Art: The Venerability of Pop

FIRST it seemed all Brillo boxes, hoked-up cartoon strips, billboard fragments—and met mostly loud guffaws. But after less than a decade Pop art has not only come of age; it has —such is the accelerated pulse of art movements today—almost become venerable. As a sure sign of esteem, New York’s Guggenheim is now holding a retrospective of the comic-strip-inspired works of Roy Lichtenstein, and the saggy, baggy sculptures of Claes Oldenburg are on display at the Museum of Modern Art. The Whitney Museum, not to be outdone, will exhibit another major Pop artist, Jim Dine, in February.

Pop never was as radical as it has been made out to be. For one thing, it is more readily accessible to the casual viewer’s sensibility than the austere abstraction of, say, a Barnett Newman or an Ad Reinhardt. Its images, in fact, depend in part on instant recognition. Many of its subjects are the eternal themes of art—scrubbed, rubbed, varnished, stuffed and updated. Susannah and the Elders, an exercise in biblical voyeurism that has been painted by Tintoretto, Rubens and Rembrandt, becomes in Tom Wesselmann’s rendition a pink plastic Great American Nude in her bathtub, with gallerygoers playing unreluctant elders. Those meticulous Dutch still lifes of fruits and game are reflected in Pop’s soup cans, candy canes, slabs of gooey cake, giant Coke bottles.

Although the works might appear to be flip, slick and sexy, they also brim with menace. When they are funny, which is often, it is with the precarious humor of Harold Lloyd teetering on the edge of a cliff, or Charlie Chaplin falling into a machine. The pictures visually crowd the spectator, jostle and shout at him. All the vernacular of commercialism—billboards, neon signs, girlie magazines, comic books—provides the imagery. By using such familiar props, the Pop artists are commenting on the new urban landscape of supermarkets and motel rooms, of roadsides and TV commercials, a civilization in which the old-fashioned nature celebrated by old-fashioned artists has become merely a fleeting view from the window of a car, train, plane or apartment house. Thus most Pop works contain a tacit indictment of a society that allows life itself to be rolled off an assembly line: standardized, specialized, fragmented, and beautifully packaged.

As a movement, Pop is perhaps ebbing. But as its shock value wears off, it is easier to make judgments. The thin, acrid sensibility of Andy Warhol remains naggingly insistent, an idiosyncratic talent that can be derided but not dismissed. Lichtenstein’s works are admired for their sharp elegance, Rosenquist’s for their painterly quality, Jim Dine’s for their intimacy. But each seems to have settled into the styles established by his own success. The one among them who seems to have continuously moved into progressively new and different areas, blithely leaving his successes behind him, is Claes Oldenburg.

Table Volcano. A big, burly man who looks like a scholarly truck driver or an agile Bacchus, Oldenburg is shy but not modest. “I am a magician,” he says. “A magician brings dead things to life.” His sculptures of food, for example. Typical, terrible American cuisine fascinates him, the kinds of things dieters like Oldenburg himself try to avoid: a wedge of pecan pie, a banana sundae, racks of assorted pastry, ice cream, cheeseburgers. Made of plaster, slathered with lush enamel paint, these goodies actually seem ready for the consumer’s fork and spoon. But like four-color advertisements of food, they are designed more to entice than to be eaten. An Oldenburg baked potato nonetheless looks hot, smoky, delicious —with butter melting over the white insides. Yet visually it is as powerful as a volcano, with energy and drama in the eruption of its thick, baked skin.

Oldenburg sees the world with eyes as fresh and intent as a child’s, and he notices everything. He has collected, for instance, stubbed-out cigarettes. “Everybody puts out a cigarette in a different way, and these are particularly nervous ones,” he explains. “A fag end is a basic geometric form—a cylinder—that is altered by a very natural action when it is put out. This interests me.”

The soft sculptures are, of course, the magician’s most famous trick. Thfir success lies in their invitation to be touched and poked and in their quality of surprise. Where other artists in the past would change the color or shape of the objects they treated, Oldenburg keeps those qualities as they are and instead changes their context (a hamburger sits on the floor), size (small things become gigantic) and state (soft instead of hard). The result is a sculpture of enormous intellectual compression; it shows the stress of gravity, the effect of age, the possibility of sensuality. As a result, his sculptures force the viewer to look at everyday things with the fresh eye of discovery.

Whoever heard of a wedge of cake as big as a luncheonette booth? Or a giant fan so limp that it can hardly stand up, much less turn. Or three-way extension plugs, tall as children, and all ready to totter up to the viewer and command: “Take me to your leader!” His gleaming soft toilet slumps and sags like a geriatric patient. Oldenburg knows precisely what he is doing. “The important thing about humor is that it opens people. They relax their guard, and you can get your serious intentions across. If I were as didactic in my work as I really am, I would bore people to death. But because I can put my message in a colorful, engaging form, my message isn’t heavy.”

Ground Rules. To accomplish this difficult task, Oldenburg has developed some basic ground rules for his work. The subject first must be timely; he has no use for dead symbols. It must also be an object that touches the body, like furniture and food, or is constantly used, like housewares. “I never make representations of bodies but of things that relate to bodies so that the body sensation is passed along to the spectator either literally or by suggestion.” Finally, his creations must have something to do with sex. “If you ignore that,” he says, “you’re missing the point.”

