GERMANO CELANT
For decades, pop artist Oldenburg has been transforming the ordinary into the fantastic with his imaginative sculptures of everyday objects. The 12-meter Giant Trowel in 1976 marked the start of a collaboration with his wife van Bruggen on their "large-scale projects," which are the concern of this colorful, witty and illuminating book produced in conjunction with a British exhibition of Oldenburg's sculpture, notebooks and sketches. This survey investigates the artists' methods, achievements and creative processes. Among other conceptions is the absurd solution to a shortage of burial spaceOldenburg's depiction for Cemetery in the Shape of a Colossal Screw: Skyscraper for Sao Paolo, Brazil, which as it fills with coffins, screws into the ground until only the screw-head projects as a marker. Explanatory essays give the works their artistic, historical and, as in Blasted Pencil (Which Still Writes), a monument to the survival of the University of El Salvador, their political contexts. Recurring images like broken matches and bent screws are traced from developmental stages to installation in finished sculptures.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
