OLDENBURG'S SCATOLOGICAL 'SOFT' TOUCH
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art OLDENBURGS SCATOLOGICAL SOFT TOUCH BY JAMES R. MELLOW since coming on the scene in the early '60s, Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born Pop artist, has been assigned the role of the clown or...
...And in his ghost versions of the same objects, cut from canvas, the nomenclature scrawled across them in pencil, he has produced a novel -and often beautiful-form of three-dimensional drawing...
...He has created (or had factory-produced, in this case) a comic object that is both a nonpainted painting and a two-dimensional sculpture...
...This is one reason, presumably, why sculptors have lately turned to various kinds of colored plastic...
...It is chiefly his sly and often Rabelaisian humor, confronting the conventions of both our society and our higher artistic styles, that enlarges his work and gives it a singular importance on the current cultural scene...
...the painting's intentions would be just as well served if it were a free-standing object, completely divorced from the conventions of the easel...
...it tends to look unnatural or applied, originally unrelated to the shape...
...And the construction of both "soft" and "hard" versions of these domestic icons (encompassing the impotent and vital phases of the American Dream) has enlivened the artist's repertoire by several comic turns...
...Reportedly, it would go to Yale's traditional rival, Harvard...
...o ldenburg's concern with the problems of contemporary painting is significant...
...the glossy white toilet tanks slump loose and apathetic, their interior plumbing spilling out like fruit from a cornucopia...
...In these he has invented a new mode, a relaxed and diffident sort of sculpture that relies on gravity for part of its shaping impulse...
...It is a role he has cultivated with a marked degree of success...
...This finds "natural" expression in our cult of convenience appliances-typewriters, telephones, electric juicers, electric fans, the automobile, the bathroom in all its hygienic glory...
...She is quite right, however, to insistently affirm the formal considerations of Oldenburg's work, often clouded by the general zani-ness of his subject matter...
...For the national capital he has proposed an obelisk of sorts, an immense pair of scissors rising above a reflecting lagoon-a replacement, evidently, for the existing Washington Monument...
...Oldenburg's achievement can be largely attributed to his ability to maintain the degree of ambivalence necessary for celebrating and at the same time ridiculing the objects of his attention...
...Art critic Barbara Rose, whose detailed and perceptive monograph on the 40-year-old Oldenburg will be issued this month, quotes an entry from one of his journals: "Nothing is irrelevant, everything can be used...
...It is hard to agree with that evaluation...
...Oldenburg has designed a number of such monuments, most of them mundane household objects crammed with scatological implications...
...Oldenburg's real achievement, it seems to me, is his soft sculptures, his sagging bathtubs and wash-stands, which combine innovative forms with inspired commentary...
...Much of this is apposite material, adding weight to her discussion, but it beefs up the artist's literary image far too much, inflating it out of proportion and presenting him rather like one of his larger-than-life-size hamburgers...
...Adapting the drip and splatter technique of the Abstract Expressionists, he concocted a crudely realistic, gluttonous orgy of misshapen and lumpy sausages, roasts of beef, racks of pies, and ice cream sundaes...
...For New York, a city that has frequently served as his home base, he has designed everything from Gargantuan billiard balls on Park Avenue to a towering banana for Times Square...
...Although primarily a sculptor, Oldenburg is one of the few who can deploy color with real authority...
...Oldenburg manages to harmoniously unite color and form through a very shrewd formal maneuver?by having his third dimension suffer a slow leak...
...The large retrospective of Oldenburg's work (116 sculptures, 100 drawings) now installed at the Museum of Modern Art engagingly illustrates that his basic theme is the Great American Hard-On, the national urge for success, for "making it" big...
...What Oldenburg has produced is a witty commentary on a problematic form that has attracted some of the newer painters, the shaped canvas-a generally abstract mode aspiring to the third dimension and resulting in a hybrid that combines both painting and sculpture...
...When it does?as in Bedroom Ensemble, with its marbleized dresser rendered in hard-edged perspective -the artist can cite the intention of a horrendously heightened realism...
...The problem of recent colored or painted sculpture is that color sets up its own countereffort against the rigidly defined three-dimensional forms...
