Word: oldenburg
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...Oldenburg's humor comes from his awareness and appreciation of the human element that supports his art. So his drawings can be hilarious, but they are never glib, or snide. A sketch such as Fagends in Hyde Park is funny because of the innocence and incongruity of the vision; the wit in seeing the bristles of a typewriter eraser as broccoli lies in yoking two seemingly disconnected things...
Quite literally, Oldenburg envisions these objects--clothespins, or three-way plugs--as monuments. With the exception of the Typewriter Eraser, each has been executed on a colossal scale. These colossi are impressive: a ten-foot clothespin towers up in golden splendour, refined, stripped to bare geometric form; a 20-foot vinyl three-way plug hangs limply from the ceiling, inviting caresses. (In the present exhibit, the larger pieces are at MIT, while the drawings, for the most part, are at the ICA. The MIT part of the exhibit should be seen after the ICA portion, since the large sculptures...
...PRINT, Oldenburg compares his clothespin to Brancusi's sculpture, The Kiss. The form he discovered and liberated sustains the comparison. In fact, the clothespin as Oldenburg has perceived it pushes Brancusi's conception farther than Brancusi does, being more truly two-in-one. The spring presses the two identical pieces of metal more tightly against each other than the encircling arms of Brancusi's stone lovers pull them together. Not only does Oldenburg's structure express a more intimate formal relationship, but his "two" are one--they are made out of one sheet of metal, with a groove down...
Clothespins, three-way plugs, cigarette butts. All seem to suggest Oldenburg is playing a visual joke on his unsuspecting and gullible audience...
...joke" is the wrong word. Oldenburg's art is not comic, though it is humorous. He has no attitude of superiority, he is pulling no tricks on Everyman. He finds his own magic sexually mysterious himself. "My forms ...are constantly engaged in promiscusous intercourse and may turn up as almost anything," he says. He presents his work as a sort of subconscious process of spontaneous generation rather than a plotted contrivance to substitute one thing for another. He is often gently self-mocking, quietly deflating his own balloons. Works like his Paste-up for mitt print with Bob poke...