Profile Airflow - Test Mold, Front End

Claes Oldenburg's Statement on Profile Airflow (Claes Oldenburg: The Multiples Store, 1996, pp. 32-35):

'The Profile Airflow multiple, like the Tea Bag, is a relief superimposed over an image, though this time the relief is larger and far more complex in detail and fabrication. The Chrysler Airflow, which appeared in 1937, was the first "streamlined" car. It became the subject for many of my soft sculptures shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1966. In the course of the project I visited Carl Breer, the inventor of the Chrysler Airflow, in Detroit and studied a mammoth specimen of the automobile that he owned. I dissected the car into parts that would serve as sculptures – the radiator, the engine, the muffler, the dashboard, the tires, the doors, taillight, mudguards, etc. – and established three scales. The Airflow project at Gemini G.E.L., made three years later, was a kind of reprise in the media of reproduction, set in the industrial paradise of Los Angeles where, I discovered, Breer had been born. Two days after I arrived in Los Angeles to work at Gemini G.E.L. for the first time, I was presented with an actual Airflow, which happened to be maroon just like a toy Airflow I had owned as a child and, in addition, had the distinction of being the first automobile to have been driven over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. This car was then intensively photographed in preparation for what was to be a portfolio of prints and reliefs on different areas of the car, together with a separate Profile edition. As it turned out, the portfolio project gave way to the Notes, a suite of lithographs, and all effort connected with the Airflow became concentrated on the Profile Airflow.

The specifications for the Profile Airflow relief were that it be clear in color, transparent like a swimming pool but of a consistency like flesh, and, that these conditions be "permanent." The conditions seemed impossible to fulfil at first, but gradually the technology was discovered or invented by the indefatigable Ken Tyler and the Gemini G.E.L. staff. The standards of production were the highest possible, in keeping with the advanced technology of the region and, remarkably, when the first group of Profile Airflows had been sold and found to discolor, the entire edition was returned (in an echo of automobile recalls) and remade to the accompaniment of a successful lawsuit against the supplier of the chemical ingredients.'

Cast-polyurethane relief over screenprinted Plexiglas, in welded aluminium frame, 1972, signed and numbered by incision, artist's proof aside from the edition of 50, published by Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, with copyright and care information printed on verso, overall: 470 x 397 x 102 (18½ x 15½ x 4 in.)

Multiples Store 16; Multiples in Retrospect 16; Axsom and Platzker 99