Claes Oldenburg's sculpture

Claes Oldenburg's sculpture, in which ordinary objects are transformed by radical changes in scale and the use of unexpected materials, has become one of the most widely known bodies of contemporary art work. Oldenburg was one of a number of artists who reacted against Abstract Expressionism's domination of American art in the 1950s. In various ways, these artists returned to the representation of people and objects in their work. But, American artists of the early 1960s did not limit themselves to the subjects favored by older art traditions that had focused on illusionistic replication of the visual world. Instead, artists such as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist took elements of popular culture--movies, billboards, magazines, commercial products--as their subjects. The new Pop Art responded to the commercialized environment that these artists observed around them. Oldenburg shared many interests and influences with the major Pop artists, but was less interested in the packaging and commercialization of America. Instead, his primary concern was with the "real" world, an "attachment [that] was so overwhelming as to force him to devise a new way to reintroduce it into art" (Geldzahler, 1985, p. 22). From his 1961 environment The Store, through his Happenings and his soft sculptures of hamburgers and hand-mixers, up to his monumental sculptures of clothespins and baseball bats, Oldenburg has consistently pursued this goal of reintroducing the everyday object into art.

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anner in which people view such mundane objects. This critique of the museum and gallery presentation of his work was another persistent theme throughout Oldenburg's career. In the early years, he often "seem[ed] to want to get away from art altogether and concern himself only with things" (Compton, 197O, p. 112). Thus, in 1961, Oldenburg rented an ordinary shop, on the Lower East Side, which became the installation known as The Store (1961). Oldenburg created over 100 objects, made of painted plaster, and displayed them in the space as if they were for sale. The objects were common things such as a Cap (Livingstone, 1991, p. 82), a Plate of Meat (Livingstone, 1991, p. 82), and a Sewing Machine (Fineberg, 1995, p. 197). The dark tones of The Street were set aside, and The Store's objects were brightly painted, using only 7 colors of household-enamel paint. The garish objects displayed less of the type of organic transformation found in earlier objects, such as "Empire" ("Papa") Ray Gun (1959). Instead, the emphasis was on formal aspects of the transformation of the object. The loosely splashed on paint, and the chunky shapes of the objects, for example, "emphasise[d] the reality of paint, as against its capacity to creat

Category: Arts - C