Word: magic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Oldenburg's drawings and sculpture realize the magic of his thought. The current exhibition, held jointly at the Institute of Contemporary Art, in Boston, and Hayden Gallery at MIT, focuses on six themes the Swedish-born sculptor has developed over the last ten years: "Geometric Mouse", "Three-way Plug", "Clothespin", "Fagends", "Typewriter Eraser", and "Standing Mitt with Ball". In each case, Oldenburg considers a commonplace object, analyzes it in terms of texture, volume, form, etc., then manipulates the essence he has extracted. Using a process of free association, he fuses images, correlating aspects of the original object to other things...
...joke" is the wrong word. Oldenburg's art is not comic, though it is humorous. He has no attitude of superiority, he is pulling no tricks on Everyman. He finds his own magic sexually mysterious himself. "My forms ...are constantly engaged in promiscusous intercourse and may turn up as almost anything," he says. He presents his work as a sort of subconscious process of spontaneous generation rather than a plotted contrivance to substitute one thing for another. He is often gently self-mocking, quietly deflating his own balloons. Works like his Paste-up for mitt print with Bob poke...
...codgers' surprise when Joan of Arc (Nancy Snyder) arrives in blazing armor with sword and pennant at the ready. She tells them that her mission is to recruit two of every species, including them, for a spaceship trip to heaven. After that, all antic hell breaks loose. Instant magic occurs: appearances and disappearances, deaths, resurrections, changes of identity, autokinetic kitchen utensils and finally Joan's celestial levitation. Director Marshall W. Mason moves all the UFOs and the splendid cast at a rocketing pace. The words are manic-puns, syllogisms, answer-and-question games, in that order. Some scenes...
...between Kalypso's loom and the loom of Penelope, roughly corresponding to the grade on a paper and the grade on the final exam, respectively. There are two interpretations of the water: either it is Odysseus's exam, which he will overcome only with the help of Leukothea's magic veil (corresponding to present-day crib notes), or it is a symbol of Odysseus's knowledge, and thus the source of his consternation, "barren...
...hundred years after his death he remains the unsurpassed master of the fairy tale. Who has not smiled ruefully at the imperial victim of The Emperor's New Clothes, or identified with The Princess on the Pea? What youth remains ignorant of Andersen's articulate birds and magic elves? Yet, as Cambridge Professor Elias Bredsdorff brilliantly demonstrates, these creatures were the offhand productions of a vast and thwarted literary ambition...