Mouse Museum

In the midsixties Claes Oldenburg begins in his New York studio to present a collection of found objects and peculiar mass articles beside small models and studies of his own work. Thereby he develops the idea to store this fund in a miniature museum of its own. In 1972, at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Oldenburg was given the chance for the first time to translate his idea for a “museum of popular objects” into a real structure and in 1977 the Mouse Museum was finally realized in its present form. The ground plan of the housing is based on the sketch of the so called „Geometric Mouse“, a fusion of the head of comic character Mickey Mouse with the outline form of a former filmcamera model. Drawing upon the first model of corrugated cardboard the walls were produced of black-painted corrugated aluminum. The interior is dark; only an illuminated vitrine runs along the walls as a continuous strip. The two small vitrines in the free-standing columns mark the eyes of the mouse. In the vitrines, Oldenburg has arranged roughly 400 objects from his years of collecting activities and compiled them into groups according to his personal presentation: without any hierarchy, without pedestals, they are connected to one another in a loosely associative sequence; the eye is led from one object to the next via similarities and suggestive associations. When the visitor walks along the walls, the illuminated band of vitrines unrolls like a filmstrip, the objects in the vitrine like a “skyline” of consumer culture. Oldenburg: “It shows a kind of encyclopedic view of the world. Within it are all possible dimensions, every shade of feeling. There is art there and a bunch of non-art. It’s like a cross-section of a specific time, a microcosm that poses all possible questions.”