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Biography
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Claes OLDENBURG
Born in 1929, Stockholm, Sweden. Lives and works in the USA.
What if in the middle of the Esplanandi park there stood not the statue of Runeberg but a gigantic runebergintorttu , the cake loved by and named after the poet? Can a national monument be humorous? Yes, it can, the Swedish-American artist Claes Oldenburg would undoubtedly reply. He is the one who came up with the idea of a new monument for our national poet during a visit to Finland in 1970. Perhaps the most playful representative of American pop art, Oldenburg turns the everyday into the festive, small into large, soft into hard – or vice versa. Gigantic objects and soft sculptures have been his trademark since the1960s.
Biography
Claes Oldenburg (born in 1929) was born in Stockholm but has lived in the USA almost continuously since 1930. He spent most of his childhood and youth in Chicago where his father served as the Swedish consul. Oldenburg studied at Yale between 1946 and 1950 and at the Art Institute of Chicago between 1950 and 1954. He moved from Chicago to New York City in 1956. Since 1976 he has worked together with Coosje van Bruggen, his wife since 1977. In Finland Oldenburg’s works have been seen at the ARS exhibitions in 1969 and 1974, the Modern Masters exhibition in 1989, and the retrospective "A Bottle of Notes and Some Voyages" at the Tampere Art Museum in 1990.
Works in the Museum Collection
Extinguished Match, 1987
Urethan foam, painted with latex
240 x 690 x 80 cm
Drawing for Tähtitorninmäki Hill: Three Melting Butter Pats, 1971
Indian ink on squared paper
10,3 x 14,4 cm
London Knees, 1966
Multiple, two parts
Plastic, latex, h. 39 cm
Article
Claes Oldenburg creates metamorphoses in everyday life
When a match or a lipstick grows into a monumental size far exceeding the physical limits of the viewer, or when a hard and heavy tool becomes soft and plump, the impression is inevitably comic. A sense of humour is one of the central elements of Claes Oldenburg’s art. But it is not only a question of visual jokes. Surprising shifts in scale and materials shake and refresh the concept of art and public art in particular.
For Oldenburg, any everyday object can serve as a point of departure: a broken button, a used match, a baseball bat. Next, he transfers the outward shape of the original object to another material and scale, thus opening the viewer’s eyes to a new way of looking at both everyday objects and public sculptures. During a visit to Finland in 1970 he expressed ideas for the statue of Runeberg and other grand works. One of them is illustrated in a small drawing included in the collections of this museum: entitled Butter Columns , the drawing depicts three massive, melting pats of butter on the Tähtitorninmäki hill. For the site of the statue for the shipwrecked he suggested humungous black ski boots and the Old Student’s House was to be replaced by a gigantic mechanically rising lipstick, which was later erected on the Yale University Campus.
The idea of monuments is also behind the sculpture London Knees , which is included in our collections. Oldenburg drew a colossal knee as a monument to be erected in the Thames Estuary in England in 1966. The idea was realised later in the same year as the London Knees multiple, a series of a number of identical works in which the single knee has obtained a pair and a sturdy box underneath it. The box also contains drawings of the designed monument.
The latest Oldenburg at the Museum of Contemporary Art is the Extinguished Match , almost seven metres high and constructed of steel, foam plastic, and latex. Under Oldenburg’s magnifying glass a nondescript object such as a used match has become voluptuous and sensual. The viewer enjoys the recognition of the original object behind the transformation. Nevertheless, Oldenburg himself emphasises that representation does not play an important role in his art. What is important are the shapes: scale, relationship of volumes, planes, and lines.
Claes Oldenburg began his career as a draughtsman. By the beginning of the 1960s his scale had expanded to installations whose themes emerged directly from American everyday life: street, shops, home. The 1960 exhibition The Street turned the gallery into a shady street with its graffiti, litter, and cardboard figures. In 1961, The Store was inspired by a shop selling women’s underwear, but among plaster bras and stays Oldenburg placed enormous, oversized pastries. After the street and shops, his next major theme was the home: inspired by billboards and newspaper advertisements, Oldenburg created in 1963 The Bedroom Ensemble , a hypermodern American bedroom playing with distorted perspectives. It was followed by a bathroom whose elements (toilet, wash-basin, bath-tub etc.) Oldenburg realised both as ‘hard’ cardboard and as vinyl sculptures.
Oldenburg’s installations in the 1960s often served as sets for various performances. He created a range of props from waste material. Indeed, the first soft sculptures, for which he later became famous, were created for performances and installations. He often realised the same theme – light switches, electric plugs, typewriters, and other everyday objects – in several materials: cloth, cardboard, and vinyl. Oldenburg became the satirical interpreter of the symbols of the American consumer society and the hidden power of everyday objects.
Drawing continues to be important for Oldenburg. He draws sketches of his sculptures, and the early drafts for colossal monuments, such as the butter pats or Runeberg’s cake for Helsinki, live as drawings. ‘Potential monuments’ were replaced by concrete large-scale projects in the 1970s. In 1976 Oldenburg met his future wife and partner, the Dutch artist Coosje van Bruggen, with whom he has carried out some twenty large-scale sculpture projects, including a 33.5-metre steel baseball bat in Chicago (1977), three gigantic billiard balls in Munster, Germany (1977), a broken button almost 5 metres in diameter in Philadelphia (1981), a seven-metre bent screw in Rotterdam (1983), etc.
"Each project is a journey that can last as long as two or three years, and at the end of each journey we collect the documents into a story ", Oldenburg has described his working method. First he and Coosje van Bruggen get acquainted with and collect information on the location of the planned sculpture. An idea gradually emerges, combining the identities of the place and the artists. The idea is developed through drawings and scale models until questions of material and scale have been solved. The complexity of public works - design, maintenance, financing, bureaucracy – has decreased the degree of spontaneity associated with Oldenburg’s earlier soft sculptures, but the work has also obtained new political and ideological dimensions.
Oldenburg has been compared to the surrealists – indeed, his soft sculptures share an absurd dimension with, say, Salvador Dali’s oozing dials – but also to the curious Gulliver who in the land of Lilliputians and giants encountered worlds of different scales. Oldenburg himself opened his poetic1961 manifesto with these words: "I am in favour of art that is politic-erotic-mystic, that does something else other than just sit on its ass in a museum."
Anu Uimonen