Tying up a sizable loose end

San Francisco has its giant bow and arrow; Chicago, its baseball bat; Las Vegas, its flashlight. In Europe, Milan has its colossal needle and thread; Cologne, its upside-down ice cream cone; Eindhoven, Netherlands, its bowling pins.

And come next summer, Los Angeles will have its own eye-catching, thought-provoking, whimsical monument designed by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. “Collar and Bow,” a 65-foot-tall metal and fiberglass sculpture in the shape of a dress shirt collar and bow tie, will be installed outside the entrance of Walt Disney Concert Hall, at 1st Street and Grand Avenue.

Not that Oldenburg and Van Bruggen -- partners in art and marriage since 1977 -- have been invisible in Southern California. Working with Disney Hall architect Frank Gehry, the artists created “Binoculars, Chiat/Day Building,” a landmark structure in Venice, and “Toppling Ladder With Spilling Paint,” a sculpture at Loyola Law School. Their “Knife/Ship II,” a motorized version of a Swiss Army knife, belongs to the Museum of Contemporary Art and periodically does its kinetic thing on the museum’s plaza. And an exhibition of their drawings is on view at Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art.

But “Collar and Bow” is “the big one,” Oldenburg says. And he isn’t talking about dimensions. He and Van Bruggen have made larger sculptures, but none that measure up to this in terms of technical difficulty or architectural context.

“This is the most complicated work we have done, in detail, engineering and form,” Van Bruggen says. “And then there’s the dialogue between the sculpture and the building.”

The goal, she says, was to respond to the building’s free-flowing, sail-like volumes in a merger of imagination and physicality that would transform bits of concertgoers’ attire into pure form in motion. The J. Paul Getty Trust and Music Center patrons Richard and Geri Brawerman are paying most of the cost, which has not been disclosed.

In the best of circumstances, conceptualizing and designing “Collar and Bow” and bringing it to fruition would have been daunting. The difficulty of funding the concert hall and getting it off the drawing boards extended the artists’ process to more than a decade.

As Van Bruggen tells the story, the sculpture was born in 1991, when she was writing a book about Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, he was working on the facade of the concert hall, and “Binoculars, Chiat/Day Building” was being constructed. Friends since 1981, the artists and the architect spent a lot of time together, and the notion of joining forces in Gehry’s new Los Angeles project evolved naturally.

“Frank made a large model of the concert hall around 1993,” Oldenburg recalls. “Coosje suggested the subject, a collar and bow tie, which we had been toying with for a while. We made a model, put it on Frank’s model, and it stood there for several years.”

When work on the concert hall finally moved forward, the artists adjusted and refined their idea, producing a final version of the model in wire, canvas and resin. They scanned that three-dimensional image and fed it into a computer at Carlson & Co., a San Fernando Valley firm that would fabricate the sculpture with close supervision by the artists.

“The model was quite a few steps away from a bow tie and collar,” Oldenburg says. “We don’t imitate things. We transform them.”

And the sculpture under construction bears little resemblance to the model, the artists say. Oldenburg, whom his wife calls “the master of contours,” defined the sculpture’s shapes after the model was scanned. Then Van Bruggen worked with a computer technician at Carlson to create a much more dynamic artwork. A Dutch art historian and artist who was a dancer and a speed skater in her youth, she claims a special understanding of movement and delights in using it.

Both Gehry’s architecture and the artists’ sculpture have become much more baroque since they stationed a giant set of binoculars in the center of a static, rectangular building in Venice. As Gehry has dreamed up buildings with sweeping curves and flamboyant contours, Oldenburg and Van Bruggen have turned out a towering needle with looping thread for a Milan train station and a set of airborne bowling pins for an Eindhoven green space along a highway.

“In urban surroundings where you have a lot of traffic and movement, you have to intensify everything to get any attention,” Van Bruggen says. In “Collar and Bow,” that meant accentuating the precision of contours, the contrast of colors and the implied speed of visual motion. “We exaggerated the collar wings by 10% and made the tabs flat because they are the directional force within the collar,” she says. “The bow just rolls out. That’s the vaudeville thing, the crazy part.”

It wasn’t easy to make an enormous sculpture look as if it had just been tossed off by a concertgoer and touched down on the sidewalk. Working on a computer helped to retain the spontaneity of the gesture in the model. But the secret to making the action look natural, Van Bruggen says, was to start at the bottom, twist the forms there and let the rest flow.

Still, the sculpture changed significantly as it evolved. At Gehry’s urging, it grew from a height of about 35 feet to nearly twice that. An unexpected slant in the sidewalk required tilting the huge artwork 5.6 degrees.

“That’s when reality kicked in,” Van Bruggen says. One challenge was to create the smallest possible footprint while anchoring the massive sculpture under the pavement. Another was to find exactly the right site, which turned out to be more central than planned. In one dramatic move, Van Bruggen rotated the bow 180 degrees, so that it would hover over the staircase instead of flying toward the street.

“Everybody was happy at that point,” Oldenburg says.

When “Collar and Bow” rises in downtown Los Angeles, it will join a lineup of nearly 50 large-scale works created by the artistic team. Oldenburg, 75, established himself independently in the 1960s and began proposing outlandish monuments as an ironic critique of conventional practices. Van Bruggen, 62, a former curator and author of many books on contemporary art, has played an increasingly prominent role in their partnership and often has taken the lead in “Collar and Bow.”

Their work always springs from ordinary objects -- usually on the edge of obsolescence. Their new sculpture is patterned after a type of collar designed to be buttoned to a shirt.

“In the old days,” Oldenburg says, “it was a loose object that you got washed and pressed separately from the shirt. Just for fun, I went around to stores in Los Angeles to see if they are still sold. Nobody had them. The last time I remember buying one was about 15 years ago in New Haven, Conn., in an old- fashioned store, almost an antique store.”

They liked the idea of a classic collar, he says. But part of the appeal was that a loose collar and bow tie would give them two forms that would play off each other in a sort of dance.

“It’s a contrast that you can develop,” he says. “The collar is metallic and the bow is fiberglass, so they have completely different characters. In color, black and white couldn’t be more different. Then you have the soft, rough surface of the bow and the smooth, hard surface of the collar. And then they meet.”

So many things to consider. But above all, Oldenburg says, “we wanted a sculpture that is related to the building and still is independent. The combination of the two -- that’s very rare.”