Word: oldenburg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What is seven feet wide, made out of painted sailcloth, and looks like a giant hamburger with a detachable pickle perched on top? The pop-art answer is a well-done Giant Hamburger by Claes Oldenburg. When the Art Gallery of Toronto recently bought one for some $4,000, students at Toronto's Central Technical High School looked at it with a hungry eye. What a hamburger needs, they reasoned, is ketchup. Someone sent out for a bottle of Heinz; in less time than it takes to shake a slurp out of the bottle, students and teachers had built...
...well. Britain's Eduardo Paolozzi used eleven colors for Wittgenstein in New York, incorporated such city elements as jets, skyscrapers, and the man from a Bufferin ad to tick off hectic modern life. Roy Lichtenstein printed his Moonscape on metallic plastic that shimmers like aluminum foil. Claes Oldenburg made a serigraph print and attached a rust-colored felt...
...pursuit is undertaken with relish and good humor, much as a Claes Oldenburg delights in making a mattress-sized Popsicle on a limp stick. Beauty seems no longer at stake; the word itself is rarely used. But tough, satirical commentary abounds. "An artist should be an evangelist for looking," says Rauschenberg. Yet in creating a second, magical reality, the artist often ends up with whole stage-sets, creating a future problem: What's to keep the museums of the future from looking like a decayed Disneyland, or the whole back...
Just getting the show abroad cost the International Council of New York's Museum of Modern Art $35,000. There are 77 pieces by 37 sculptors. Well, only 76, since Claes Oldenburg's Giant Hamburger got caught in a rainstorm. Wrote a French critic: "Even in a country that has no great culinary pride, an 8-ft.-wide hamburger of soggy casein and canvas is artistically unappetizing." Noguchi's two-ton Sun had to be floated up the Seine on a barge, and Calder's two-ton stabile Falcon required a derrick to hoist it over...
...rest of the Biennale, which few of them bothered to attend. John Chamberlain, a sculptor of automobile parts, slept on the Lido beach, declared the marble-patterned Piazza San Marco to be the "world's greatest hopscotch arena" and hopscotched around it like a great shambling bear. Claes Oldenburg, as softly pudgy as his sculptures of melting typewriters made of vinyl plastic, politely ate his way through the festival. Rauschenberg himself was busy at Venice's elegant Teatro La Fenice, working with Merce Cunningham's avant-garde ballet troupe, for which he designs props and occasionally does...