Friday, January 6, 2023

monumental replicas / complex and complete

students at Peet Junior High School
Roy R. Behrens, "Looming Large: the outdoor megasculpture student projects of Bill Close" in The Iowa Source. Vol 40 No 1. January 2023, pp. 6-7—

In the spring of 1994, when I was in my 40s and had moved back to Iowa to teach, I was walking near a shopping mall and came within sight of a bicycle shop. There, propped up in front of the building, was a gigantic mountain bike, so large that it was taller than the building it stood beside. Even from a nearer view, it appeared to be an enormous, functioning bicycle, complex and complete in every detail. It was breathtaking and delightful, a flashback to my childhood days.

That enormous bicycle, as I soon found out, was a trompe l’oeil work of art, a “fool the eye” construction, like the large-scale sculptures of Swedish-born American artist Claes Oldenburg. As a pop artist, Oldenburg made monumental replicas of mundane familiar objects, such as bowling pins, binoculars, and a garden trowel. But the giant bicycle that I had suddenly come upon was not created by Oldenburg. The sculpture had been built from scratch as an art project by ninth-grade students at Peet Junior High School in Cedar Falls. The person who initiated the project and supervised the students was an art teacher named William F. (Bill) Close. more>>>

book cover