Word: soft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...also two fully staffed mental health clinics that accept the disturbed patient in a most unmartial atmosphere. Military ceremony and the rule book are dropped at the door. Says Colonel Thomas Murray, chief Army psychiatrist in South Viet Nam: "Some of our psychiatrists are the most improbable military guys: soft, flabby, unexercised." In this deliberately demilitarized ambience, the soldier's recovery begins...
...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...
...cake as big as a luncheonette booth? Or a 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...
Some of his sculptures are unmistakably phallic-the food 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...
...Soft Drum. The glory of vinyl struck Oldenburg in 1963. It was an ideal substitute for the hard plaster and enamel paint he had been using-and it was soft as skin. "It works by itself, takes different positions. I established guidelines, but the pieces must be arranged by others or it arranges itself." Oldenburg's Soft Drum Set takes an object specifically noted for its tautness and its sharp staccato clatter and expresses it as a chaos of relaxation. The Drum Set looks more like man's viscera than his toy (another example of a body image...