Waddington Galleries

Double Vision: The Poetic Focus of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen Marco Livingstone

Long after the spell of the solitary romantic artist has been broken, artistic partnerships remain rare but they are no longer such oddities as to be regarded merely as objects of curiosity. Gilbert & George, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Ed and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Langlands & Bell are among the most visible of the couples who have persuasively proven the advantages for two people with a shared artistic agenda to make work together that blurs the boundaries between their individual identities. Even in this select company, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen stand out as a special case, and not only because of their mutual respect and the very particular contributions each makes to a coherent, consistent and always evolving conception of sculpture. Their personal histories as American artists originating from Europe - Claes having emigrated as a young child from Sweden, Coosje (13 years his junior) as an adult from the Netherlands - are also only part of the story. Above all it is their interrelated passions and ways of thinking and seeing that result in the production of works that are as richly layered in their formulation and terms of reference as they are bold and concise in their conception.

Oldenburg's identity as an artist was very well established by the time he married van Bruggen in 1977, a year after they first had occasion to work together. The sculptures he has produced with her (and only with her) since then remain immediately identifiable as faithful to his original vision. What is just as true, however, and perhaps not so obvious at first glance, is that van Bruggen has brought just as much of herself as he has to their joint project, not just in her application of her deep knowledge of art history and modern French literature but also through her sensitive immersion in the visual and sculptural terms through which they have made works together. Each piece emerges as a conversation between two equals, a discussion in wholly visual form that plays on numerous dichotomies that repeatedly echo the dual origins of the conception and of its eventual material realisation. The most expected of these pairings is that of masculine and feminine, but that is by no means the only or even the strongest of the contrasts that repeatedly call on the viewer's attention.

Certain aspects of the works - such as the use of forms that are by turns or even simultaneously hard and soft, erect and flaccid, open and closed - have a marked erotic dimension, all the more so given the presentation of objects as surrogate figures that are as malleable and subject to gravity as human bodies and that prove startlingly expressive of emotions ranging from tenderness to joy and sexual abandon. But what of the other dualities that reveal themselves: sensual/cerebral, intuitive/intellectual, whole/fragmented, static/dynamic, permanent/dissolving, three-dimensional/flattened? Can these usefully be ascribed to male or female principles or analysed, like some of the imagery they employ, simply as part of a celebratory statement of their love for each other and their creative lives together? That would seem unhelpfully reductive, given the many facets of human thought and behaviour that are enacted through works that are funny and playful, but never less than serious in intent, and that bring the spectator face-to-face with ebullient life and the inevitability of death.

The works jointly created over nearly three decades by Oldenburg and van Bruggen propose many oppositions, but they also direct attention to unexpected, or at least infrequently examined, connections. By depicting separate items in a harmony of function, as in Collar and Bow 1:16, 2005 (cat. no. 20) or as facilitating the promise of pleasure and sustenance, as in Leaning Fork with Meatball and Spaghetti III, 1994 (cat. no. 9) they call attention to the interdependence of all things and (by extension) to the attachments people form for each other. Even when staging a drama of conflict, as in Torn Notebook, on Ground, 1994, where physically violent conduct succeeds in dismembering the products of an ordered mind, neither impulse is presented as preferable to the other. Action and reflection are instead left in a perpetual state of suspension, each as necessary as the other to survival and the advancement of human knowledge. What seems especially marvellous about the exposition of such ideas in their work is that it is done with such simplicity and lack of pretension, centred on everyday objects that serve as a familiar and unthreatening point of access even for spectators unversed in the theory or history of art.

Such concerns have been embedded in Oldenburg's work since his Pop period of the 1960s, of which Fan - Hard Model, 1965-66 (cat. no 1.) provides a salutary reminder. An electric fan in apparent movement is represented by a fabricated object whose hard, unyielding surface freezes that moment forever. The freely rendered graphic markings on the surface, however, provide a new burst of movement through the pictorial shorthand, and one is left to imagine the waft of cool air that would caress one's face when properly positioned. These effects are achieved largely through the power of suggestion.

There is an immense generosity in the work of Oldenburg and van Bruggen, not least in the invitation to play that they extend to the audience, an irresistible call to enter into the spirit of their thinking and to participate in the consumption of each piece, often in recent works through the metaphor of food or music. The open-handedness is also to each other: Oldenburg's in welcoming the contributions of his partner to a terrain that had been his sole domain for two decades, and in allowing her suggestions not just for subjects and images but also for processes and formal solutions to determine the final appearance of the work; and, no less selflessly, van Bruggen's in channelling her own highly formulated knowledge, creativity and aesthetic impulses into these collaborative objects. The give-and-take between these two powerful personalities, sometimes expressed literally in the intertwining of forms, results in an irresistible energy that activates even the most apparently mute objects. Such is the case with Broken Bulb of 1991, a kind of afterglow to the suspended element of a room-sized installation they had begun two years earlier, From the Entropic Library - Model, 1989-90 (cat. no. 5). The transparent glass light bulb, wittily rendered as a black void with an opaque white exterior, lies in shards on the floor, where the main body of the bulb also rests. What force or violent act, one wonders, what kind of spontaneous combustion or explosion, could have resulted in this fictive state of affairs? The only thing that holds up the light bulb and prevents it, too, from spilling over, is the long flex screwed into it. It looks spent, exhausted, like someone in a state of collapse after a particularly vigorous bout of lovemaking.

