Word: works
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 I can put my message in a colorful, engaging form, my message isn't heavy...
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...
...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...
...work now in the works is a lox-pink ice bag, 18 ft. in diameter, for the U.S. Pavilion at the World's Fair at Osaka next year. A motor inside will cause the ice bag to tilt, inflate, undulate and deflate on a continuous cycle. As an object, it is funny, anthropomorphic and intellectual all at once. It qualifies as kinetic or soft or Pop sculpture...
Colossal Gift. So far, Oldenburg has completed only one monument, and it is not his best work. Financed through an especially established Colossal Keepsake Corp., he has produced and "given" Yale University a 24-ft.-high lipstick made of metal. Sitting on a tanklike base in Beinecke Plaza, it looks morose rather than confident, too small to take an architectural stand against the ponderous classicism of the surrounding buildings. But the students seem to like it. Anyway, if Yale does not want Colossal Keepsake Number One, Oldenburg will offer it to one college after another until it is accepted...