Word: oldenburg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Negative Cube. The antic spirit that animates the earthworks movement has been cavorting in Manhattan for at least one year-ever since putty-nosed Claes Oldenburg, 39, dumfounded the city with his contribution to its outdoor sculpture festival. Oldenburg can always be counted on to do the unaccountable...
...Oldenburg had gone on from plaster to vinyl and canvas. In 1962 he dreamed up monster hamburgers and bed-size pistachio ice-cream cones. Since then he has sketched a myriad of delightful "proposed colossal monuments" for Manhattan, including a giant Teddy bear for Central Park, and a mountainous baked potato for the front of the Plaza Hotel. Conceivably, Manhattan's festival organizers also expected him to whip up the baked potato. Instead, he had the city hire two gravediggers, who dug a 3-ft. by 6-ft. hole in Central Park, then carefully filled it in. He called...
...seemed perfectly valid to me," says Oldenburg today. "A kind of identification with earth, a recognition that earth is worth looking at, like sculpture. Taking the earth out of the ground, you are left with a cube, a nice geometric piece like Tony Smith's box, while the mound we excavated was a ground-up cube. We had a negative and positive cube-a conceptual thing." To most people, of course, a hole in the ground remains a hole in the ground. Who would ever think of it as a negative cube? Only a conceptual artist like Claes Oldenburg...
...Oldenburg, his soft and cuddly toilet, with its water tank dipping to a U in the middle, suggests the Winged Victory. A magnified drainpipe incorporates the notion of a phallus and an elephant's trunk. Cigarettes on a tray look like cannons (he kicked the habit of three packs a day). Oldenburg's proposed colossal monuments were never meant to be built. Who wants a 650-ft. high Teddy bear in Central Park? But they are real nonetheless-they exist in the form of drawings, as "concepts" rather than sculpture...
...resulting exhibit is not, strictly speaking, obscene, but many of the artists in it use phallic and fecal images to express their feelings about the mayor. William Copley sent in a 1965 painting in which a woman exposes her plump backside. Oldenburg did a series of 48 indefinably nasty plaster versions of Chicago's distinctive red fireplugs, which for diverse reasons remind him of the plug-ugly Chicago cops. He also made a drawing of a "proposed colossal monument" for Chicago showing