Tea Bag, from the portfolio 4 on Plexiglas

Claes Oldenburg's Statement on Tea Bag (Claes Oldenburg: The Multiples Store, 1996, pp. 14-17):

'Baked Potato and Tea Bag, which developed almost concurrently, were the first multiples I made in a regulated commercial edition. This was the period of "soft" sculptures, which were sewn in canvas or vinyl using patterns derived from models built of cardboard and expanded polysterene.

Starting with the Paris food pieces of 1964, I developed a variation, making hard versions of the "soft" sculptures in the following way: Canvas works were filled with wet plaster. When the plaster had dried, the canvas was peeled off and discarded, leaving the contents, etched with reversed seams. This technique was used to create the masters of both Tea Bag and Baked Potato. In each case a unique sculpture was made at the same time as the master for the multiple, using an identical version of the sewn form. They differ because, though the form was the same, it could be shaped differently with the hands while the plaster was still wet. In both subjects there is a literal correspondence between the structure of the art work and that of the original: cloth = the paper in a tea bag or the skin of a potato; plaster = tea, wet by water or potato mass. The Baked Potato multiple shows the subject before consumption. The Tea Bag multiple represents the subject after use, having been discarded or dropped on a horizontal surface.

Tea Bag, in its original form as a dropped tea bag, carries with it the horizontal surface on which it has been dropped. The portfolio for which it was made, 4 on Plexiglas, was essentially a painters' portfolio, with works by Larry Rivers, Barnett Newman, Philip Guston, and me. A certain thickness was allowed but the presentation had to be vertical, like a painting. To conform to this requirement, the horizontal plane of the dropped tea bag was tilted to the vertical, so that in looking across, one is actually looking down. The print becomes a relief, a passage from flat to round, another version of a sculptor's approach to making a print. The experience becomes more complicated because the solid original is eliminated; only a transparent impression of it remains, as if pressed into the glass or plastic veering the "picture." Inside is another version of the tea bag, dry as if before its use, made from the same pattern as the dropped bag but of beige felt and not filled or subjected to any process, a kind of "before" to the dropped bag's "after," or an ideal state in relation to the dropped bag's circumstantial character. The formulation also creates a separation of the senses: what the hands touch is not what the eyes see.'

Screenprint in colours on laminated vacuum formed vinyl, with felt, Plexiglas, and rayon cord, 1966, signed and numbered in pencil on the verso, from the edition of 125, published by Multiples Inc., New York, overall: 991 x 711 x 89 mm (39 x 28 x 3½ in.)

Multiples Store 4; Multiples in Retrospect 4; Axsom and Platzker 36