Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929)

Oldenburg returned to New York in 1965 from traveling through Europe and the United States. His memories and experiences while traveling had given him an inclination of representing objects within the landscape, a combination of still life and landscape scales. Oldenburg often came back to his favorite objects, producing multiple sketches of colossal monuments from 1965 to 1969, Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace Washington Obelisk, Washington, D.C.: Scissors in Motion, was never realized.
"The handles of the monument are underground, balanced in great troughs which may be looked into. The handles are red. The blades part in the course of a day. At evening, the colossal red handles rise above the ground; they sink out of sight again when the suns sets. The closing continues slowly all night until dawn when the colossal blades are joined, forming a structure like the obelisk, catching the sun's light at the tips."
Claes Oldenburg, Proposals for Monuments and Buildings, 1965-69, New York, 1969, p. 166.