Claes Oldenberg

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Claes Oldenburg

The son of a Swedish diplomat, Oldenburg was born in 1 in Stockholm. When he was an infant, the family moved to the United States, settling for a time in New York but eventually moving to Chicago.

After attending Yale University from 146 to 150, Oldenburg returned to Chicago, where he worked as a cub newspaper reporter and took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 156, he moved to New York City, where he came into contact with Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, and others, whose theatrically based art posed an alternative to the prevailing influence of Abstract Expressionist painting.

The radical experiments of these artists involved the creation of environments for their performances, called Happenings, which were partly scripted, partly spontaneous theatrical events that, Oldenburg says, broke down barriers between the arts and something close to an actual experience.

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Theater is the most powerful art form there is because it is the most involving.... I no longer see the distinction between theater and visual arts very clearly... distinctions I suppose are a civilized disease.

--Oldenburg, 16

Oldenburgs practice of situating objects within an environment, sometimes created as a context for theater, has remained to the present day a mainstay of his artistic approach.

Born in 1 at Stockholm. The son of a Swedish Consul General, he came to Chicago in 16. After finishing his studies at Yale University, New Haven, he started to work as a reporter. In 15 he attended a course at the Chicago Art Institute, published drawings in several magazines and began to paint pictures influenced by Abstract Expressionism. In 156 he moved to New York and came into contact with Jim Dine. In 158 he met Alan Kaprow and took part in his Happenings. In 158-5 he arranged his first sculptural, Neo-Dadaist assemblages of plaster and garbage soaked in striking colors. These led to his environments (The Street, The Store etc.). He also started at this time to make replicas of foods like hamburgers, ice-cream and cakes, which prepared the ground for his soft sculptures. In 164 and 168 he was represented at the Venice Biennale, and in 168 and 17 at the documenta 4 and documenta 5, Kassel. In 17 he arranged his Mouse Museum. A comprehensive retrospective of his projects, documents and sketches was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 16. He was given a retrospective in 170 by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. From 176 he collaborated on large-scale projects with Coosje van Bruggen, whom he married in 177. He was represented at the documenta 6, 177, and documenta 7, 18, at Kassel. He was given a retrospective of his drawings in 177 by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Kunsthalle Tübingen. His environment Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing was arranged in 17 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. In 18 he made his large sculpture of a toothbrush for the Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld. In 184 he made his proposals for the large project The Course of the Knife for Venice, which was then shown in collaboration with the architect Frank OGehry at the Campo dellArsenale, accompanied by performances which he took part in himself. He then went on to collaborate with Gehry on other projects related to architecture, e.g. in Boston and Los Angeles. In 18 the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, organized the exhibition Claes Oldenburg - Coosje van Bruggen, A Bottle of Notes and Some Voyages.

I am for an art that is political-erotic-mystical, that does something else than sit on its ass in a museum. -- Claes Oldenburg, 161

In the early 160s, 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 arts own Fab Four Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and, last but most, Claes Oldenburg.

Oldenburg, who turns 70 on Jan. , has spent much of his life bending, inflating, melting and enlarging the ordinary objects of 0th 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 catchers mitt, 1 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 8-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 14 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 youre 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 (164), 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 (16), a 5-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 Knäckebröd 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.

In 156 he moved on to New York and met Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms and others, who posed an alternative to the influence of Abstract Expressionism, with their Happenings a form of art which was theatrically based.

These happenings were performances partly scripted and partly improvised. Oldenburg saw this form of art as powerful, because it is the most involving for the viewer. He said that it breaks barriers between art and actual experience.

158/5 saw his first Neo-Dadaist sculptures. They were pieces of plaster and garbage strikingly coloured. After these came the soft sculptures.

Following this, many exhibitions came devoted to Claes Oldenburg, and he had made a name for himself as an Artist. From 176 he went on to a more ambitious style, by collaborating with Coosje Van Bruggen on monumental scultpures. In 177, Van Bruggen and Oldenburg married. He also collaborated with architect Frank O'Gehry, with the large project The Course of the Knife in Venice. Oldenburg collaborated again with O'Gehry.

Oldenburg is still coming up with ideas for sculptures, in 16 came the Torn Notebook.

Oldenburgs work seems to remain as intriguing now as it ever was. A lot can be read from an individual sculpture, as well as what can be read from the style, the very fact that such a household object was changed by Oldenburg. His sculptures show objects that we can easily recognise, they stay true to the real thing while representing, and provoking thought in other things as well.

