Fag End

Claes Oldenburg redefined the idea of the monument through enormous reproductions of commercial and quotidian objects that are at once whimsical, irreverent, and absurd. He moved to New York after college in 1956 and quickly became a prominent figure in Happenings and performance art, but his plaster sculptures shown in 1961 at The Store, a display in his studio that parodied American consumerism, launched him to fame as a leading artist associated with the emergent Pop movement. Later that decade, Oldenburg embarked on a series of Proposed Colossal Monuments, renderings in pencil or watercolor that transformed a familiar site or geographic location through a startling sculptural intervention. By the 1970s, Oldenburg had turned to actual monumental outdoor sculptures as his primary output. Most of these are co-authored with Coosje van Bruggen, his longtime artistic collaborator and second wife.

In this early drawing from the Proposed Colossal Monuments series, Oldenburg and van Bruggen sketch a gigantic monument to the cigarette butt, a proposal as surrealist as it is seriously rendered. "Fag" refers to British slang for the cigarette, though the artists would have been aware of the word’s derogatory connotations in the United States. Oldenburg first began to depict this subject in the late-1960s, when he envisioned a cigarette monument for central London, inspired by antismoking posters that he saw in the city. He intended his idea for a commemorative statue to this harmful substance, so often discarded on the street as trash, as a provocative prank.