Double-Nose/Purse/Punching Bag/Ashtray

Claes Oldenburg's Statement on Double-Nose/Purse/Punching Bag/ Ashtray (Claes Oldenburg: The Multiples Store, 1996, p. 38):

'In Double-Nose/Purse/Punching Bag/Ashtray, several subjects that developed over a period of two years were combined to form one complex souvenir of the time, a sort of diary in the form of objects. The time was the end of the 1960s, a period of anxiety, but the experiences referred to are mostly personal. A more-or-less public experience like London Knees 1966 could be documented with newspaper clippings, but Double-Nose/Purse/Punching Bag/Ashtray seemed to call for a more intimate account, like the little mouselike missal or pocket tract that was finally produced, on delicate "Bible" paper, whose self-conscious tone was perhaps encouraged by some months of Freudian psychoanalysis in the latter part of 1968.

Besides its reference to the body, the Double-Nose/Purse/Punching Bag/Ashtray, in its peculiar way, is also about landscape. The particular landscape evoked is perhaps more that of northern California than Los Angeles (through the redwood box and bark), and also of the Pacific Northwest (as it appears on the label from a can of Olympia beer). The wooden counters imprinted with a skull and crossbones from Sidney Felsen's collection of rubber stamps still puzzle me but may suggest a buried treasure. A facsimile made from a notebook filled with sketches done at the time, stamped "memo," was left out of the box because its explicitness seemed to undercut the box's atmosphere of evasiveness and concealment. Only the mythic mask with the penis-nose survived.'

Leather, bronze, wood, metal, bark chips, and deerskin bound book: A History of The Double-Nose/Purse/Punching Bag/Ashtray, with the original redwood box, 1970, signed in pencil and numbered, artist's proof aside from the edition of 75, published by Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, with their blindstamp incised on the bronze rim of the ashtray, overall (box closed): 276 x 527 x 213 mm (10¾ x 20¾ x 20¾ in.)

Multiples Store 13; Multiples in Retrospect 13