Floor Burger

The cheapest, most disposable object in America, a fast-food hamburger, blown up to about seven feet across and then made soft, so the monument sags and slumps on the floor under its own weight instead of standing on a pedestal.

1. 1
   The giant sagging bun

   The top of the object, the swollen pale dome capping the burger

   The top bun is a huge hand-painted dome, and it does not sit crisply the way a real bun does. It bulges and settles, the soft canvas pulling into folds where the stuffing has shifted under it. The freshness a real burger advertises is replaced by slump: the bun reads as something that has been sat on, sagging into its own weight.
2. 2
   The patty

   The dark disc wedged in the middle, between the two buns

   A thick dark disc jammed between the buns, and it is the densest, most solid-looking part of the whole thing. Conservators noted the patty and lower bun kept their shape best over the decades, so it reads as the heavy core the rest of the burger droops around, the one part that holds while everything above and below it gives way.
3. 3
   The slump and the soft folds

   The whole object where it meets the floor, the creases and spreading lower edge

   The burger spreads outward at the bottom, settling on the floor under roughly 700 pounds of its own weight. The creases and sags are not modeled or carved by the artist: they are where gravity, not Oldenburg, finished the shaping. This is the anti-monument in plain view, an object that cannot stand up or strike a pose because it is too soft to.
4. 4
   The hand-painted canvas surface

   Across the whole skin of the burger, the worked, slightly grimy finish

   The color is acrylic brushed onto cotton-duck canvas, not a printed wrapper or a molded plastic shell. There is visible brushwork and a slightly grubby, handled, worked-by-hand finish rather than a slick product render. It looks made, not manufactured, which is part of the joke: the most machine-made food in America, rendered by hand in paint on cloth.
5. 5
   The scale you stand over

   The footprint of the whole piece, sitting low and wide on the gallery floor

   It is about seven feet across and only about four feet tall, so it sits directly on the floor and the viewer looks down at it. A monument is usually something you crane up at on a pedestal; here you tower over a hamburger. It dwarfs you sideways while staying beneath you, which keeps the comedy and the colossal scale in the same object at once.
6. 6
   The seams, the stitching, and the pickle

   Along the joins of the sewn forms, and the sliced disc perched on top

   This thing was sewn. The seams of the stitched-and-stuffed forms are findable along the joins (Patty Mucha ran them up on her own home Singer machine), and the foam and cardboard cartons were packed in through zippers in the underside. Perched on top is a sliced pickle, the comic punctuation of the whole piece; the pickle now on the burger is a later replacement.