#pop-art

According to the city's tourism site, this one was commissioned by the shopping centre it's balanced on, taking its cue from all the ice cream stands doing business on the street below. Apparently the tilted tip was meant to echo the church spires on the skyline nearby — a mall dressed up, half-jokingly, as a cathedral of consumption.

I couldn't find why Oldenburg picked pool balls specifically for this one — if anyone knows, I'd love the story. What I did find is that blowing ordinary objects up to monument size was basically his whole practice for decades, one of the things credited with helping Pop art move off the canvas and into public parks.

Apparently the idea goes back to a performance in Venice, built around bundling your whole household into a sack you could just roll to wherever you were headed next. Same trick he always pulled — blow up something ordinary until it can't be ignored — except here the ordinary thing carries real grief: they say the permanent version was recast as a memorial for refugees, since this exact plot once held a church built by families who'd fled with whatever they could carry.

They say this stretch of park used to be allotment gardens before the vocational school and the park itself went in, and the giant hose and tap were meant to nod back to that — like someone just walked off and left the water running. From what I can tell, it's one of a series: he's put up oversized ordinary objects — a giant clothespin, a huge trowel — in different cities; this one just happens to be a hose long enough to loop across a lawn.

Oldenburg spent decades blowing up small household objects into oversized public sculptures, and from what I can find, a lot of the later ones were worked out with his wife and collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen. This is one of their bathroom-themed sculptures — from a run of work that helped push Pop art off the canvas and into actual parks and plazas.

According to what I've picked up, Paolozzi was part of the London scene often credited with helping Pop art get going in the 1950s, years before Warhol picked up the idea over in the US. By the time he made this one, he'd moved into these heavy, machine-part-looking bronzes — a shift from collage to hard metal that a lot of the writing treats as its own turning point for him.