Sculptor Claes Oldenburg once imagined a 60- foot fishing pole along Gore Creek
Claes Oldenburg, the renowned sculptor who died Monday, imagined a 60- foot fishing pole along the banks of Gore Creek.
Oldenburg was known around the world for his enormous sculptures of everyday objects, bringing out “dramatic and spectacular potential, finally giving it hyper significance,” as described by Germano Celant in “The Course of the Knife.”
“Oldenburg removes his everyday objects — a shirt, a hamburger, a tube of toothpaste, a clothespin, a typewriter, a feat, an ice- cream cone, a saw, a baseball bat, a flashlight, a button, a knife — from the irreversible, anonymous flow of the commonplace,” Celant writes. “He renders the normal ‘ exceptional,’ transforms it into the extraordinary, the singular, the anomalous.”
Celant’s description of Oldenburg came from an attempt to chart the voyage of a more than 80- foot- long floating Swiss Army knife, which could be piloted by people manning oars, at the naval yard in Venice, Italy, in 1985.
Covered by The New York Times and NBC News, Oldenburg had an idea for a sculpture in Vail, but not everyone in town liked the concept, not enough money was raised and it was never built.
Planned for the banks of Gore Creek in Lionshead, Oldenburg envisioned a 60foot- tall fishing pole attached to a tin can.
Some people saw the tin can as representative of man’s tendency to bring litter to beautiful places, but Oldenburg defended the piece before the Vail Town Council on Aug. 23, 1983.
The Vail Trail quoted Oldenburg as saying that he never saw the tin can to be an “iconological feature” representing pollution.
“I never saw it in the sense of a polluting element,” Oldenburg told the Vail residents in attendance. “I’ve found quite a few things in the stream. The stream transforms
Claes Oldenburg
these objects into nature as they decay.”
A model of Oldenburg’s sculpture, made by Oldenburg for the town of Vail, is on display at the Vail Public Library.
Observers can see something even the naysayers in the 1980s had to admit was present in the model, the eye- pleasing geometry that is characteristic of Oldenburg’s work.
In 1983 Frank Caroselli, who was 72 at the time, said people will laugh at Vail if the full sculpture idea is realized, but nevertheless Caroselli, an engineer, had to admit “there are very nice lines in the curvature of the pole,” the Vail Trail reported.
But what viewers can’t see is the engraving beneath the pole, which says “C. Oldenburg, for Vail, 1983.”
The site- specific nature of Vail’s piece is another feature which is characteristic of Oldenburg’s work.
“Since 1976 Oldenburg, working with ( Coosje) van Bruggen, always poses a relationship between his large- scale works and the historical and cultural environment,” Celant writes in “The Course of the Knife.”
“His permanent installations involve a flow of metaphors and allegories around the essence of the site, be it a street or square, a museum or skyscraper, a university or factory, a city or a village.”
Vail Art in Public Places Director Molly Eppard said she discovered the engraving when she had the Oldenburg and van Bruggen piece stabilized and encased in glass in 2009.
“It truly is a part of Vail’s history that we’re fortunate to have,” Eppard said.