Made the way a cushion is made
The most surprising thing about Floor Burger is how it was built. It was not carved, modeled, or cast, the three ways sculpture had been made for thousands of years. It was sewn. The forms (the two buns, the patty, the trimmings) were cut and stitched out of cotton-duck canvas, the same heavy cloth a painter stretches for a picture, and the sewing was done by the artist Patty Mucha (then Patty Oldenburg) on her own portable Singer sewing machine, one she had bought to make her own clothes. Oldenburg designed the shapes and painted them; she sewed and stuffed them. Her sewing was not a service to the project but part of how this kind of object came to exist at all: the soft, sewn form was a technique she brought from the giant costumes and props she made for Oldenburg’s Happenings, the staged, semi-improvised performance pieces he was making around the same time. The floor food grew straight out of that stage work, and the giant burger was assembled the way a sofa cushion is assembled, in a New York apartment, on a home machine.
Then it had to be filled, and at this scale that turned into a problem. The forms were so large that ordinary soft stuffing was not enough to give them their bulk, so the inside was packed with two things at once: upholstery foam rubber, the springy stuff inside a cushion, and empty cardboard cartons (ice-cream cartons, by most accounts) shoved in to take up the volume. The fill went in through a zipper sewn into the underside of each piece, so the whole giant burger could be opened up, stuffed, and closed again. The Art Gallery of Ontario, which owns it, records the materials plainly: canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, painted with acrylic.
The surface is the last layer, and it is painted by hand. Oldenburg brushed acrylic paintstraight onto the cotton-duck canvas, the toasted brown of the bun, the dark sear of the patty, with visible, worked brushwork rather than any printed or molded finish. (The painting is acrylic on canvas; loose descriptions sometimes call it latex or vinyl, but the gallery’s own record says acrylic.) So the object is, oddly, half painting and half sculpture: a hand-brushed canvas surface wrapped around a sewn, stuffed, three-dimensional body.
And then it sat down. Stuffed with foam and cardboard, the finished burger weighs something like 700 pounds, and because its skin is soft and its filling shifts, it settles. It cannot hold a crisp shape. The minute it was set on the floor, gravity began finishing what the sewing started, pulling the bun into folds and spreading the base outward. That sagging is not a defect or an accident of age; it is the whole point.