Oldenburg’s soft sculpture were formative to Pop Art Movement, setting up a commentary on postwar consumerism. For Oldenburg, along with the soft materiality of the sculpture, scale is fundamentally taken as an asset to exaggerate everyday objects of banality stripped off from their domestic context and inverted into an unusual setting. In Oldenburg’s installation of 1970, spectators are first left puzzled by the uncanny presence of 581⁄2 x 383⁄4 x 291⁄2 inches, wooden Giant Three Way Plug hanging in the gallery space of Detroit Institute of Art. Several other versions of the same were made over the course of years with different materials. In relation to the sculpture and the context of its placement, Rudi H Fuchs asserts that “form is identified with object. The object itself is not surprising but its identification with form and scale is”.

Scale intensifies the direct manifestation of latent formal language, not only of the identified object but also of the sculpture. However, the part-to-whole relations in making formal assessment remains same but scale subverts the domestic identity of plug as an object.

It disrupts completely the traditional dialectic between form and content. The concern for content is mediated by the concern for material identification in relation to the object as plug. In the visual field, however, the dialectic between form and content prevails even under any variation of scalar attributes. A change of size in object would only fabricate the false idea of depth between corresponding objects represented on a flat medium.

Three-way plug is no longer the plug as a commodity object, but by exercising scale in the visual world, it is forced to reformulate relations; one identifying the object (sculpture) in relation to the human body and the other, of that of the object in relation to architecture.

Other installation of Giant Three-Way Plug placed on sloping lawn besides the Allen Memorial Art Museum,

Ellen Johnson in her article observes that, “the plug matches the Renaissance design in its combination of rectilinear and curvilinear elements and in its strict bilateral symmetry, which is, however, hidden, almost denied, by its partly submerged, dropped position.”

In its transformation, the plug’s relation to architecture or functional buildings can also be observed in Oldenburg’s sketches of 1967, English and Swedish extension plugs, “The English one becomes a crematorium and the Swedish one, because of its vaulted cross construction, a chapel.”

Scale acts as a complete autonomous singularity, what matters here is not just the relative characteristics of scale but as scale as such. Scale in the visual world (real world) identifies itself with the Euclidean Geometry – mathematical, calculable, and hence very material. Oldenburg inverts this material characteristic of scale, as Nadja Rottner notes, “by resorting to abstraction, as well as intensifies the three-dimensionality of the real as he stages the drama of vision in objects that he rebuilds with altered physical appearances set in unconventional contexts with exaggerated qualities: very shiny, very large, very soft. Thus, we “feel” the body of the plug more affectively.” By scaling up a plug, Oldenburg unfolds the single perspectival viewpoint into a non-static, non-narrative, multi-focal theatre by letting the spectators actively and bodily engage with the object. As referred earlier, to know the scale of an object, one must know the size of the corresponding object in its context or background. Size is a unit that can be measured objectively, however, the size of an object is dynamic in perception, but it remains static in the real. As psychologist Gibson establishes, “while size in the visual world remains the same, we experience the size of objects in the visual field as changing. At proximity an object appears larger, while at a distance it appears smaller.” This difference in scale of size is subjective and only exist in the visual field. By contrast scale is absolute, a fixed relation between objects in real world. It is this fundamental difference that Oldenburg uses to play with scalar attributes of size and volume in the visual world to bring them back in their subjective state (property of the visual field).

Reading scale in the visual field (images) entails considerable amount of attention to shapes. A “projected shape” as Gibson would term it, is different than the “depth shape” because of the two-dimensional representation medium. As Gibson argues on the real-world object, projected on a flat plane, he summarizes that the depth shape is “the shape which an object possesses in three dimensions and which is defined by its surfaces,” while the projected shape is which “an object possesses when projected on a plane. This is its shape as a silhouette, or the shape which is defined by the outlines or contour.” Playing with scale in images is like playing with projected shapes; changes recorded strictly by their unit sizes (length and height) with no physical attenuation to depth. While scaling up or down, the object falls devoid of its own material concern, however, the concern here is only of false depth as it is already implied in perception. It further causes contradictions in understanding the spatial logic as represented in an image and very soon fall under the realm of illusions. Scale here is strictly relative, always instigating analogical expressions. Scale as such does not exist in images and hence in the visual field.

On the other side playing with scale in the real world, disrupts the context or even bring incongruencies in everyday perception.

Oldenburg produced a series of drawings in 1965, “Proposed Colossal Monuments,” with scaled up objects like a giant ice-cream bar, a spoon with cherry and a lipstick. The proposal presented in a form of two-dimensional drawings still indicate the play of scale in the real world by rendering depth and only implying. These objects disrupt the tradition viewing practices by abolishing normative figure-ground relations and instil a quality of defamiliarization. “A giant, melting ice cream bar wedged into a tall city block on New York’s Park Avenue (1965) is an obstacle both literally and figuratively—it impedes the flow of everyday traffic as well as the viewer’s continual perception of the visual world as a stable system of absolute scale.”