A Small Step from Reality

Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings and Happenings Films
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: The Music Room

Whitney Museum of American Art
Until September 6, 2009

The first artwork a viewer meets, when stepping out of the elevator on level two at the Whitney Museum, is French Fries and Ketchup (1963). This over-sized stuffed vinyl sculpture is composed of elongated tan rectangles; ‘fries’, draped with an amorphous red pillow; ‘ketchup’. Other works accompanying French Fries and Ketchup on the gallery floor are a fishpond-sized ashtray filled with giant cigarette butts, a giant B.L.T and an upholstered toilet. It is obviously a Claes Oldenburg exhibition.

French Fries and Ketchup works like all Oldenburg's early sculptures; it is a blunt interpretation of an object, devoid of the characteristics that might convey the original's essence. The strips of ‘potato’ are not golden, their edges are not crisp, they do not steam, they do not make your mouth water. In other words, Claes Oldenburg removes the ‘yum’ from french fries and ketchup. Yet the strange thing is that Oldenburg’s works are incredibly satisfying to look at precisely because they so obviously reference the everyday. The charm of Oldenburg is his accessibility. The question of Oldenburg is: why are these soulless objects so appealing?

French Fries and Ketchup, 1963

In 1961 Oldenburg rented a store at 107 E. Second Street in the East Village. He then ran this store as an art piece known as ‘The Store’ in which he sold sculptures based on goods you would normally buy in a store. An eclectic selection of these sculptures (bra, pie, toast, potato chips), made from draping plaster-dipped muslin over chicken wire, is on display at the Whitney. They are crude creations with rough surfaces, weak edges and patchy paintwork, yet they still instantly invoke a personal response as the viewer can identify a ‘small treat’ consumer good. Interestingly, Black Girdle (1961), with its obsolete subject, is almost devoid of its referential quality in the 21st Century and therefore now barely recognizable in this basic plaster form.

Shirt, 1961 and Black Girdle, 1961

Drawings that relate to Oldenburg’s works are hung throughout the exhibition. He is an accomplished drawer. His images have the dull edges of his sculpture yet they still precisely deliver the intended effect. Study for Soft Fireplug (1969) personifies an upside-down fireplug; the ‘plug’ is shown to slump with a soft weight, its ‘legs’ are splayed, its ‘head’ tilts forward. Amazingly, with simple pencil, Oldenburg conveys a material – soft, heavy, metal – that does not exist.

Study for Soft Fireplug, Inverted, 1968

Oldenburg’s drawings are not only formal studies for sculptures he has created, but also fantasies that explore the space between possible and impossible, planned and unplanned, known and unknown. In this sense these drawings are similar to the scripts he wrote, which someone else shot, for Happenings films produced in the 1960s (seven of these films are on view at the Whitney). The drawings and scripts both loosely chart what may happen when Oldenburg’s ideas are realized as form/moving-image, however the point is they cannot begin to express the lived experience of viewing Oldenburg’s more completed works.

A large component of the Whitney exhibition is dedicated to Oldenburg’s collaborations with Coosje van Bruggen. The gallery entitled The Music Room features instrument sculptures Oldenburg and van Bruggen created between 1992 and 2006 (van Bruggen died early 2009). These later sculptures are more detailed and closer to true scale than Oldenburg’s iconic vinyl works. Made from porous muslin and featuring frayed edges, these works seem to breathe as their forms literally unraveled off the wall.

Soft French Horn, 2002

In Soft Saxophone, Scale A, Muslin (1992) Oldenburg and van Bruggen place the stuffed muslin body of a saxophone upon a ‘bed’ made from a painted grey rectangular piece of canvas that has been removed from its stretcher. Like the canvas, the saxophone is also without a ‘skeleton’; as a result its buttons, levers and rods have slipped off its soft body. Or perhaps these buttons, levers and rods are waiting to be attached to the body? The muslin material and rough seams gives the work the feel of a dressmaker’s mock-up, waiting approval for the final copy.

Study for Store Poster, 1961, Store Poster, 1961

With many of Oldenburg’s sculptures it is impossible to decide if they are on the verge of assemblage or deconstruction. Are they studies for, or interpretations derived from, the objects they reference? I think the answer is both. Oldenburg’s sculptures are surprising in scale and material, but they also are comforting as typical household objects we bring into our realm of experience. (On the other hand, Oldenburg’s Happenings films are obscure and, because they push away from reality, ultimately tedious.) A shirt, a sandwich, a saxophone; all made great, not because they are transformed into iconic artworks, but because they slightly skew our understanding of these common objects. It is a small step Oldenburg and van Bruggen ask us to take in considering new meanings for these objects, but an important one all the same.