Word: enameling
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...brings dead things to life." His sculptures of food, for example. Typical, terrible American cuisine fascinates him, the kinds of things dieters like Oldenburg himself try to avoid: a wedge of pecan pie, a banana sundae, racks of assorted pastry, ice cream, cheeseburgers. Made of plaster, slathered with lush enamel paint, these goodies actually seem ready for the consumer's fork and spoon. But like four-color advertisements of food, they are designed more to entice than to be eaten. An Oldenburg baked potato nonetheless looks hot, smoky, delicious -with butter melting over the white insides. Yet visually...
Soft Drum. The glory of vinyl struck Oldenburg in 1963. It was an ideal substitute for the hard plaster and enamel paint he had been using-and it was soft as skin. "It works by itself, takes different positions. I established guidelines, but the pieces must be arranged by others or it arranges itself." Oldenburg's Soft Drum Set takes an object specifically noted for its tautness and its sharp staccato clatter and expresses it as a chaos of relaxation. The Drum Set looks more like man's viscera than his toy (another example of a body image...
...though, about the price of some of these minor treasures. It is virtually impossible to buy a genuine brass spittoon because all but a few are already ensconced in places of honor in private homes. The porcelain heads used by phrenologists 70 years ago ($350) and the brightly colored enamel coffee pots of the 1890s ($75) are so scarce that manufacturers are now busily and cheaply reproducing them. Fancy china Jim Beam bourbon bottles, cranked out in limited quantities in the 1950s and early '60s as gift items, now fetch as much as $500 each-empty...
...Kooning and Kline, and Frankenthaler can be called an heiress of it. She might also claim to be something of a pioneer. In 1952, when she was only 23, she developed her "stain technique" as an extension of Jackson Pollock's method of skeining swirls of glossy Duco enamel onto a canvas spread upon the floor. Helen thinned her paint with turpentine and poured it onto the unprimed canvas, so that the paint sank in. The marks of the pouring or brush disappeared, canvas and color became one and the same. The result was so remarkable that when Morris...
...room in a grim penitentiary, out of my mind, I looked over at the man next to me, a Polish embezzier from Worcester, Mass. I could see him so clearly, I could see every pore in his face, every blemish, the hairs on his nose, the incredible green-yellow enamel of the decay in his teeth, the wet glistening of his frightened eyes. I could see every hair in his head, as though each was as big as an oak tree. What a confrontation! What am I doing out here, out of my mind, with this strange mosaic-celled animal...