Some of his sculptures are unmistakably phallic—the food blenders, for example, or toothpaste tubes. Others are based on female forms: the hamburgers, light switches, the soft version of Chrysler’s 1935 Airflow. But every good Freudian knows all that without having to prowl within a sculptor’s imagination. On the other hand, who could anticipate Oldenburg’s explanation of his sculpture Raisin Bread, Sliced? “It was conceived as a sort of Parthenon and was also suggested by a picture I saw of Paris’ Madeleine Church turning into a loaf of bread. The piece has a lot to do with excrement and sex. It also has to do with cutting.”

“All I need,” says Oldenburg, “is for something to stick in my mind. Like Henry Miller’s nose. It has a strange, puffy quality. Then it begins to work within a scheme of resemblances. The nose metamorphoses into a fireplug; the plug into a coin phone box; the phone into a car.” Once, just to discover exactly what did happen to a banana’s shape when it was being eaten, Oldenburg made five banana shapes out of canvas, filled them with plaster, peeled the “skin” and bit them all down to varying sizes. “I spit the plaster out,” he says. “It tasted terrible. But I had five bananas, each very different.”

Found Objects. Born in Stockholm 40 years ago, he grew up in Chicago, where his father was Swedish consul general. “I lived a private, shy life,” Oldenburg says, “built around an imaginary country I invented, called Neubern, located in the southern Atlantic.” By the age of 16, he was spending a lot of time in burlesque houses. “Talking to the dancers,” he recalls, “you found beauty in extremely negative things, because there was nothing else.” After four years at Yale and a brief period as a police reporter, he committed himself to art. “I had always thought I would be a figure painter,” he remembers. “But objects suddenly took on a personal nature. They became parts of the body. Potato chips are ears, ink bottles are nipples.”

Oldenburg moved to New York, where he met Artists Jim Dine and Allan Kaprow, who were busy inventing the world’s first “happenings.” Soon Oldenburg was staging happenings too, and got married to a pretty artists’ model, Pat Muschinski. The world of objects—food, toys, bric-a-brac—blazed all around him ia neighborhood stores. Claes started to reproduce them in burlap or muslin dipped in plaster and painted with all the romantic energy of Abstract Expressionism. “I wanted to extend color to three-dimensioned form,” he says, “to make paint tangible and edible.”

Soft Drum. The glory of vinyl struck Oldenburg in 1963. It was an ideal substitute for the hard plaster and enamel paint he had been using—and it was soft as skin. “It works by itself, takes different positions. I established guidelines, but the pieces must be arranged by others or it arranges itself.” Oldenburg’s Soft Drum Set takes an object specifically noted for its tautness and its sharp staccato clatter and expresses it as a chaos of relaxation. The Drum Set looks more like man’s viscera than his toy (another example of a body image) and its muteness almost rings in the ear like a parade that has passed.

Claes carries a notebook everywhere, and his drawings have an immediate impact. Free, energetic, powerful, they reflect the man’s intellect, brobdingnagian humor and conviction in his vision. In 1964 when Oldenburg was flying back from a trip to Europe, he looked at New York and “suddenly it seemed as if the city had gotten smaller or I had gotten bigger.” The whole idea of scale started him thinking about monuments, and so he drew them. Not monuments in the usual sense of statues or obelisks, they were things that attain monumentality through constant use: a toilet float that rises and falls with the tide on the Thames River in London, a gigantic pair of scissors to replace the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., a huge windshield wiper for Grant Park in Chicago, a melting Good Humor bar to replace the Pan Am Building in New York. Nor are all the monuments big. The most poignant, in fact, is the smallest—a fallen hat for “a London street” to commemorate Adlai Stevenson.

There is a great deal of comment in all these works. The hat, for example, is an image every English major at college encounters as far back as the medieval balladeers who sang of the brave Sir Patrick Spens, who drowned leaving no trace but a floating hat. In Washington’s scissors there is the suggestion of red tape and the hint of emasculation.

Colossal Gift. So far, Oldenburg has completed only one monument, and it is not his best work. Financed through an especially established Colossal Keepsake Corp., he has produced and “given” Yale University a 24-ft.-high lipstick made of metal. Sitting on a tanklike base in Beinecke Plaza, it looks morose rather than confident, too small to take an architectural stand against the ponderous classicism of the surrounding buildings. But the students seem to like it. Anyway, if Yale does not want Colossal Keepsake Number One, Oldenburg will offer it to one college after another until it is accepted.

The work now in the works is a lox-pink ice bag, 18 ft. in diameter, for the U.S. Pavilion at the World’s Fair at Osaka next year. A motor inside will cause the ice bag to tilt, inflate, undulate and deflate on a continuous cycle. As an object, it is funny, anthropomorphic and intellectual all at once. It qualifies as kinetic or soft or Pop sculpture, but is it art?

Oldenburg has no doubts. “People have a terrible time with the names of things,” he says. “The artist sees the world abstractly—form and color. Through his work, he hopes to get people to see the world as he does.” From his cavernous studio in New Haven, he sees Snake Mountain on one side, a railroad freight yard on the other. As an artist he looks on both with an equal eye.

“In the last analysis,” wrote Marcel Duchamp, the most cerebral artist of the 20th century, “the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of art history.” Right now Oldenburg—and some of his fellow Popsters as well—seems assured of a place in the primers.