Word: food
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Table Volcano. A big, burly man who looks like a scholarly truck driver or an agile Bacchus, Oldenburg is shy but not modest. "I am a magician," he says. "A magician 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...
Ground Rules. To accomplish this difficult task, Oldenburg has developed some basic ground rules for his work. The subject first must be timely; he has no use for dead symbols. It must also be an object that touches the body, like furniture and food, or is constantly used, like housewares. "I never make representations of bodies but of things that relate to bodies so that the body sensation is passed along to the spectator either literally or by suggestion." Finally, his creations must have something to do with sex. "If you ignore that," he says, "you're missing...
Some of his sculptures are unmistakably phallic-the food blenders, for example, or toothpaste tubes. Others are based on female forms: the hamburgers, light switches, the soft version of Chrysler's 1935 Airflow. But every good Freudian knows all that without having to prowl within a sculptor's imagination. On the other hand, who could anticipate Oldenburg's explanation of his sculpture Raisin Bread, Sliced? "It was conceived as a sort of Parthenon and was also suggested by a picture I saw of Paris' Madeleine Church turning into a loaf of bread. The piece...
Oldenburg moved to New York, where he met Artists Jim Dine and Allan Kaprow, who were busy inventing the world's first "happenings." Soon Oldenburg was staging happenings too, and got married to a pretty artists' model, Pat Muschinski. The world of objects-food, toys, bric-a-brac-blazed all around him ia neighborhood stores. Claes started to reproduce them in burlap or muslin dipped in plaster and painted with all the romantic energy of Abstract Expressionism. "I wanted to extend color to three-dimensioned form," he says, "to make paint tangible and edible...
...long weeks during the summer, lack of railroad cars tied up 3,600 tons of meat and 105,000 tons of other Soviet goods at the border transfer point of Cierna. No one is starving, but Czechoslovaks returning from trips to Germany and Austria carry suitcases stuffed with food...