By comparison, Clothespin is upright, uptight even. Its form renders precious-in the best sense of the word-details of the Academy’s Furness façade, as well as those of City Hall a block to the south. It deploys a Pixar-tight caricature quality reminiscent of a helium parade balloon. As it turns out, Paint Torch floats above its site and gently commands Broad Street with scale, color and texture. His Pop Art manifesto staked out new artistic territory: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” Would Oldenburg be willing and able to push the envelope on the streets of Philadelphia? What we seem to have across from City Hall and at the museum is something less than the “political-erotical-mystical” art we were promised.īut looks can be deceiving. In the early 1960s, in his New York studio, Oldenburg pushed the envelope plenty. These span Oldenburg’s entire, at times envelope-pushing, career. And in 1976 Philadelphia dedicated the first of Philadelphia’s major Oldenburg works: Clothespin, Split Button, Giant Three-Way Plug and now Paint Torch.
LOCKED TOWER EROTICAL NIGHT FULL
Someday, we may learn the full story about Philly’s first Oldenburg proposal, but we do know he had in the wings a less offensive idea: a clothespin.
Could Rizzo-era Philadelphia, a city barely willing to accept a clothespin, allow a 45 foot-tall screw across from City Hall tower? Not on your life. Oldenburg, we always heard, originally proposed a screw monument for 15th and Market Streets, something he only imagined for São Paulo, Brazil. Illustration by Kirk Finkel based on Wikipedia Creative Commons photograph by Spikebrennan and "Cemetery in the Shape of a Colossal Screw," in “Oldenburg Draws Seven New Wonders of the World,” Horizon (Spring 1972). Philadelphia's might-have-been screw monument. That artist imagined a giant toilet float for the Thames in London and a working windshield wiper threatening the Chicago waterfront. That sculptor once proposed replacing the Washington Monument with a giant pair of upended scissors. We wanted the old Oldenburg, the one whose work spilled out originality, as he recently described to The Wall Street Journal. We expected Oldenburg to be more the outsider here, more outrageous. Had Claes Oldenburg, after more than thirty five years and in his fourth major work in Philadelphia, sold out? Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin, 15th and Market Streets, in 1979Īt first, the idea of a 51-foot paintbrush in front of an art school/museum seemed unoriginal, little more than a logo for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
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