Vinyl and canvas, stuffed with foam rubber, painted wood, metal on wood base covered with Formica; chrome metal railing; instruments (15 pieces), 84 high x 7 wide x 48 deep, 167

Claes Oldenburgs exhibit in the East Wing of the National Gallery is a thought provoking assembly of forms. All of Oldenburgs pieces gathered at the gallery fit together and compliment each other extremely well. I meandered through the exhibit, eyes wide and mouth open, my mind quickly processing the art that lay before me. His pieces are reinforced and made interesting by the drafts included in the exhibit. I strolled from draft to revision, drawing to sculpture and final end product. I read each summary of the pieces, amazed at the stimulation I felt by understanding his thought process as I learned how he worked out each piece.

When I first encountered Soft Drum Set, I perceived the piece to be a study of contradiction. I had discussed with a friend Giant Saw-Hard Version, a sculpture of an oversized, true to life handsaw which was propped up against a wall and bent with hinges. We had questioned how this saw could ever possibly work; saws were supposed to be hard, and that is why and how they did their job of cutting through hard materials. As I studied Soft Drum Set, still very early in my tour of the gallery, I made similar conclusions about the piece as I had to Giant Saw-Hard Version. Before I read the summary of the work, I decided that this Oldenburg fellow had a peculiar sense of humor. Again I questioned how this melted drum set could possibly make a sound, the flexible drumsticks could never tap out a beat against the cushiony drumheads.

I then read the summary of the piece and discovered that Oldenburg had based the sculpture on the mountainous landscape of Colorado. The silhouette of the melted drum set was indeed a striking resemblance to the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Oldenburg even included the foothills within the composition, by placing the mallets and other parts of the ensemble at a descending distance from the highest cymbal (peak) of the looming formation. Not only does the form of the sculpture resemble that of the beautiful mountains, but the fabric and the material mediums that Oldenburg chose reflect the surface texture of the grand peaks. Oldenburg includes soft white canvas, shiny black vinyl, and silvery metallics within the composition. These materials correspond to the snowy areas of the mountains, the rock and earth encrusted mounds, as well as the slick icy surfaces which often reflect the crisp sunlight at that elevation.

I realized that Oldenburgs study of the drum set, actually the entire exhibit, was an examination and investigation of various forms. Instead of merely accepting normal perception and understanding of objects, Oldenburg challenges the form and forces the viewer to interpret the object in an entirely different sense. I realized that I never had looked at a drum set with such intensity, nor had I questioned the use of a saw as I did until Oldenburg challenged me to do so.

Oldenburgs uninhibited creativity can be traced back to an imaginative childhood. Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Sweden in the year 1. As a childhood game, Oldenburg created an entire city which he called Neuburg. He contrived extensive maps, newspapers, and magazines to detail this make-believe metropolis. Perhaps this is where Oldenburgs precise drafting habits had their origin. The Oldenburg family moved to the United States and Claes was provided with a successful private, boys school education in Chicago. He then attended Yale, with his main focus on literature. During his final year, he began a formal education in art and art history, which influenced his decision to return to Chicago to attend art school. There, Oldenburgs art education was primarily that of figure studies. Craving to learn more, Oldenburg moved to New York City, to experience and study firsthand Abstract Expressionism and the works of Jackson Pollack. New York City proved to be very influential in shaping the mind of the artist and helping him to discover his personal style. There he experimented with art theater, as well as straying from his figure compositions to more abstract concepts. He began his investigation of form which would prove to be his greatest inspiration. Throughout his education, Oldenburg kept many journals detailing his thoughts, ideas, and self investigations. These notebooks would direct Oldenburgs development as an artist as well as provide subject matter in later years. Oldenburg is a very intellectual individual who puts great emphasis on research and discovery. Oldenburg searches out his subject matter, and provides his audience with a final product that sums up a complex concept in a extremely simple and comprehensive manner. This style is a diversion of the properties of Abstract Expressionism that Oldenburg disliked. Oldenburg strived to create art work that would reach the masses and ordinary individuals would understand and appreciate, rather than limiting comprehension to a select few.

It is difficult to pick a single piece of Oldenburgs work and study it without incorporating his other pieces. Oldenburg takes a standard item and incorporates many different perspectives, ending in the conclusion that all forms can somehow merge into another. Like Oldenburgs tunnel entrance on the side of a mountain in which the entrances are nostrils, Oldenburg can take a form and manipulate it into something different, without straying too far from the original. Oldenburgs artwork is an investigation to find similarities between forms, and he proves this hypothesis with great accuracy and intuition.

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