The Dash column explores art and its social contexts. The dash separates and the dash joins, it pauses and it moves along. The dash is where the viewer comes to terms with what they’ve seen. Here, X-TRA editor Anuradha Vikram shares her inside knowledge of an obscure but pivotal theatrical work by Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen, and Frank Gehry, Il Corso del Coltello (The Course of the Knife), performed as a table reading by a cast of contemporary artists at Pace Gallery, New York, on July 21, 2021.
Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen, and Frank Gehry, Il Corso del Coltello, September 1985. Performance at the Arsenale, Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Oldenburg/van Bruggen Studio. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard.
As a studio assistant to Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in the late 1990s, I developed a strong attachment to Il Corso del Coltello, a hugely ambitious performance work centered on a massive ship in the form of a Swiss Army knife. Coltello was Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s attempt to mount a Happening at an operatic scale. In the performance, the key concerns of these artists’ multi-decade collaboration in drawing and sculpture were brought to life. Written with Frank Gehry and performed by the trio with curators Germano Celant and Pontus Hulten in Venice, Italy, in September 1985, Coltello brought the improvisational character of Oldenburg’s performances from the early 1960s into the 1980s discourse of postmodernism, anchored in art history by van Bruggen through frequent quotations from Venetian art and architecture.
The climax of what Celant called a “monumental multimedia performance” was the entrance of Knife/Ship, a 31-foot floating sculpture moored in the Rio dell’Arsenale until the pivotal narrative juncture. The ship was an architecture of its own, made of steel, wood, plastic-coated fabric, and an electric motor. When activated, the ship extended its blades in upright and horizontal configurations; the corkscrew spun in spirals like the flags of the ancient Venetian Carnevale, a collective performance of masquerade that allows one to selectively enhance and present aspects of the self. After being exhibited at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid in 1986, the ship was dismantled and reconstructed for the Guggenheim Museum in 1987, and subsequently acquired by the museum in 1995 on the occasion of Oldenburg’s retrospective there. A second version was built for MOCA in enameled steel, suitable for display outdoors.
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Knife Ship 1:12, 2008. Aluminum and mahogany wood, 8½ x 40 x 9½ in. closed without oars, 27¾ x 82¾ x 37 in. fully extended with oars (blades at 180 degrees; corkscrew at 90 degrees), 32¾ x 40 x 37 in. partially extended with oars (blades and corkscrew at 90 degrees), edition 1 of 6. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York.
Pace Live’s restaging of Coltello as a table reading in July brought the work into a twenty-first century conversation that emphasizes speed and transmission over the slowness and presentness that Coltello foregrounds. Presumably the revival’s objective was to call attention to the project’s remaining artifacts, which await acquisition by a major collection. Only a handful of Coltello works are in collections, including MoMA (a drawing, Characters and Props from ‘Il Corso del Coltello’ Along the Canale do San Marco, Coltello Ship in ‘Background—Version II’), the Guggenheim (Knife Ship I), MOCA (Knife Ship II), and the Castello di Rivoli in Torino, Italy (Houseball and Architectural Fragments).
Claes & Coosje: A Duet, installation view, Pace Gallery, New York, March 26–May 9 , 2021. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York.
Today, what strikes me as most relevant about the work is its thematic treatment of migration. Although all Coltello’s original participants were of European descent, they shared immigration experiences, with the pressure to assimilate that entails. Hulten and van Bruggen came to live and work in the United States as professionals, while Canadian-born Gehry moved to California as a young adult, and Oldenburg emigrated from Sweden as a child. Van Bruggen’s character in the play, Georgia Sandbag, has a massive “houseball” laden with furniture and import stamps and bound with rope, a mobile monument to rootlessness. It suggests that, rather than shedding our identities as we might shed our names when crossing borders, we endlessly acquire new aspects of our personalities. Gehry’s character talks about his Jewish upbringing and Celant’s about his Hungarian ancestry, aspects both of them minimized in their professional lives to avoid scrutiny and exclusion. Sandbag’s nomadism and Dr. Coltello’s collecting impulse likewise reflect the changing global paradigm of the 1980s, when the international economic systems, multinational corporations, and market-oriented alliances of today were becoming established.
