Word: oldenburg
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Understanding an art like this requires an imagination that is flexible, free, childlike--a dancing mind. For Oldenburg's works depend on the capacity of the human mind to dance; they have meaning because they stimulate the observer to perform the same intellectual acrobatics that the artist did when conceiving the piece. This art is metaphoric as well as metamorphic and it demands mental participation in all the associations made and transformations performed. Aspects of reality which would never be rationally juxtaposed are struck together--sparks fly. The typewriter eraser, for example, becomes a tornado in one series of drawings...
...quest for links, for symbols, Oldenburg has made himself a symbol, associated himself with an image. The "geometric mouse" has come to be a metaphor for his work. First developed in 1965 from the geometry of a movie camera, the mouse is the only one of his themes to have assumed the name of an animate being. Actually it looks very little like a mouse. Oldenburg calls the geometric mouse "a symbol of analysis and intellect". He identifies with it ("I'm the Mouse"); one of the funniest drawings at the ICA is a "self-portrait as a Mystical Mouse...
...mouse is subjected to some of the most fantastic variations of all; the eyes alone, for example, are drawn as teabags; window shades, or light switches. A "system of iconography" (also the title of a sketch) is derived from the mouse's circles and squares. Simplifying the mouse form, Oldenburg plays with it. He stamps it on everything, designs kites, banners, costumes in its image. Mice appear with bras on their ears, or half under water. Other things suggest mice to his roaming pencil: a map of New York City, an arrangement of pillows. What makes Oldenburg's outrageous associations...
...mouse becomes an idol: The Mouse God Multiple, a stack of geometric mice becomes a temple. Oldenburg jots down a progression on the drawings: "ziggurat/-pyramid/mouse". The mouse is real architecture too--it was used as a blueprint for a Maus Museum, erected in 1972 to house a collection of Oldenburg's objects, the precious common things that provide springboards for his imagination...
...building of a huge facade-face of a mouse on the hills over Hollywood. The tongue (originally the handle of the movie camera) was to protrude out into space. From this elevation the movie camera-mask-mouse-skull would watch over Hollywood, its creation and its creator. Oldenburg commented: "Maybe people would commit suicide off the tongue, like the Golden Gate bridge...