Message in a Bottle

           Bottle of Notes is the first public sculpture in the United Kingdom by the two internationally renowned artists, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.  The piece, which soars thirty feet high, alongside mima in Centre Square, was completed in 1993, and it is a magnificent piece of public art in Middlesbrough, UK, home of voyager and mapmaker James Cook.

            In 1986, a program had been started to help revitalize the economically depressed region of Middlesbrough through commissions of art. The sculpture was to be built in Hebburn, helping to provide employment for workers in the abandoned shipyards along the Tyne River.

http://www.pbase.com/jabtas/canon_28135mm

            A lattice-like steel sculpture in the shape of a bottle set at an angle in a bed of bark chips. The bottle has a steel “cork”. The piece is formed of a hand-written message (Claes Oldenburg) which has inside it another hand-written message arranged in a spiral. The bottle, the inner text and the cork are all painted in polyurethane enamel-white, blue, black respectively. The outer text is taken from the log of Captain Cook’s first voyage to the South Pacific in 1768. It reads, ‘We had every advatage we could desire in observing the whole passage of the planet Venus over the Sun’s disk”. The inner text is from a 1987 poem, ‘Memos of a Gadfly’, by van Bruggen about her childhood in Amsterdam: ‘I like to remember seagulls in full flight gliding over the ring of canals.’ Appropriately, the sculpture is sited beside a small ornamental lake in a new, centrally-located park.