Because it anticipates the interests of a future generation from the perspective of the previous one, Coltello is less a watershed work of the ’80s than a pivotal anomaly. Its representation in the art historical canon is commensurately spare. Few recognized its meaning or implications at the time, even if the message seems clear in the aftermath of the 1990s’ global turn. Little to no scholarship nor outside documentation about Coltello has surfaced since its debut. The performance preceded the ubiquity of video, and has been preserved mainly through performance posters, pastel drawings, and props, most of which have spent the intervening decades in storage. At any rate, documentation was a lesser priority for its creators, whose primary concern was the live experience of the work at the site of the historic Venetian Arsenale, upon which elements of the story and props were based. Soft sculptures were rigged to fall from the facades of the surrounding medieval buildings, while a lion named Chateaubriand strolled among the stately stone felines on the piazza’s north side.
Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen, and Frank Gehry, Il Corso del Coltello, September 1985. Performance at the Arsenale, Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Oldenburg/van Bruggen Studio. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard.
While the performance was set and staged in Venice, Italy, aspects of the script make reference to Venice, California, as well. Coltello has a lot to do with Los Angeles. Longtime Angelenos may remember the sculpture Knife Slicing Through Wall that Oldenburg and van Bruggen installed on the outside of Margo Leavin’s space at 817 Hilldale Avenue in 1989. The eleven-foot, stainless steel blade remained embedded in the building’s facade until the gallery closed in 2013. Leavin’s gallery represented Oldenburg and van Bruggen for many years. Though raised in Chicago and based in New York, Oldenburg spent a significant part of the 1960s in Los Angeles with Patty Mucha, his first wife, befriending artists including John Baldessari and Dennis Hopper, and frequently returned for exhibitions and to fabricate his large-scale sculptures with van Bruggen. Pontus Hulten, the formidable Swedish curator who was the founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown, was close with Oldenburg, a fellow Swede. MOCA’s Panza Collection includes many of Oldenburg’s important early Store works.
Left to right: Frank Gehry, Coosje van Bruggen, and Claes Oldenburg, 1988. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York. Photo © Sidney B. Felsen.
Perhaps most significantly, Los Angeles is the adopted home of Frank Gehry, who completed a Bachelor’s in architecture at USC in 1954 before contributing to the total transformation of Southern California’s architectural landscape—beginning with his own home in Santa Monica. Gehry’s character in Coltello, Frankie P. Toronto, is a barber from that other Venice—California—who expounds on the virtues of the blade as an architectural tool for what Celant calls “disorganized order.” At the time, the architect was revolutionizing building design using newly available CAD tools that allowed him to freely model architectural forms and then slice them apart. Gehry also experimented with sculpture during this period, creating snake- and fishlike forms with chips of Formica as scales. Following the Coltello performance, Gehry would invite Oldenburg and van Bruggen to contribute to his design for the Chiat/Day building at 340 Main Street in Santa Monica, resulting in that structure’s iconic binoculars-shaped entrance.
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Frankie P. Toronto Costume – Enlarged Version, 1986. Canvas filled with soft polyurethane foam, painted with latex, overall installation dimensions variable, jacket with hat 74 x 97 x 49 in., pants 71 x 69 x 13-1/2 in. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York. © Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.
These productive though short-lived collaborations between Gehry, Oldenburg, and van Bruggen continued to inform their separate practices throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Gehry’s buildings took on sculptural qualities, while Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s sculptures grew to architectural proportions. Gehry’s Nationale Nederlanden building, designed and built in Prague between 1992–1996, brings the performative energy of Coltello to a pas de deux between distinct, interleaning structures. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Bicyclette Ensevelie (Buried Bicycle) (1990), meanwhile, uses architectural scale and placement to imply that a massive bicycle is buried underground with only a handlebar, bell, and parts of seat and wheel exposed. Coltello taught these artists how to make an entire city their studio. This may be its most enduring lesson. To the immigrant artists: the world’s a stage, yours to invigorate with the right props and players. X
Anuradha Vikram is a curator, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. She is the author of Decolonizing Culture (Art Practical/Sming Sming Books, 2017) and a guest editor of the recent Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas special issue, “Challenging Hegemony within the South Asian Diaspora” (Brill, Fall 2019).