ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com © Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material Chapter 3 To Become a Monument: Artworks by Claes Oldenburg and Robert Smithson 1 Susanneh Bieber he artist Claes Oldenburg created his irst monumental sculptures for urban plazas in the late 1960s, but by that time he had already conceived numerous public monuments in the form of texts and drawings. He had proposed a monument to immigration for Upper New York Bay as early as 1961, describing it as follows: ‘he monument would begin as a reef placed in the bay; a ship would sail in, hit the reef, and sink; soon another would do the same; and ater awhile, there’d be this big pile of wrecked, rusting ships which, as it grew, would be visible from quite a distance.’ 2 At once outrageous and tongue-in-cheek, it is not surprising that this proposal was never realized. he monument to immigration exists merely as a verbal description and perhaps as a visual image in the reader’s imagination. From 1965 to 1967 Oldenburg devoted a sustained efort to the design of monuments, creating more than 80 drawings in which he visualized his ideas with a skilled artistic hand. Made with swit, luid lines and loose washes of colour, Oldenburg’s ideas appear efortlessly in front of the viewer’s eyes, as for example in a monument proposal that resembles a gigantic hot dog or another in the shape of an enormous block of concrete (Figure 3.1 and 3.2). Are these drawings proposals for monuments to be actually built or are they idealistic visions of an artist who has lost touch with reality? While these questions seem rhetorical and one may dissolve them by simply identifying the drawings as ‘art,’ this chapter recovers how Oldenburg as well as fellow artist Robert Smithson produced 1 Research for this chapter was completed with the generous support of a Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a Travel Grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. 2 Oldenburg interviewed by Paul Carroll, 22 August 1968, published as ‘ he Poetry of Scale’, in Claes Oldenburg: Proposals for Monuments and Buildings, 1965–1969 (Chicago, 1969), p. 13. See also Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg (New York, 1970), p. 104. From Katrina Gulliver and Heléna Tóth (eds), Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409439592 © Susanneh Bieber (2014)