Monuments
Claes Oldenburg.
On a large scale, most Primary Structures are obviously
monuments. But just as obviously they are not monuments commemorating or
celebrating anything except their designer's imagination. To the
uninitiated, they offer no ready frame of reference, nothing to be
reminded of, even though the original meaning of "monument" is "a
reminder." Monuments in the traditional sense died out when contemporary
society lost its consensus of what ought to be publicly remembered; yet
the belief in the possibility of such monuments has not been abandoned
altogether.
The Pop artist
Claes Oldenburg (born
1929)
has proposed a number of
unexpected and imaginative solutions to the problem of the monument. He
is, moreover, an exceptionally precise and persuasive commentator on his
ideas. All his monuments are heroic in size, though not in subject
matter. And all share one feature: their origin in humble objects of
everyday use.
In 1969
Oldenburg conceived his most unusual project. For
a piece of outdoor sculpture he wanted a form that combined hard and
soft and did not need a base. An ice bag met these demands, so he bought
one and started playing with it. He soon realized, he says, that the
object was made for manipulation, "that movement was part of its
identity and should be used." He then executed a work shaped like a huge
ice bag (fig. 1152) with a
mechanism inside to make it produce "movements caused by an invisible hand," as the artist described
them. He sent the Giant Ice Bag to the U.S. Pavilion at EXPO
70 in Osaka, Japan, where
crowds were endlessly fascinated to watch it heave, rise, and twist like
a living thing, then relax with an almost audible sigh.
What do such monuments celebrate? Part of their charm, which they
share with ready-mades and Pop Art, is that they reveal the aesthetic
potential of the ordinary and all-too-familiar. But they also have an
undeniable grandeur.
1152.
Claes Oldenburg. Ice Bag—Scale
B. 1970.
Programmed kinetic sculpture of polyvinyl, fiberglass, wood,
and hydraulic
and mechanical movements, 4.9 x
5.5 x 5.5
m.
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Claes Oldenburg.
Giant Ice
Bag
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Claes Oldenburg
b. 1929, Stockholm, Sweden
Claes Oldenburg was born January 28, 1929, in Stockholm. His father was
a diplomat, and the family lived in the United States and Norway before
settling in Chicago in 1936. Oldenburg studied literature and art history
at Yale University, New Haven, from 1946 to 1950. He subsequently studied
art under Paul Weighardt at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1950 to
1954. During the first two years of art school, he also worked as an
apprentice reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago, and afterward
opened a studio, where he made magazine illustrations and easel paintings.
Oldenburg became an American citizen in December 1953.
In 1956, he moved to New York and met several artists making early
Performance work, including George Brecht,
Allan Kaprow, George Segal, and Robert Whitman. Oldenburg soon became a
prominent figure in
Happenings and performance art during the
late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1959, the Judson Gallery exhibited a series
of Oldenburg’s enigmatic images, ranging from monstrous human figures to
everyday objects, made from a mix of drawings, collages, and papier-maché.
In 1961, he opened The Store in his studio, where he recreated the
environment of neighborhood shops. He displayed familiar objects made out
of plaster, reflecting American society’s celebration of consumption, and
was soon heralded as a Pop artist with the emergence of the movement in
1962.
Oldenburg realized his first outdoor public monument in 1967; Placid
Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with a crew of gravediggers
digging a six-by-three-foot rectangular hole in the ground. Beginning in
the mid-1960s, he also proposed colossal art projects for several cities,
and by 1969, his first such iconic work, Lipstick (Ascending) on
Caterpillar Tracks, was installed at Yale University. Most of his
large-scale projects were made with the collaboration of Coosje van
Bruggen, whom he married in 1977. In the mid-1970s and again in the 1990s,
Oldenburg and van Bruggen collaborated with the architect Frank O. Gehry,
breaking the boundaries between architecture and sculpture. In 1991,
Oldenburg and van Bruggen executed a binocular-shaped sculpture-building
as part of Gehry’s Chiat/Day building in Los Angeles.
Over the past three decades, Oldenburg’s works have been the subject of
numerous performances and exhibitions. In 1985, Il Corso del Coltello
was performed in Venice. It included the Knife Ship, a giant Swiss
Army knife equipped with oars; for the performance, the ship was set
afloat in front of the Arsenal in an attempt to combine art, architecture,
and theater. The Knife Ship traveled to museums throughout America
and Europe from 1986 to 1988. Oldenburg was honored with a solo exhibition
of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969, and with a
retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,
and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1995. Oldenburg lives
in New York.
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