to Alloway, “The nineteenth century closed the tradition of public sculpture and the twentieth has not established one.” The reasons for this have to do with the lack of availability of a shared iconography. Artists working in the nineteenth century had a store of signs and symbols on which to draw. These signs were rooted in literary sources rather than artistic ones, making them legible to a broad public. For artists working in the twentieth century, this sort of shared iconography poses a problem. Alloway writes, What we have now is a cluster of public arts that are not in the hands of sculptors or painters at all. Obviously television, the movies, advertising, packaging, ceremonies, peer-group games constitute a set of public arts, though characterized by continuous flow and replacement rather than by monumentality. Popular culture has created an inventory of signs and themes, but it is an unstoppable flow of variants rather than a succession of classic points. Hence it does not help a sculptor working for a public site.
He adds, “Mickey Mouse in concrete or fibreglass is no… solution to the problem of public sculpture… If an artist takes a sign from an existing store and displaces it by transformation 59 Alloway, Lawrence. “The Public Sculpture Problem,” Studio International 184 (October 1972), p. 123.
we are entitled to ask what the gain is.”59 With Geometric Mouse, Oldenburg seems to ask: if the iconographic inventory used by artists up to the nineteenth century was exhausted, where could the artist turn for signs and symbols that would communicate with a broad public? A central question of Pop art, the answer for artists like Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein was the popular culture of advertising, comic strips, film, and television. Yet in making Geometric Mouse, Oldenburg did not merely tap a pop cultural icon for a public monument. It is no accident that Geometric Mouse is the sculpture Oldenburg chose as his personal symbol, the one that he chose to reproduce at so many different sizes and in different media, and the one that he made into a public monument. In so doing, he simultaneously drew on and played with the corporate branding practices of global conglomerates like Disney. What is more, Oldenburg anticipated the fate of the Grand Rapids Calder, which quite literally became the trademark for Grand Rapids. It remained to be seen,
60
The City of Houston had refused the gift of Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (1963-67) in 1969. For the controversy, see Douberley, “The Corporate Model.” I address Broken Obelisk and Geometric Mouse in my fourth chapter, “Designing the Image of the City.” See also Sterba, James P. “A Brash, Young Houston Schizophrenic Over Its Culture,” New York Times, 25 February 1976. 61 Oldenburg was interviewed for several articles on the sculpture. See Crossley, Mimi. “Public Art’s New Face,” Houston Post, 18 November 1975 and Crossley, “The Mousemaker,” Houston Post, 23 November 1975.
however, whether Geometric Mouse could do the same in Houston.60 Geometric Mouse, Scale X - Red arrived in Houston in November 1975 and was installed by Oldenburg and Donald Lippincott on the spot the artist had selected, on the plaza in front of the main library entrance. Geometric Mouse was not tailor-made for the site, but the sculpture was a good fit for the library. As a symbol of analysis and intellect, a head made an excellent symbol for the library. The fact that it was a mouse worked well, too; it played on library conduct, where one should be “quiet as a mouse,” and on iconic library statuary— here one thinks of the lions—big cats—that mark the entrance to the New York Public Library. Oldenburg saw the sculpture as having a strong relationship with architecture and for this reason he liked the Houston site, where the tilted geometric head would contrast sharply with the regular geometry of the library building.61 During the first half of the 1970s, Oldenburg had sited his sculptures at museums, universities, and the homes of private collectors, but Geometric Mouse was the first public monument realized by Oldenburg and owned by a city. It did not inspire the kind of trinkets and tchotchkes made after the Grand Rapids Calder or Chicago Picasso; besides, Oldenburg had in a sense already taken care of their manufacture with the small-scale mice, which now functioned as souvenirs
for the monumental Mouse. It did, however, become a symbol for the library, identifying
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the building for pedestrians on the street and appearing as a strong graphic image on the
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cover of the guide to the new building, just as the Geometric Mouse had circulated in print as Oldenburg’s logo, and much as the Grand Rapids Calder became the trademark for that city. Indeed, we might say that the model for public sculpture was no longer the hero monument, but branding. With Geometric Mouse, Oldenburg probed the way that public sculpture had become legible for communities like Grand Rapids; not as art, but through the visual language of marketing and public relations.
