Exhibitions Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (Hayward Gallery, till 18 August)
Pulling in the punters
Edward Lucie-Smith The Hayward Gallery, in trouble over attendances, seems to have envisaged its current Oldenburg show as just the thing to pull in the punters during the summer months — jolly, populist stuff with a big name attached. To view it as anything other than this is to risk being accused of a sense of humour deficit. In fact, the exhibi- tion raises a lot of questions, some of which don't have easy answers.
The first set of queries concerns the ori- gins of Pop Art. Oldenburg's kind of Pop is regarded as a uniquely American phe- nomenon, with its roots in the mass culture of great American cities — advertising signs, hardware stores, hamburger joints. In fact, Oldenburg himself is rather marginal- ly American: the son of a Swedish diplo- mat, he was born in the old country because his parents wanted to make sure he had a Swedish passport, and brought up
Geometric Apple Core, 1991 partly in Oslo. When he deals with Ameri- can blue-collar culture he's dealing with it from the outside — it's not absolutely his native element.
Looking at his work in a European rather than an American context, one is struck by how derivative it is from Surreal- ism. It is not merely that Merret Oppen- heim's `Fur Teacup' anticipates Olden- burg's kapok-stuffed canvas hamburgers and other similar goodies in method if not in scale, it is also that he often seems to do in three-dimensional form what leading Surrealist painters had already done in two dimensions. Oldenburg's droopy egg-beat- ers are a version of Salvador Dali's soft watches. Similarly, when Oldenburg blows up a three-way plug to vast size, its effect on the surrounding space is like that of the giant apple which Magritte imagines occu- pying a very small room.
Like many not wholly original artists, he has enjoyed a success denied to those whose work is perhaps more genuinely rad- ical. In recent years, he has been offered opportunities to make major public sculp- ture. He has made a whole series of quirky monuments in collaboration with his sec- ond wife, the Dutch art historian and cura- tor Coosje van Bruggen. These began as fantasies and in-jokes, depicted in seduc- tive drawings — Oldenburg is a fluent and attractive draughtsman of a purely conven- tional kind. The first to be physically realised was commissioned by students at Yale: a giant lipstick mounted on a plat- form with caterpillar tracks, something with which to cock a snook at solemn university surroundings. Now, however, similar ideas have attracted impeccably conservative establishment patrons, enamoured with the idea of cheering up supposedly dreary urban surroundings — mitigating (or per- haps more exactly trying to excuse) the nature of the context by supplying a bit of fun for one-and-all. Oldenburg's sculptures are appearing in full-scale solidly rooted form all over the place, in Europe as well as in the United States: a giant clothes-peg for Philadelphia, a bottle full of messages for Middlesborough.
This leads me to my second set of queries, which is what his recent successes in this field have to tell us about the nature of modern monumental sculpture. It has been clear, ever since Rodin's day, that this was gradually having the life drained out of it. Rodin could still provide something apposite to a particular context, though he often had difficulty getting his own way think of the `Balzac' and the 'Burghers of Calais'. Rodin's successor Maillol, whoever or whatever was being commemorated, offered a female nude. With Oldenburg, you get, not a nude, but a brobdignagian toothbrush. What does this teach us about contemporary society? Basically, I think, that we no longer have any common visual language which will take us beyond the realm of the facetious. In this sense, at least, Oldenburg is an epoch-making artist.
Previous page
