Narrator: Hey, is it hot in here? I mean, look at this thing. I think it melted. What is it anyway? A giant black bug? Yuck!
Oh, no, wait. Look on the platform. A bug wouldn't have an electric plug.
Hey! I think it's a fan. Yeah, one of those old fashioned fans with the spinning blades. Only these look more like they're wilting.
Maybe if I just plug it in.
[SFX]
Whoa! Turn it off! Turn it off!
Okay, so it's not a real fan, but it is pretty cool. Cool.
Claes Oldenburg loved to turn everyday household things into giant sculptures to make us laugh and think about them in a new way. Most fans are hard metal machines made by other machines in a factory. But a person sewed this droopy, soft plastic fan together and gave it a personality, too. By making something small and ordinary as big as a statue in a park, Oldenburg shakes up our ideas about what's supposed to be important.
He once said, “I try to look at things as if I had never seen them before, as if I were a Martian and didn't know what they were for.”