ART-PRESENTATION: Claes Oldenburg-The Ordinary Must Not Be Dull
Since 1962, Oldenburg has been making soft sculpture based on common objects ranging from household fixtures (such as toilets, fans, and light switches) to foodstuffs and Manhattan maps. His later soft sculptures are sewn from vinyl or canvas and are stuffed with filler material to achieve varying degrees of flaccidity, his method of modeling.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pulitzer Arts Foundation Archive
The exhibition “The Ordinary Must Not Be Dull: Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Sculptures”, is dedicated exclusively to Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, a body of work that he began in 1962 and developed over the next 20years. The 14 works on view, all but one made during the ‘60s and 70s, represent food, common fixtures of the home, and domestic objects that might be found in one’s garage or kitchen. In 1962, Oldenburg held an exhibition at Green Gallery, in New York. In collaboration with his first wife Patty Mucha, he presented the works “Floor Burger”, “Floor Cake”, and “Floor Cone”. These three sculptures were out of proportion, oversized, inauthentique, and represented banal objects, made of canvas stuffed with foam rubber and cardboard, and then painted with acrylic.. Oldenburg explained that he wanted the sculptures to be lightweight so that they could easily be pushed around. As Oldenburg would later comment, “What I want to do is to create an independent object which has its existence in a world outside of both the real world as we know it and in world of art. It’s an independent thing which has its own power, just to sit there and remain something of a mystery. I don’t want to prejudice the imagination. I want the imagination to come and make of it what it wants to make of it…If someone says it looks satirical, the next day it may look very unsatirical. It may look like an ordinary thing. My intention is to make an everyday object that eludes definition”. As with Oldenburg’s other work, the soft sculptures undermine the functionality of the objects they represent, challenging our perceptions and unsettling our routines with, for example, a twelve-foot-tall, bright blue sculpture in the form of a three-way plug, or a folding chair that appears to droop, and a pile of four-foot-long French fries topped with ketchup. The exaggerated scale, bold colors, and limpness of Oldenburg’s soft sculptures will stand out in especially high relief when viewed within the pristine geometry of the Pulitzer building, where they will transform quotidian objects into a provocative mix of the ubiquitous and the uncanny.
Info: Curator Tamara H. Schenkenberg, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 3716 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, Duration: 29/7-15/10/16, Days & Hours: Wed & Sat10:00-17:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-20:00, http://pulitzerarts.org
