Word: oldenburg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
Claes carries a notebook everywhere, and his drawings have an immediate impact. Free, energetic, powerful, they reflect the man's intellect, brobdingnagian humor and conviction in his vision. In 1964 when Oldenburg was flying back from a trip to Europe, he looked at New York and "suddenly it seemed as if the city had gotten smaller or I had gotten bigger." The whole idea of scale started him thinking about monuments, and so he drew them. Not monuments in the usual sense of statues or obelisks, they were things that attain monumentality through constant use: a toilet float that...
Colossal Gift. So far, Oldenburg has completed only one monument, and it is not his best work. Financed through an especially established Colossal Keepsake Corp., he has produced and "given" Yale University a 24-ft.-high lipstick made of metal. Sitting on a tanklike base in Beinecke Plaza, it looks morose rather than confident, too small to take an architectural stand against the ponderous classicism of the surrounding buildings. But the students seem to like it. Anyway, if Yale does not want Colossal Keepsake Number One, Oldenburg will offer it to one college after another until it is accepted...
...Oldenburg has no doubts. "People have a terrible time with the names of things," he says. "The artist sees the world abstractly-form and color. Through his work, he hopes to get people to see the world as he does." From his cavernous studio in New Haven, he sees Snake Mountain on one side, a railroad freight yard on the other. As an artist he looks on both with an equal...