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Sarah Beetham is an instructor at the Departament of Liberal Arts of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in 2014, with a focus on sculpturein the United States. Her current book project, tentatively titled Army of the Dead: Civil War Soldier Monuments and the Politics of Permanence, considers the implications of moments when Civil War soldier monuments have been moved, reinterpreted, amended, rededicated, vandalized, destroyed accidentally, neglected, or otherwise altered. A community’s role in causing or rectifying these moments of monumental crisis can illuminate the role of memorials in national conversations and the nature of public memory itself. Amanda Douberly is an art historian and curator based in Chicago. Her publications include “The Memory Frame: Set in Stone, a Dialogue” (with Paul Druecke) in A Companion to Public Art, edited by Harriet F. Senie and Cher Krause Knight (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming 2016) and site insets in Land Arts of the American West by Bill Gilbert and Chris Taylor (University of Texas Press, 2009). She teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Leda Cempellin earned her doctorate in 2004 at the University of Parma, Italy, and is currently an Associate Professor of Art History at South Dakota State University. She is the author of a book on American Photorealism, two monographs and numerous articles in Modern and Contemporary Art, with cross-disciplinary interests in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She is a member of the Education Committee at the College Art Association for the term 2013-2016. Mei-Ling Cabrera Pérez es licenciada en Historia del Arte, egresada de la Universidad de La Habana, Cuba, en 2001; y Master en Historia del Arte, egresada de esa misma institución, en 2007. En la actualidad, desarrolla su tesis para obtener el título de Doctor en Ciencias del Arte, el tema es la escultura cubana de salón durante 1960 y 1970. Se desempeña como profesora asistente del Departamento de Historia del Arte de la Facultad de Artes y Letras. En este sentido, ha participado en calidad de ponente en eventos científicos nacionales e internacionales. Asimismo, ha incursionado en el trabajo curatorial, destacándose el proyecto A es B, realizado en Galería Habana (2004), y por el que obtuvo el Premio Nacional de Curaduría 2005. María de los Ángeles Pereira Doctora en Ciencias sobre Arte. Profesora Titular del Departamento de Historia del Arte de la Universidad de La Habana. Preside la Comisión Nacional de Carrera de Historia del Arte en Cuba. Es miembro de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC). Como investigadora y crítica de arte se ha especializado en el estudio de la escultura cubana y caribeña. Susana Pliego Quijano Doctora en Historia del Arte con Mención Honorífica por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM. Maestra en Historia del Arte, egresada de Harvard Extension School. Realizó una estancia posdoctoral en la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Es miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. Es coautora del libro “El hombre en la encrucijada: el mural de Diego Rivera en el Centro Rockefeller”. Fue curadora de la exposición “Diego Rivera, nacimiento de un pintor”, la cual se llevó a cabo en el Museo Mural Diego Rivera y de la exposición “El hombre en la encrucijada: el mural de
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Diego Rivera en el Centro Rockefeller” que se exhibió en el Instituto Cultural Mexicano de Washing-
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ton D.C. Ha sido profesora de historia del arte en diversas instituciones. Fue Coordinadora del Insti-
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tuto de Liderazgo en Museos, A.C. En la actualidad labora como asesora cultural de la Oficialía Mayor de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público.
NOTA EDITORIAL Dina Comisarenco Mirkin SECCIÓN TEMÁTICA De la escultura contemporánea: algunas nociones básicas María de los Ángeles Pereira La escultura cubana durante los años 1960 - 1970: una revisitación necesaria Mei-Ling Cabrera Pérez Presentación: Multiples in Sculpture Sarah Beetham y Amanda Douberley “An Army of Bronze Simulacra”: The Copied Soldier Monument and the American Civil War Sarah Beetham Claes Oldenburg’s Geometric Mouse Amanda Douberley Multiples in Late Modern Sculpture: Influences Within and Beyond Daniel Spoerri’s 1959 Edition mat Leda Cempellin PERSPECTIVA CRÍTICA Territorios velados: México, Esplendores de treinta siglos, el canon de la cultura oficial y su uso en la diplomacia cultural Susana Pliego Quijano ENTREVISTAS Ser uno con el universo: entrevista a Ángela Gurría Dina Comisarenco Mirkin DOCUMENTOS Herencia (2002-2014), instalación móvil y viva Máximo González e Iván Buenader De mármol Damián Comas RESEÑAS Diccionario de escultores mexicanos del siglo XX de Lily Kassner Miriam Kaiser Untangling the Web: Gego’s Reticulárea-An Anthology of Critical Response de María Elena Huizi y Ester Crespin editado por Mari Carmen Ramírez y Melina Kervandjian Dina Comisarenco Mirkin