...Oldenburg has converted the esthetic hero "into the loonie," one of the "disguises," he maintains, that an artist must adopt if he is to be both a constituent and a critic of his cultural milieu...
...Oldenburg's genius enabled him to treat the problem in the basically planar terms of an ordinary household saw hanging on a wall, a solution that cut through the formal difficulties in a kind of Chaplinesque fantasia on the malfunctioning world...
...The handle segment hangs on the wall, the middle cants outward, while the end of the blade slides along the floor...
...The most recent of a long series of lusty pranks, the Lipstick-a 24-foot high, red-tipped phallus comme ballistic missile (Eros as a national warhead...
...It is more a deadpan period tableau than an imaginative work of art...
...The Bedroom is scarcely "imaginative" enough, sticking too closely to the real thing-the well-upholstered nightmare of a motel room in the style moderne, done up in fake fur and embossed vinyls...
...But on the whole, Oldenburg's formal accomplishments are not extensively or radically new, though they are hilariously refined...
...Miss Rose has fleshed out her study with a wealth of quotations from his writings and that of a string of authors ranging from Petronius and Proust to Mark Twain and Herbert Marcuse...
...In the current show, for example, there is a Giant Saw, 12 feet long and hinged in three parts to underscore its functional incapacity...
...An English critic has pronounced Oldenburg's Bedroom Ensemble "one of the great imaginative works of the century...
...The pay telephones in black vinyl hang dejected and deflated...
...He has taken a Jamesian stance toward his material, convinced that the artist is one who uses everything...
...Make love and war...
...the air is let out of it...
...As a deft visual metaphor of the American way of life, it combines a triumphant phallus with the instrument of its castration...
...They have risen from the sculptor's mental and physical footwork in the local terrain, a terrain transformed by his esentially private and generally ribald imagination...
...In a similar development, painters are now using stained or soaked-in pigment, binding the color to the canvas support to avoid the built-up application of pigment that characterized the Abstract Expressionists...
...The plaster victuals he produced for his early versions of The Store (the first of which was actually installed in a storefront on the lower East Side) were delectable not for their realism but for their painterly qualities...
...Commissioned as an anti-Establishment gesture by a group of Yale students, faculty and alumni, the sculpture has occasioned some controversy in conservative quarters...
...Clinging to the wall and venturing out upon the floor, it is a homely piece of figurative art broken upon the rack of higher formalisms...
...Is the first of Oldenburg's major "monuments" to attain a stage of complete erection...
...He has translated the advertisements of American success, the hardware symbols of our affluence and inventiveness, into a unique form of body english, correlating them directly to the human physique: "If I can possibly refer to both the male and female anatomy, that's best," he is reported as saying...
...But even if the university should refuse to accept this stately piece-offering, its future as a symbol of campus protest is assured...
...Oldenburg is one of the few contemporary artists who has positioned himself so carefully that he can draw upon the canons of pure form and submit to the claims of representationalism with equal ease and advantage...
...In this relaxed, or relapsed, state of 3-D, color seldom comes up against a definitive edge...
...It is a position allowing him to rail against the vulgarity of modern existence while luxuriating in its Giant Economy Size fantasies...
...Throughout his career-from the seven-foot wide, soft Giant Hamburger (1962) to the huge Lipstick (Ascending) on a Caterpillar Track recently installed in Beinecke Plaza at Yale-oldenburg has employed the method of inflatio ad absurdum in his comic sculptures on American themes...
...Oldenburg is one of the most literate-If not literary-of contemporary artists (in one phase of his career he was a reporter in Chicago...
...On Art OLDENBURGS SCATOLOGICAL SOFT TOUCH BY JAMES R. MELLOW since coming on the scene in the early '60s, Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born Pop artist, has been assigned the role of the clown or buffoon in contemporary American art...
...The difficulty with this contemporary construct is that as the painting becomes more elaborately three-dimensional, its relationship with the wall becomes less necessary...
...Thus, for Stockholm he has devised a giant wing-nut, screwed to a phallic totem pole...
...For London he envisions a mammoth toilet-tank float-a huge copper ball attached to one of the city's bridges-that would rise and fall with the tides of the Thames...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 21
