ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Claes Oldenburg as well as fellow artist Robert Smithson produced works that interacted very specifically with the contemporaneous discourses of building, destroying, designating and protecting public monuments in the 1960s. The artist Claes Oldenburg created his first monumental sculptures for urban plazas in the late 1960s, but by that time he had already conceived numerous public monuments in the form of texts and drawings. Oldenburg's drawing not simply rendered a fantastic monument as a roadblock on Canal Street causing traffic chaos, but stood in direct opposition to the city's looming plans to construct Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX) at that location. From the seemingly immaterial proposals and texts, to the drawings and photographs, to the actual tours, the art made by Oldenburg and Smithson impacted how and what people saw. In 1970, a few years after the artworks were created, the New York City Preservation Commission deliberated for the first time about protecting industrial vernacular structures.
