All sorts of valuable objects: drainpipes, knives, electric sockets, Chryslers, bananas, safety pins and other familiar items populated three concurrent New York shows of drawings and sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

Art in America, Oct, 2002 by Edward Leffingwell

For the world of monuments according to Oldenburg and van Bruggen, sketches track the translation from idea to possible expressions to built form. His drawings in the Whitney collection trace aspects of that transformation. Among them are lined-notebook-page sketches and study drawings of variously anthropomorphic badminton shuttlecocks conceived as soft sculptures, dating from 1993 to 1995. Several propose the shuttlecock at rest or splayed, feathers spread out like a fan, one of them raised, arm-like, in limp salute, with two tiny figures inserted as markers of scale. Another drawing shows the shuttlecock in a pose of flat-out exhaustion. One of two full-sheet drawings depicts the shuttlecock raised, its feathers upright. The other, Soft Shuttlecocks, Falling, Number Two (1995), recalls the posture of two fighting cocks, one rising in the attack, feathers bristling, the other collapsed in a gesture of defeat. A set of drawings dating from 1992 to 1998 offers four views of a slice of blueberry pie a la mode, the first presenting it as a lake house perched precariously on a slope above the water, ice cream beginning to melt. In the second drawing, the slice slides downhill without its ice cream, and in the remaining two it is assigned the status of an island. In Blueberry Pie Island (1998), the slice of pie rests on its side, the ice cream at its tip rising in a ball above the water, sailboats like insects hovering beyond the island shore.

The Metropolitan roof garden installation is linked to these drawings la mode by the sculptures Shuttlecock/Blueberry Pies, I and II (1999), and by a monumental safety-pin sculpture, Corridor Pin, Blue (1999), a formal descendant of the last drawing in the Whitney publication, Dream Pin (1998). The sculptures were included in a monumental program of work first sited at Oldenburg and van Bruggen's home in France, the Chateau de Laborde at Beaumont-sur-Deme. In the summer of 2001, the works were temporarily on view in the park of the Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal. At 4 feet by 2 by 2, the pie a la mode sculptures, cast from aluminum and painted with acrylic urethane, are large in relation to their model but not grandly monumental. Titled to imply a metamorphosis from pie slice to shuttlecock in play, the triangular slices are poised like dancers on point, perched on their ball-like scoops of ice cream, resting formally on opposing corners of the roof garden's south balustrade like topiary bracketing a vista. The pin, 21 feet high and wide, of stainless steel and painted with blue polyurethane enamel at the elbow, frames a portion of the sky.

To the north and west, the billowing white sail of Architect's Handkerchief (1999), of fiber-reinforced plastic painted with polyester gelcoat, 12 feet high and wide, 7 feet deep, seems defiantly unrecognizable in the context of this installation, given the relative absence of the pocket square from the haberdashery of contemporary culture. While it springs exuberantly from an otherwise featureless footing like a flower from a pot, the sculpture finds its source in a photograph by Peter Blake, a tightly framed image of the signature handkerchief of Mies van der Rohe, published for ease of reference in the Metropolitan's exhibition brochure. Greatly enlarged, the convolutions of white seemed to waft up and westward toward the clouds of a buttermilk sky. However Miesian the source, the rippling forms more immediately recall the familiar billowing folds designed by Oldenburg and van Bruggen's close friend and sometime collaborator, Frank O. Gehry.