Word: oldenburg
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...soft sculptures are, of course, the magician's most famous trick. Thfir success lies in their invitation to be touched and poked and in their quality of surprise. Where other artists in the past would change the color or shape of the objects they treated, Oldenburg keeps those qualities as they are and instead changes their context (a hamburger sits on the floor), size (small things become gigantic) and state (soft instead of hard). The result is a sculpture of enormous intellectual compression; it shows the stress of gravity, the effect of age, the possibility of sensuality...
...giant fan so limp that it can hardly stand up, much less turn. Or three-way extension plugs, tall as children, and all ready to totter up to the viewer and command: "Take me to your leader!" His gleaming soft toilet slumps and sags like a geriatric patient. Oldenburg knows precisely what he is doing. "The important thing about humor is that it opens people. They relax their guard, and you can get your serious intentions across. If I were as didactic in my work as I really am, I would bore people to death. But because...
Ground Rules. To accomplish this difficult task, Oldenburg has developed some basic ground rules for his work. The subject first must be timely; he has no use for dead symbols. It must also be an object that touches the body, like furniture and food, or is constantly used, like housewares. "I never make representations of bodies but of things that relate to bodies so that the body sensation is passed along to the spectator either literally or by suggestion." Finally, his creations must have something to do with sex. "If you ignore that," he says, "you're missing...
...blenders, for example, or toothpaste tubes. Others are based on female forms: the hamburgers, light switches, the soft version of Chrysler's 1935 Airflow. But every good Freudian knows all that without having to prowl within a sculptor's imagination. On the other hand, who could anticipate Oldenburg's explanation of his sculpture Raisin Bread, Sliced? "It was conceived as a sort of Parthenon and was also suggested by a picture I saw of Paris' Madeleine Church turning into a loaf of bread. The piece has a lot to do with excrement and sex. It also...
...need," says Oldenburg, "is for something to stick in my mind. Like Henry Miller's nose. It has a strange, puffy quality. Then it begins to work within a scheme of resemblances. The nose metamorphoses into a fireplug; the plug into a coin phone box; the phone into a car." Once, just to discover exactly what did happen to a banana's shape when it was being eaten, Oldenburg made five banana shapes out of canvas, filled them with plaster, peeled the "skin" and bit them all down to varying sizes. "I spit the plaster out," he says...