For modern artists, it has become kind of fashionable to declare that their art is 'investigating' something. Very often, the object of such an artistic 'research' concerns the viewer’s perception of visual reality, i.e. the 'added value' that a spectator attributes to the presented image.
One of the methods used is to present familiar objects in a completely different context, thus providing them with a new identity. The godfather of this technique is the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1878-1968), who ‘transformed’ utensils like a bicycle wheel, wine bottle drying rack or urinal, only by presenting them, almost unchanged, in a museum context. Thus, the change was in the eye of the beholder.
From the mid-fifties onwards, the artists of the pop art movement took this principle a step further. They also isolated everyday objects from their original context, but their goals were different. While Duchamp, with his ‘found objects’, wanted to raise the question of what is or is not ‘art’, pop artists, by use of exaggeration, multiplication and other transformations, wanted to draw attention to both formal and hilarious aspects of the media world and modern mass consumption.
One of them was the American-Swedish sculptor Claes Oldenburg (1929), who became particularly famous for his radically enlarged utensils. By increasing the scale of objects like screws, clothespins, lipsticks or ice bags, blowing them up to a colossal size, he seriously confused the public.
This work from 1976, Trowel I, demonstrates the idea: the tool, loosely inserted into the ground, is a common image for nearly everyone, until you realize that this trowel is twelve meters high! The sculpture seems familiar and alien at the same moment, which can have an unsettling effect on the spectator.
Oldenburg created Trowel I, together with his partner Coosje van Bruggen, for an important exhibition of outdoor sculpture in the Netherlands called Sonsbeek. Oldenburg himself declared that he thought the giant trowel, plunged into the earth, was a ‘perfect example of a sculpture with no need for a base.’
(text: Maarten Levendig)
Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=466050186744305&set=a.272167206132605.87867.271017012914291&type=1&theater
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