ART-PRESENTATION: Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen-A Duet

A leading voice of the Pop art movement, Claes Oldenburg came to prominence in the New York art scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s, where he established himself with a series of installations and performances influenced by his surroundings on the Lower East Side. In 1977, Oldenburg married curator and art historian Coosje van Bruggen, with whom he would collaborate for over thirty years. In addition to curatorial and lecturing positions, van Bruggen was the author of many articles and books. Together, Oldenburg and van Bruggen produced sculpture, drawings, performances, and colossal monuments that transform the familiar into the unexpected,

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Claes & Coosje: A Duet” sheds new light on the philosophical, aesthetic, and artistic dialogue between Claes Oldenburg and the late Coosje van Bruggen (6/6/1942-10/1/2009), Emphasizing the indispensable role that van Bruggen played in their collective practice, the exhibition charts the evolution of one of the 20th century’s most influential artistic duos, culminating with the unveiling of the large-scale work, “Dropped Bouquet” the final sculptural work that Oldenburg and van Bruggen conceived together before her death. Among the best-known artist-couples of the post-1960s era, Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s partnership was, from the beginning, a conspiracy between artist and art historian. They met in 1971, when van Bruggen was a young curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and they married six years later. During the 1980s, van Bruggen soon transformed from interlocutor into full-fledged artistic collaborator and artist in her own right. From the 1970s onward, Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s ongoing debates and conversations, first around major sculptural commissions and later in their collaborative studio practice, reflected a profound intellectual exchange shaped by the sensibility of a sculptor, on the one hand, and that of a writer, on the other. The result was one of the most fruitful, impactful, and sometimes controversial collaborations in 20th century art. Occupying two major galleries at Pace Gallery’s location in New York, the exhibition is anchored by “Dropped Bouquet” (2021), the realization of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s final work together. Produced at monumental scale for the first time after three years in fabrication, it evokes a garland of faux wildflowers, depicted in the midst of tumbling to the ground and frozen at the moment of impact, as if in suspended animation. The exhibition also features a selection of sculptural works from some of the artists’ best-known collaborations, including original artifacts, drawings, and soft sculptures from “Il Corso del Coltello” (The Course of the Knife), Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s canonical site-specific performance project for Venice, Italy, which was commissioned, conceived, and realized together with the writer Germano Celant and the architect Frank Gehry. This ambitious event involved the creation and embarkation of a sea-worthy sculpture in the shape of a giant Swiss army knife. With oars protruding from its red-enameled hull as if from a Viking longship, the image of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s “Knife Ship” sailing the Grand Canal has become iconic, while the massive kinetic sculpture was later shown in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and finally at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The initial idea came about in 1983 with the idea (that never materialised) of the boat being placed as a monument in Basel. The image of the large knife blades (initially referring to the Swiss army) was devised as a symbol of cutting and separating; recurring in Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s projects are cutting instruments, such as scissors and knives, as macro-signs, tools that metaphorically split the chain of relationships and section reality. Frank Gehry has also explored the direct relationship of the metaphor of the knife in his work – for him architecture is a sharpened scalpel that traverses, slices, separates and tears the centre of spatial, architectural and urban development issues with its blade. In an article published in Artforum, van Bruggen talks about how, by chance, “the knife and corkscrew are not only equal to a fish, but also a snake, the two biomorphic forms Gehry frequently uses in his architecture”. The knife, albeit an image, structurally corresponds to the Venetian gondolas, modern tug boats and even the Bucintoro, a Venetian ceremonial boat. Important early collaborations from the 1980s, including models for “Spitzhacke” (1982), Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s contribution to documenta 7, and “The Entropic Library” (1989) are presented in dialogue with sculptural renditions of everyday objects of labor and leisure created in the 1990s and 2000s, and which range in scale from modest to monumental. From pies to garden tools, many were designed as models for large-scale installations, among them Inverted “Collar and Tie” (1993) and “Typewriter Eraser” (1998). Others, like the “Collar and Bow” (2005), originally designed for Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, exist only in the form of models and drawings. Further exhibition highlights include sculptures and models from the 1990s and 2000s, including selections from the celebrated suite of musical instruments that van Bruggen and Oldenburg created around the time of their last major solo show, “The Music Room”. Also included is an important sculptural study for “Soft Shuttlecock” (1995), the monumental site-specific sculpture that Oldenburg and van Bruggen created together and suspended from the Guggenheim’s rotunda on the occasion of the 1995 retrospective. The work also evokes their well-known public sculpture of monumental shuttlecocks in the garden of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Photo: Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Georgia Sandbag Costume – Enlarged Version, (1986). Vinyl filled with soft polyurethane foam; canvas filled with soft polyurethane foam, painted with latex; painted wood and canvas. 218.4 x 208.3 x 358.1 cm, © Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Courtesy Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, Duration: 26/3-9/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00 (by appointment only, book here), www.pacegallery.com