Word: oldenburg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ordinary, the art fancier understandably asks: "What is art?" Replies Samuel Adams Green, who supervised the installation of New York's outdoor sculpture show: "Everything is art if it is chosen by the artist to be art." But even Green was taken aback when Sculptor Claes Oldenburg, known for his spoofing soft-plastic sculptures, last week ordered a hole dug in Central Park by professional gravediggers, and then had it filled in to produce "an invisible, underground sculpture...
...first teacher, Norine McDonell, 82 (now Mrs. Roman Zeller of nearby Kalis-pell), recalled how farmers petitioned the county to open the school in 1904 for the valley's 26 children, including year-old baby Alma McClarty and Henry Dietrich, 19. They even built a barn for Adla Oldenburg's spotted riding horse, since she was too "delicate" a girl to walk the three miles to school...
...most frabjous funnyman in town is Claes Oldenburg, a prematurely balding troll of 38. Among his what's-its on display at the Sidney Janis Gallery are: 1) a 6-ft.-long stuffed-and-sewn canvas loaf of raisin bread, with six detachable slices and 42 removable raisins; 2) a 12-ft.-tall, droopy white canvas "ghost fan" (its mate, a 12-ft.-tall black fan, wilts in mid-air beneath the space capsules at the top of Expo 67's U.S. pavilion); 3) platters bearing real Jell-O and real marzipan molds of the artist...
Such pranks are by now Oldenburg's trademock. Stockholm-born and Yale-educated, he set up shop in lower Manhattan in 1961, in a store stocked with his own enameled-plaster foodstuffs and clothing, and became one of the progenitors of pop. That humorists such as Kaplan and Pistoletto can find galleries in Manhattan nowadays is largely because Oldenburg's monster hamburgers and soft vinyl Dormeyer mixers made comic contemporary art acceptable, indeed sometimes all but inescapable. "Jokes," says Oldenburg, with all the Nordic intensity of a Bergman, "are one way to reach people. Perhaps humor...
...popularity was undoubtedly traceable to its carnival aspects. Children, especially, delighted in watching Len Lye's kinetic Flip and 2 Twisters, stood entranced as three giant loops of steel jumped and jiggled for 15 minutes at a time. Adults, too, joined in the good-humored spoofs of Claes Oldenburg's gigantic, canvas-covered Ice Cream Cone and Falling Shoestring Potatoes, and his plaster Pecan Pie. They poked their fingers into the spongelike walls of Harold Paris' Pantomina llluma, a "feelies" room containing $10,000 worth of molded, twisted and flat rubber and polyurethane, tensor lights and stainless...