Claes Oldenburg died about a year ago (July 22, 2022). He was 93. I have been reading a lot about the midcentury US art world over the past few years and his name is one that comes up over and over. But for me the name Claes Oldenburg is not a name for columns and quiet marble hallways or the whisper-passed, enclosed knowledge of art school, or even the rustly pages of the newspaper of record or the books by art critics I love to read. Claes Oldenburg is a name that means summer heat and drawings on secondhand paper and humor I sense but can’t really understand until I grow into it, and, most of all, it is a name that reminds me of the kind of person my father was. Like Oldenburg, my father died in 2022. Like Oldenburg, my father was the product of the white, American mid-20th century (though Oldenburg was a Swedish immigrant, and my father was born in the US to a settler family). Like Oldenburg, my father lived in New York and spent time in the art scene there in the 1960s, though he was never an artist by profession, being instead an artist of his everyday life.
My father’s approach to art was to like it. That was an active verb for him: he liked a lot of things, from Alexander Calder, his perennial favorite, to Yoko Ono. (He once took me to an exhibit of Ono’s work that changed my life.) His favorite painting was Rembrandt’s Lucretia, which is held in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (now MIA), and which his mother took him to see often as a child. I can remember dozens of times in that museum, just standing with my dad in front of the painting, looking at it, and after a while he would say, It’s beautiful. And that would be it. When we were children we were also often taken by my parents to the museums in our city, which were free, warm, and open to children without pandering or condescension. And it was with my father, and probably my brothers and my mother, that I remember first encountering the work of Claes Oldenburg, in the form of his hanging sculpture Shoestring Potatoes Spilling From a Bag. How could I help but like that work, when the person who introduced me to it approached it (and the Sol LeWitt mural near it, and the Louise Nevelson construction around the corner) as something it was possible to find visual and intellectual and felt pleasure in, however it was it came? Liking art as a way to be with art is one of the major lessons I took from my dad.
On the day I met Claes Oldenburg’s work I was a child, holding my dad's hand as we walked through the collections of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag, hung in a stairwell. I have a bodily memory of it—it's one of the earliest memories I have of a work of visual art, and most of those memories take place at the Walker. The memory I have is of its size, but not size as in monumentality; size as in disproportion. It’s a sculpture of a small thing that’s represented hundreds of times larger than it is. The sculpture’s not-quite-rightness made me feel good, and that’s a feeling I’ve been interested in ever since. It’s not a “good” of smoothness that thought can slide off of; it is a “good” that made me ask but why? and follow that question with more thinking. The shoestring potatoes are huge (wrong! fries are small) and they are floppy-soft (wrong!! sculptures are smooth and hard!). The bag is not quite symmetrical, and the whole thing hangs not like paper (which it represents) but like cloth (which it is). Thinking through my first reaction (pleasure, humor) has helped me understand this sculpture and Oldenburg’s work—what it’s saying about art, about everyday life, and about the intersections between the two.
Most people in the city I come from have seen the huge sculpture Spoon Bridge and Cherry that sits in the garden outside the modern art museum. Oldenburg is known for massive works like this, many of which he made with his wife Coosje Van Bruggen, who died in 2009. This sculpture, like most of Oldenburg’s work, is playful and interested in the objects of everyday life. What happens to them when the scale changes? What happens when we see a typewriter eraser or a clothespin as a monumental object? Whose lives and work are memorialized when these are the things that we have to look up to see, instead of a man on a horse, pointing toward the territory? I am drawn to Oldenburg’s work—the soft sculptures especially, but also the prints and drawings that lead up to and accompany them—because he makes images and sculptures that show ordinary things and that are rendered in ordinary materials. Not marble, but cloth. Not oil paint, colored pencil. Children’s media, not able to be dismissed as children’s media. Or “feminine” material—cloth—and processes—sewing—that are to be taken as seriously as carving marble or casting bronze.
