From the Entropic Library, 1989,
included in Magiciens de la Terre,
La Grande Halle - La Villette, Paris,
May 18 - August 14, 1989.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

From the Entropic Library is a forty-foot-long sculpture created for anexhibition held in Paris in 1989. Its imagery consists of eroded and topplingbooks and notebooks between bookends that combine the forms of an elephant headand an outboard motor. The disintegrating still life, spread beneath ashattered lightbulb, represents the remains of a library left to the elementsin the African jungle by a European explorer. The library containsthree-dimensional pages made up of words taken from texts by van Bruggen andexecuted in Oldenburg's handwriting. Within the international scope of theParis exhibition, which included artists from such diverse places as Mexico andSenegal, From the Entropic Library made reference to the history of Europeancolonialism in Africa. The original sculpture is represented in this exhibitionby a large model.

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