A burger the size of a sofa, slumping

The first fact about Floor Burger is its size, and it lands before anything else. It is about seven feet across and only about four feet four inches tall (the gallery records it at 132 by 226 centimeters), which means it is wider than a person is tall and sits low and heavy on the floor. The everyday object in the title (a fast-food hamburger, the cheapest hot meal in America) has been blown up to the scale of a piece of furniture. It is unmistakably a burger and unmistakably wrong, an ordinary thing swollen far past any size an ordinary thing should be.

It is built like a real burger, part for part. There is a top bun, a big hand-painted pale dome that bulges and settles rather than sitting crisp and fresh. There is the patty, a thick dark disc wedged in the middle, the densest and most solid-looking element of the whole thing (conservators found the patty and lower bun held their shape best over the years). And perched on top is a single sliced pickle, a small green disc that works as the comic full stop on the whole giant object. The pickle there now is a later replacement, but its job is the same: it is the one little detail that turns a monument into a joke.

And once you are close, the surface tells you it was sewn. The seams of the stitched-and-stuffed forms are findable along the joins where one shape meets the next, the bun against the patty, the trimmings against the bun, the soft canvas puckering slightly where the stitching pulls it. Tucked into the underside are the zippers the foam and cardboard were packed in through. This is not the smooth shell of a molded object; it is a giant cushion, and it shows its seams.

The thing that makes it unlike any sculpture before it is that it sags. Because the skin is soft canvas and the filling is foam and cardboard, the whole burger spreads and slumps on the floor under its roughly 700 pounds. The bun folds. The base creeps outward. And those creases and droops are not carved or modeled by Oldenburg: they are where gravity finished the shaping, settling the soft mass into a slouch. A bronze or a marble holds the exact pose the artist gave it forever; this object is still quietly sinking, doing the opposite of what a monument is supposed to do.

There is one more thing the scale does, and it is easy to miss. Because the burger is low and wide and sits directly on the floor, the viewer looks down at it. A monument is usually something raised on a pedestal that you crane your neck up toward; here the relationship is flipped. A person stands over a hamburger and gazes down at it the way you would look down at a meal on a table, except the meal is the size of a sofa. The object dwarfs you sideways, by sheer width, while staying entirely beneath you, and that mismatch (huge and yet lowly, overwhelming and yet underfoot) is the strange comic feeling the whole piece runs on.