Since meeting in 1970, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, also a writer and curator, have collaborated on more than 25 large-scale projects. In 1985 the city of Venice was introduced to the artists’ humorously monumental vocabulary by The Course of the Knife, a two-day multimedia, multiwork, land-and-water spectacle that also involved human performers. As in Oldenburg’s Happenings [more] of the 1960s, objects in The Course of the Knife were transformed from props and sets into essential players, including an 18-foot–wide espresso cup and saucer, and Houseball, a 12-foot–diameter ball to which various pieces of foam furniture were bound. As a dramatic finale to the Performance [more], the motorized sculpture Knife Ship I, a giant Swiss Army pocketknife set afloat like a colossal Venetian gondola, was launched from the Arsenale naval yard, its blade and corkscrew sails cleaving the air. Like many of their monuments to banal everyday items, Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Knife Ship I, in its absurdity, challenges viewers’ ordinary relationship to objects and the environment.

Soft Shuttlecock was created specifically for the Frank Lloyd Wright- designed rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum by the artists in celebration of Oldenburg’s 1995 retrospective there. While planning the exhibition, Oldenburg and van Bruggen were also developing a project for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, in which four 18-foot–high shuttlecocks in plastic and aluminum are situated in the grass on either side of the museum, as if the building were a badminton net and the “birdies” fell during play. For the Guggenheim installation, the artists playfully engaged the same object, this time rendering it in more pliant materials. Early preparatory drawings show the shuttlecock transformed into a costume for a tightrope walker to wear while crossing the museum’s rotunda. The final result was no less a daring interaction with the space. Oldenburg and van Bruggen draped the flaccid feathers of the shuttlecock over several ramps and suspended others from the skylight above with cables. Like the Nelson-Atkins installation, Soft Shuttlecock humorously deflates the imposing structure of the building by diminishing its relative scale, while underscoring the museum’s institutional role as a site not only for culture and education but also for recreation and entertainment.

Joan Young