Monday, May 12, 2008
Twanging reality like his own personal 80-foot-long rubber band, Claes Oldenburg restored a child's-eye sense of wonder to a weary world.
Dec 22, 1998 | "I am for an art that is political-erotic-mystical, that does something else than sit on its ass in a museum."
-- Claes Oldenburg, 1961
In the early 1960s, when pop art detonated in New York City, it blasted the dreary earnestness right out of the art world (at least for a few seconds). When it first hit, pop was the rock-and-roll of art (and rock was still an angry toddler). Like rock, it reset the culture clock, rewrote the rules, recast the performers -- awop-bop-a-loo-bop-awop-bam-boom! And after the fluorescent dust settled and the glimmering, giggling debris stopped bouncing around, out of the ground-zero crater crawled pop art's own Fab Four: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and, last but most, Claes Oldenburg.
Oldenburg, who turns 70 on Jan. 29, has spent much of his life bending, inflating, melting and enlarging the ordinary objects of 20th century American reality. Over the last four decades, Oldenburg has made it his business to soften the hard, harden the soft and transmute the modest into the monumental. He has created shirts and ties and dresses and ice cream cones and pies, and even the contents of an entire store, out of plaster-soaked cloth and wire. Using vinyl stuffed with kapok, he built pay telephones, typewriters, light switches and a complete bathroom -- sink, tub, scale and toilet. He constructed a catcher's mitt, 12 feet tall, out of metal and wood, and built a four-and-a-half-story clothespin out of Cor-Ten steel. In the last two decades, focusing almost exclusively on giant monuments, he has created a 38-foot-tall flashlight, a 10-story baseball bat, a 60-foot-long umbrella, a three-story-high faucet with a 440-foot water-spewing red hose, a 40-foot-tall book of matches and a partially buried bicycle that would fill most of a football field, among numerous other projects located from Tokyo to Texas.
"The main reason for the colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel -- the object," Oldenburg has said. "Perhaps I am more a still-life painter -- using the city as a tablecloth." At another time he remarked, "Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent -- which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning."
It works. His eccentric props make the so-called real world seem like an absurd stage for the "truly real" life being played out in Oldenburg Land. In the case of his 1994 piece "Shuttlecocks," for example, the artist installed four 17-foot-tall badminton birdies on the sweeping lawn surrounding the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. At first glance, the effect is not so much that you're looking at Brobdingnagian birdies, but that a tiny Beaux-Arts building has been rudely plopped in the middle of the badminton court, and that any moment a hand will remove the toy structure so the game can continue.
The still-prolific Oldenburg has also managed to eroticize the most unlikely of subjects. His "Soft Switches" (1964), a 4-foot-square drooping double light switch constructed of orange vinyl filled with Dacron and canvas, resembles nothing so much as Marilyn Monroe oozing out of an evening gown -- a light switch that looks fully capable of singing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President." Likewise, his "Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks" (1969), a 25-foot-tall phallic-shaped cosmetic mounted on what looks like a battle vehicle, evokes both male and female sexuality, while unmistakably referencing the Vietnam War, which was still raging when the piece was installed at Yale University.
"Man-made things do look like human beings," he has said, "symmetrical, visage-like, body-like. What I see is not the thing itself, but myself in its form." Yes, Oldenburg was morphing before morphing was cool. He possesses an uncanny associative vision, an ability to see in one thing the image of another; to imagine how one form might become the next -- a natural instinct for topology. Thus a faucet is turned into a cathedral, a fireplug into a skyscraper; a colossal drainpipe is the source of a waterfall; an immense spoon serves as a bridge; a human nose becomes a gigantic tunnel; Swedish Kndckebrvd crackers are bitten off to make buildings of different heights; an elephant head is also an outboard motor and a Swiss army knife is transformed into a medieval Venetian rowing galley, with silver oars protruding from its great red body.
Enormous clothespins are funny, of course. But Oldenburg has done more than give us a laugh. As Robert Hughes wrote in "American Visions," "The aspects of pop that lasted best are the very ones its bright hardheadedness was supposed to have expelled -- namely, mystery and metaphor. Here, the outstanding figure was Claes Oldenburg." And still is.
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