Claes Oldenburg’s work formed a background to my childhood, though I wouldn’t have been able to tell you his name. That makes sense, not least because he was preoccupied with the things and thoughts of everyday life, the kinds of background objects we forget are even there—clothespins and bathtubs. That his sculptures became part of my world’s wallpaper seems like one right trajectory for them. But also, I was a child, and the art museum was not so different from other ordinary places: the grocery store, the kindergarten classroom. All were part of the life my parents made for me and my brothers, and so the images and objects of these places became part of what I knew the world to be, early on. It was long after my early encounters with Oldenburg’s work that I connected the soft sculpture of the french fries falling from their bag to a specific person with a name and a place in art history. In a narrow classroom, among printmakers and painters, photographers and installation artists, our professor handed out the reading for the week. The handout was Oldenburg’s 1961 manifesto “I am for an Art”.
In the manifesto, Oldenburg writes that he is “for an art” that “does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” “I am for an art,” he goes on, “that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero. […] I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself”. Oh! Yes. Rereading that manifesto now, after years of reading it alone and with others, gives me language for what Oldenburg’s work meant to me, and, I think, what it meant to my dad. It gives me language that insists on looking at and turning toward what might be passed over or assumed to be uninteresting; a language of obstinacy and of invention. A language that I saw in my dad’s encouragement to look, and look again, at the places we lived. Back when I first encountered Oldenburg’s manifesto, in the classroom of a beloved and revered teacher, “I am for an Art” awoke in me an understanding of what it could mean to have ordinary life at the center of one’s gaze, to steadily affirm that the objects, perceptions, and actions of one’s own life were part of a lifelong engagement with art.
Of course, Oldenburg’s work does sit in museums, now; his and Coosje van Bruggen’s monumental everyday objects are not everyday objects once they are made of coated steel at immense scale. But I don’t take the manifesto that literally, or that singlemindedly. (It’s a fault-fact of my language that we can’t say all of what we mean simultaneously, and so our experience of contradiction might look like correction or sequence rather than multitudes or copresence. That’s one part of what Fanny Howe is writing about in her essay “Bewilderment”, by the way.) I take it to mean: look. What art is (what poetry is!) isn’t settled. By extension, neither is beauty! It’s not to be found in the places called “art museums” alone. Look for it everywhere: look at the charming form of that typewriter eraser. Look at how the toothpaste tube sags when it gets empty. Look at the beautiful lines of that slice of cake. And all of a sudden it’s clear that it is the seeing that makes the art: your seeing, you, ordinary person, seeing your ordinary life, which (it is revealed to have been all along) is the site of big, living questions about aesthetics, about geometry, about ethics, about optics, about haptics…. Claes Oldenburg's work taught me, as a very young person, that art was for ordinary life—that art is in fact made of ordinary life; that there is no separation between the things of our lives and the things of art. And his work teaches me that art can be playful, light—and that playfulness and lightness are serious ways of understanding or getting to know the world. From his work in part I draw the knowledge that sculpting means sewing as much as it means working with a hammer and chisel, and that, too, reminds me that art is and can be made of whatever is to hand in our ordinary lives.
I love art and I love people who make it with seriousness and playfulness (and serious playfulness) and Claes Oldenburg seems to have been one such person. When I look at Oldenburg’s sculptures now, I see my father’s seeing in them. I see I learned from him a lesson in delight, in taking things as they are, in looking again, in being playful, and in the pleasure that can come in there being a difference between what you expected and what showed up, whether in the art museum, in the classroom, or on the bus home from work.
Thanks for reading. See you in a week!
I love this so much, Éireann! I appreciate the way you talk through your thinking, of why the ordinary in unexpected form is delight-ful. What I enjoyed so much in this piece was your appreciation for what Oldenburg was *doing*, and how he did it. The ordinariness and charm of the everyday object, interrogated through changes in scale or medium. And especially, a deeper thinking about what "liking" something really means.
It was extremely helpful for me in interrogating my own aesthetic preferences, which tend more towards Dürer and Rembrandt than Oldenburg. Mostly due to a lack of exposure and education, much "modern" art has frequently been irritatingly incomprehensible to me--like an inside joke among "artists" from which I was meant to be excluded. But on a philosophical level I have always felt that the ordinary is worthy of art. My absolute favorite paintings have always been still lifes--the fishes, the oranges, the wine, the flowers--precisely because of the way they make the ordinary details of life into "Art." A quilt or dress is as worthy of contemplation as a sculpture. Oldenburg's manifesto, and those shoestring fries, demonstrate that intersection very powerfully. Thank you.