Such a response might seem fanciful, over-interpretative, until one begins to notice similar forces at work in other sculptures. Soft Shuttlecock, Study of 1994 (cat. no. 10) is marked by an even greater air of delicious abandon, its lungs deflated from overexertion and its beautifully rotund trunk resting firmly on the ground with all its ruffled feathered limbs fully extended into the slovenly stance of someone so wholly satisfied as to have become completely indifferent to any sense of decorum. Even the Sneaker Lace of 1990 (cat. no. 7) seems to loll its lascivious tongue, its contempt for propriety an indication of its own sneakiness. And don't even mention the Blueberry Pie à la Mode, Flying, Scale A, of 1996 (cat. no. 11) in which soft and hard nestle together moistly, promising complete satiation of the senses and the conjoined pleasures of taste and consumption as one element melts into the other.

It is not all about sex, of course, notwithstanding the directness of the allusions in the imagery and titles of works such as Cupid's Span, a monumental work of 2002 sited in Rincon Park, San Francisco, in view of the Bay Bridge. Yet the erotic visual metaphors that course through these objects are essential to the lustful pleasure in life that make them so irresistible and that convey with such warmth, lightheartedness and ecstasy the pleasure that the artists take in each other's company. Other sculptures speak more bluntly just about the feeling of being in the world, of making one's mark, as in the case of Spitzhacke, Model of 1982 (cat. no. 2), one of their earliest joint works, in which the head of a pickaxe appears to have been forcefully embedded into its plinth: apart from providing a beautifully elongated, elegantly attenuated dynamic shape in space, it says quite clearly, 'Here I am. Take it or leave it.' Monument to the Last Horse, 1989-90 (cat. no. 6) a small-scale replica of the 20-foot tall monument made of aluminium and polyurethane foam that they sited in 1991 at Don Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, provides a more melancholic trace, a reminder of a once-living animal now departed and remembered only in the form of a lost horseshoe that has shuffled off this mortal coil. In response to Judd's desire to preserve the history of the area in which he had established his foundation, Claes and Coosje spontaneously took their cue from an old rusted horseshoe that they had found on Judd's ranch.

Such concise but evocative ways of thinking about motifs and objects and transforming them into art can properly be termed poetic. They operate much as a writer of verse will alight upon an image and through metaphor convey through it a multiplicity of open-ended meanings. It is not surprising, therefore, that music - a medium at once abstract and highly specific, apparently intangible yet capable of intense physical presence - should provide such a constant leitmotif in Oldenburg and van Bruggen's recent art. A number of these pieces relate to their scheme for a music room at the château in the Loire Valley that they purchased in 1992, a circumscribed space of conviviality, drama, pleasure and expectation. The Tied Trumpet of 2004 (cat. no. 16), with its tubes wound together like the garden hoses they used to nourish the parkland outside, is shown as muted, placed face downwards so as to muffle even the possibility of sound. From the mouthpiece dangling loose near the top through to the body of the instrument, like wound intestines, these pipes encourage us to imagine the passage of breath that gives life to inanimate objects and conveys through them an animating human presence. Just as vivid - and more pointed as an expression of the relationship between the two artists who made it - is a work of 2005, French Horns, Unwound and Entwined (cat. no. 19), in which one object wraps itself playfully around the other.

The trio of instruments titled Study for Beached Lutes - Version One (cat. no. 18) made in 2005 are even more humanly suggestive, bringing us back yet again to powerfully erotic imagery, this time playing openly on the notion of coupledom, with one lute apparently sitting on the lap of another and a third companion alongside. Their once firm but now detumesced forms are depicted as soft and sprawling, the loosened strings indicative of a state of dishevelment and of a complete loss of inhibitions. Where once, presumably, was formality, elegance and a ritual of courtship, all has become relaxed to the point of carefree intimacy and reckless pleasure. At this point in the mating game, appearances no longer have to be maintained. Denuded and divested of all pretence and secrets, they yield to each other just as they do to the viewer's gaze. The sensuousness of their coloured and textured surfaces, so redolent of the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings to which they also pay homage, completes the sensation of languorous ease.

The musical themes continue in such sculptures as Silent Metronome, 16 inch, Version Three, 2005 (cat. no. 17), in which the monotonously ticking rod remains forever locked in place, and Soft Saxophone, Scale A, Muslin, 1992 (cat. no. 8), in which a lazily drooping shape - part human, part musical instrument, part echo of the map of Manhattan - evokes the dreamlike state of jazz improvisation that has served as a backdrop to the history of music and entertainment in New York City. It is jazz, too, that comes to mind with the representations of clarinets in Standing Soft Clarinet - Gray, 2001 (cat. no. 15), and Leaning Clarinet, 2006, another work sparked by daydreams in the beautiful parkland of their French château. Bathed in a deep blue the colour of a cloudless sky, the latter serves (perhaps coincidentally) as a homage to one of the most arresting and seductive lines in all of American music, the opening soaring clarinet solo of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. The keys are shown cascading gracefully off the instrument's body like the notes in a continuous melody; so complete is the identification between artist and musician, and between musician and instrument, that the clarinet's normally sword-like stiffness has been transformed into a gentle curve like that made by the musician's body as he enters completely into the swing of the music. And with this, Oldenburg and van Bruggen leave the stage, having stylishly entertained their audience, taken them on a voyage into the imagination and reasserted the romance of art long after joining forces in what might turn out, paradoxically, to have been no attack on the notion of the solitary romantic artist - but rather a complete reshaping and enlarging of that idea so that it encompasses not just one or two people but the whole of humanity.