Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

At a bedrock level, architectural Postmodernism and Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Large-Scale Projects shared a similar goal: to add warmth to an otherwise chilly architectural landscape through an engaging and accessible formal language, rooted in thought-provoking humor and norm-shattering subversiveness. The aim, in other words, was no less than a re-enchantment of the everyday.

That Oldenburg and van Bruggen achieved this cannot be doubted. Their sculptures, whether they are in the middle of a bustling metropolis or a provincial park, consistently draw people to engage with them, to make them sites of play, wonder, and merriment. These are not monuments that haughtily lord over the public from high up on a plinth, but rather monuments that stoop down to welcome people, like benevolent giants. You can see this in pictures of the projects living out their lives in various landscapes, with children clambering over them and adults perched atop them or lolling in their embrace.

This is not to say that Dropped Bouquet is without an element of pleasure, beauty, or joy. Or even to say that it is solely a work obsessed with death. After all, the Dutch master painters of vanitas still lives, who were putatively engaged in admonishing their audiences to turn their eyes away from vain pleasures and toward the divine, nevertheless took exquisite, even sybaritic, care in rendering their tabletops heaped with worldly spoils. Something like this internal tension is also present in Dropped Bouquet: for every bouquet that is thrown in rapture on the stage after a bravura performance, there is one chucked in the trash after a breakup; for every bouquet tossed at a wedding, there is one dropped on a grave. Here, the bouquet’s arrested motion, a key feature of many of the Large-Scale Projects, provides the most rewarding interpretive lens. Our lives, our projects, and even our empires are temporary, liable to be dispersed like sand into the wind at a moment’s notice, no matter what our vain monuments with their promises of permanence would have us believe. In the face of this, we must snatch up beauty on the fly and hold it close, before it slips from our fingers and into the embrace of the earth.