Oldenburg's text from Notes:

When commissioned to do a poster announcing a print show, I had a choice between two images of contact—a ground-out cigarette-butt or a punching bag. Since it was Jasper [Johns’s] show, the preference went toward something close to one of his objects—the light bulb. The bag is represented in three versions denying its function. In the floating version, only the thick disk would be visible, like a lily-pad on the water. Using the circular planes of the disk, reducing the bag a little and adding a rectangle, one would arrive at Mickey Mouse. If the disk, in its colossal version, were made of concrete, it would serve as a dam.

Oldenburg's text from Notes:

Plans for a new museum were in the air—arguments about the efficiency and appearance of the new Pasadena Museum, antagonism against the County Museum. Simplicity was called for. Using a tobacco ad in the Los Angeles Times, I made my proposal and followed it to its conclusion; the can-key, in colossal scale, became a fair sculpture, uncontroversial and organic to the conception. The telescoped construction suits the different scales required for a museum's function—food/books, exhibitions, and auditorium. Beautification is achieved by literal rendering of the original—its color, the revealed tobacco in relief and the ripped-open silver paper of the cigarette package (a flourish). In the scale I imagine, the source of the structure would not be obviously identifiable, except from an airplane.

Oldenburg's text from Notes:

For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two; eat one and drop the other. The city has a program for beautifying oil derricks and the dropped cone is proposed as a design. The proposal is influenced by the megaphone-like structure on the Venice beach and its echoes in the sails of boats beyond. The shapes of “draw-downs” made to test color in the lithography shop suggest that cone-form and also, by their translucence, suggest the sea and sky. A derrick is placed where there is a well. It may be in your back yard. The flat roofs around it are like the fragments of tape. The Punching Bag again—ice cream, the bag. The circular outlines of the disks, top and bottom, are separated by miles of vanishing-perspective.

Excerpt from Oldenburg's text from Notes:

A reconditioning for P.O.P. Park, rumored to be condemned. The wreckage of amusement parks! When I first came to Venice in 1947, the shore was strewn with remains; now Coney Island vanishes and Chicago’s Riverview. An American War Museum was first proposed to occupy Welfare Island in New York’s East River. The park, containing life-size panoramas of our weapons and their effects through the ages, would culminate in a concrete replica of the H-bomb cloud (at the south end)—a structure containing a restaurant, an auditorium for old war films and a planetarium of our advances into space. Something for the families on Sundays. The exhibits, drawn from the past, buried in time, would be technologically inspiring and curiosity-satisfying, rather than terrifying and solemn.

Excerpt from Oldenburg's text from Notes:

Through a misunderstanding, I believed that I would be given an enormous area to use in the 1968 Dokumenta exhibition in Kassel. I thought of building a golf course and then, imagining the surfaces of sand traps detached, I thought of scattering huge potato chips over the area like fallen leaves (or ears). In a practical mood, I reduced this to one huge chip which metamorphosed when a live model revealed her navel on the steps of the County Museum. The navel [of the sculpture] was to be filled with colored water (a recollection of Bernini), though several mothers pointed out that children might slip in.

Excerpt from Oldenburg's text from Notes:

Mickey Mouse, as form, is important in the American range of forms. The Mouse’s personality or nostalgia need not be discussed. The form may derive from the early film camera and that is how I arrived at this version—wherein the “eyes” operate as shutters, represented by old fashioned window shades. Such shades never quite roll up, which accounts for the sleepy look.

Excerpt from Oldenburg's text from Notes:

The Marmont serves breakfast on a tray outside the door and, for the coffee, they provide a paper cup with two sugar cubes. I am struck by this container and its contents while waiting for the elevator on St. Valentine’s day. They remind me of Elaine’s two front teeth, snake eyes, deuces, Gemini. As a consequence I ask to have a facsimile of the shop’s stationery included, with its embossed “chop.”. . . The structural poise of an ad in the Sunday Times Magazine suggests a building; the stiffness of the skirt and bottom edge of the suit-jacket reinforces the impression of solidity. What does not matter is thrown away. Why should buildings always be boxes?

Excerpt from Oldenburg's text from Notes:

A “monument” for retiring Alfred Barr Jr. is a kite in the shape of a tuxedo bow tie; I have rarely observed him not wearing one. Commenting on Barr’s speech at the last formal occasion, B. used Cassius Clay’s phrase “floats like a butterfly . . . ” The kite could be flown from the museum garden and viewed also at rest on the ground.

                Palm trees merge with a favorite image—the soft gym shoes. In a striving for air, all is removed but the rubber toes, the tongues and the cords with their holes. The sculpture, big as a good-sized palm, may flex, like the elbowed extension which projects my studio telephone into the room. At left, lies the ring from a giant cigar.

Oldenburg's text from Notes:

There was a time when Los Angeles was the world capital of aggrandized objects, but now, even the last of the great Spotted Dogs has disappeared. Common structures, like diners, stole grandeur by imitating zeppelins. Buildings may be “dressed” in colorful patterns or plainly, depending on the taste and services. Nostrils may serve as tunnel entrances.

Excerpt from Oldenburg's text from Notes:

A city is all words—a newspaper, an alphabet. It would allay the strain on the imaginations of architects and their clients if a law were passed requiring all new buildings to have the shape of a letter or several letters, or a word. Seen from below, like the unfinished freeway connection ending against the sky, the result would be modern and traditional, elementary, graceful and informative.

Excerpt from Oldenburg's text from Notes:

Another dam is proposed in the shape of a colossal black flashlight. The escaping water is colored a hot yellow and is lighted at night. In a dry version, the object may have fallen from the hand of an usherette. It gives all Hollywood the persistent sunset glow of far northern cities in summertime.

Excerpt from Oldenburg's text from Notes:

We were assembled on the steps of the [Los Angeles County] Museum to have our photos taken, and they seemed to be leaving nothing out. Even the manned sweeper was included. It was bigger than any vacuum cleaner I had ever seen, doing its daily sucking on the flagstones to keep the approaches clean. The Museum stands where creatures too large for their own good sank through the asphalt. Associating the memory of these animals with this machine, I arrived at a proposal for a moving sculpture, to roam forever the holy park behind the Museum—a tractor, to which two huge inflated bags are connected (like ears or arms). The operator is hired for his lifetime. He has no other duties besides driving the sculpture. Configurations are left to his whims; he may, if he chooses, create confusion between the bags, trap himself and have to be helped out.