Claes Oldenburg | The Soap at Baton Rouge

Claes Oldenburg

The Soap at Baton Rouge

Cincinnati, USA: Carl Solway Gallery, 1991

4 x 52 x 34 cm.

Edition of 250 signed and numbered copies

Produced to accompany Claes Oldenburg: Multiples in Retrospect, this cast polyurethane bar of soap is housed with the book in a linen-covered box, which also includes a screen print. The multiple has an incised signature, title, and number and the end sheet of the book is additionally signed and numbered. 

"In a short and charming text written to accompany the publication of his multiple The Soap at Baton Rouge, Claes Oldenburg talks of the genesis of the piece in a proposal to create a large-scale public work for Cincinnati. The proposal, to float a giant bar of Ivory soap down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, has all of the savvy whimsy we have come to expect of Oldenburg, combining references to the commercial history of the city with a gently comic debunking of the product itself that ultimately places the initial object of contemplation in an entirely new context. Cincinnati is home to Procter & Gamble, a giant among soap-sellers. It is also a town notorious for its clean living; a prosecutor of pornographers and a persecutor of the arts, Cincinnati tried to send a museum director to jail for showing the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe in 1990. Procter & Gamble's best-known product is Ivory soap, which the advertisement claims is so pure "it floats." But it floats because it is full of air, while the

"pure soap" that sold this product so heavily to the American public became rather soiled when the maidenly "Ivory Girl" turned out to be Marilyn Chambers, the infamous porn star.

A proposal for a grand riverboat spectacle failed to materialize, but the realization that, had it floated, it would have reached Baton Rouge no bigger than an actual bar of soap led to the idea of the multiple edition, thus cutting the grandiose histories of both the river and Procter & Gamble down to size.” 

- Thomas Lawson