Plug 1970

Claes Oldenburg made this sculpture, Plug, and it's like a monument to the everyday. Imagine him, years ago, thinking about how to monumentalize the ordinary. There’s a kind of humor in taking something so functional and blowing it up to this scale, right? It's almost cartoonish, like a Pop Art dream. The smooth, bronze-like surface is so different from the plastic or rubber we usually see. It changes the whole feeling, elevating the plug to something almost…ancient. It makes you wonder what else we take for granted, what other objects could have this kind of presence if we just looked at them differently. Oldenburg makes us reconsider what we think of as valuable or worth noticing. That's the genius, and the joy, of his work.