Plantoir or Garden Trowel?

We discuss the sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, play bingo, and create artworks from everyday objects.

English-language mediated tours of GES-2 House of Culture typically take place on weekdays.

To learn more about group tours or to request one, please email* us at mediationcalls@v-a-c.org.

Why is it that contemporary artists are allowed to make art from a bicycle wheel, a can of soup, an advertising banner, a banana, or a garden trowel, but we are not? We believe that everyone has that right.

Photo: Anna Zavozyaeva

Plantoir by Oldenburg and van Bruggen, installed in front of the GES-2 building, serves as a starting point for a conversation about the boundaries of art and the power of creative gestures that transcend them.

The symbolic significance of the sculpture primarily references cultivation of the land—working in the garden or in the fields. At the same time, this exaggeratedly monumental work is full of irony. The authors deliberately call it plantoir (French for “garden trowel”), as if provoking a fusion of the “high” culture of French gardens and the “low” culture of an everyday tool. Their play with scale is meant to draw the viewer’s attention to mundane things and to find inspiration in them.

Through questions and a game of bingo, participants of the tour, together with a mediator, will look for objects in the GES-2 space with which they can recreate the creative processes of pop art classics, and try to find answers to questions related to this movement, such as: “How can we ‘appropriate’ and object and make it meaningful to others? How does Plantoir change our customary perception of the urban landscape? Why is contemporary art not only concerned with manual labour, but also with paying attention to ready-made things around us?”

Official partner of the GES-2 House of Culture mediation programmе.

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