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Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969

Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969 Claes Oldenburg. Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969. Installation at Beinecke Plaza, Yale University, May 15, 1969. Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969 TOM WILLIAMS Acts by artists of a political nature are very rare. This was probably the closest thing to a political monument I’ve ever done. —Claes Oldenburg1 On May 15, 1969, Yale University became the unlikely site for Claes Oldenburg’s first large-scale public monument, entitled Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks. The sculpture was commissioned by a group of dissident students from the School of Art and Architecture who referred to themselves as the Colossal Keepsake Corporation, and it was installed in a sensational happening with neither the permission nor the foreknowledge of the university administration. “[W]e picked the most prominent and provocative site that we could find,” Oldenburg later remarked of Beinecke Plaza, where the monument was installed “in front of the War Memorial and the president’s office.”2 Shortly after noon, a ragtag group entered the campus with a small caravan of trucks and trailers and unloaded the 24-foot, 3,500-pound sculpture of a lipstick standing vertically on a tank chassis. As a crowd of students assembled, members of the Corporation struggled to http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Grey Room MIT Press

Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969

Williams, Tom
Grey Room , Volume Spring 2008 (31) – Apr 1, 2008
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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2008 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ISSN
1526-3819
eISSN
1536-0105
DOI
10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.116
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Claes Oldenburg. Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969. Installation at Beinecke Plaza, Yale University, May 15, 1969. Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969 TOM WILLIAMS Acts by artists of a political nature are very rare. This was probably the closest thing to a political monument I’ve ever done. —Claes Oldenburg1 On May 15, 1969, Yale University became the unlikely site for Claes Oldenburg’s first large-scale public monument, entitled Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks. The sculpture was commissioned by a group of dissident students from the School of Art and Architecture who referred to themselves as the Colossal Keepsake Corporation, and it was installed in a sensational happening with neither the permission nor the foreknowledge of the university administration. “[W]e picked the most prominent and provocative site that we could find,” Oldenburg later remarked of Beinecke Plaza, where the monument was installed “in front of the War Memorial and the president’s office.”2 Shortly after noon, a ragtag group entered the campus with a small caravan of trucks and trailers and unloaded the 24-foot, 3,500-pound sculpture of a lipstick standing vertically on a tank chassis. As a crowd of students assembled, members of the Corporation struggled to

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Grey Room – MIT Press

Published: Apr 1, 2008

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