Dark Roots Of A Pop Master's Sunshine

Professor Of Art History And Archaeology Joshua Shannon Is Quoted For His Essay In A New Volume On Claes Oldenburg.

By Blake Gopnik, The New York Times

Paying A Visit To Claes Oldenburg, One Of The Last Surviving Giants Of Pop Art, You’d Be Forgiven For Expecting A Wacky Guy Living In Chaos. His Crowd-Pleasing Masterworks — A Canvas Hamburger The Size Of A Couch, A Rusting Clothespin As Big As A House, A Lipstick Tall As A Tree — Can Easily Be Read As Giant Guffaws At A Pompous Art World. His Gorgeous Sketches For Those Projects Are As Wild And Woolly As Could Be. So Yes, You’d Be Forgiven For Expecting A Scene From A Shaggy New Yorker Cartoon By Ed Koren — Forgiven, And Mistaken.

Mr. Oldenburg’s Five-Story Studio, On The Western Edge Of Soho, Is Utterly Tidy, Its Classic Loft Spaces Furnished With Rigorous Bauhaus Classics And Hard-Edge Minimal Pieces By Donald Judd. Mr. Oldenburg, Who Is 84, Wears Stylish Round Tortoiseshell Glasses And Receives His Guest With More Old World Gentility Than New York Pushiness. (He Was Born In Sweden, Into A Diplomat’s Household.) He Reveals A Sense Of Humor, Joking About How A Big Newspaper Ad For His Forthcoming Show at The Museum Of Modern Art, Opening Sunday, Has Been Upstaged By One For A Show About Whales. But There’s No Trace Of The Clown, And There’s Plenty Of Orderly Retrospection.

“if You Really Want To Be An Artist, You Search Yourself, And You Find A Lot Of It Comes From Earlier Times,” He Said. “i Have Pretty Much Built The Work Around My Experiences. When I’ve Moved From One Place To Another, The Work Has Changed.” He Came To New York In 1956 From Chicago, Where He Was Mostly Raised, And Settled On The Lower East Side, Which He Describes As New York’s “most Creative And Stimulating Part.”

His First Notable Art Found Its Inspiration There, He Said, In “garbage Containers Made Out Of Burlap,” In The Neighborhood’s Nascent Graffiti And In Its Competing Jewish And Latino Cultures. And He Was Exposed To This Street-Smart Energy At Just The Right Time, When The Showy Abstractions Of Jackson Pollock And Franz Kline Felt Old Hat, But No One Knew What Was Next. “it Was A Moment Waiting To Happen,” He Said, Listing All The Artists Ready To Burst On The Scene, Like Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow And Jim Dine — Not To Mention Himself.

That Is The Moment Being Explored In The Show “claes Oldenburg: The Street And The Store,” Named For Two Projects That Jump-Started His Career. Recreating Scenes From The Grit Of New York’s Urban Fabric, Originally As A Backdrop For Some Of The First Examples Of Performance Art, Mr. Oldenburg’s Early Installations Show A Frenetic, Angry, Even Political Side That Has Been Lost In Our Concentration On Him In His Later, Cheery Pop Art Incarnation. And That Early Work Is Perhaps In Better Accord With Current Art Trends, Giving Mr. Oldenburg A Renewed Relevance.

He Is Probably Best Known For The Soft Sculptures He Made In The Later 1960s, Like Giant Fans And Popsicles And Telephones Sewn From Floppy Vinyl. Or As The Man Behind The Massive Public Sculptures Of The Following Decades, Like A Monumental Pair Of Binoculars Off Venice Beach, Calif., Made In Collaboration With His Wife, The Dutch Art Historian Coosje Van Bruggen, Who Died In 2009. But More And More, Oldenburg Scholars Are Realizing That All That Bubbly Pop Had At Its Root His Very Early, Angsty, Urban Works, Like Those Coming To Moma, And That His Playful Sculptures Have More Power When Those Roots Are Understood.

Ann Temkin, The Museum’s Chief Curator Of Painting And Sculpture And The Coordinator Of The Oldenburg Exhibition — A More Focused Version Of A Show First Seen At Vienna’s Museum Of Modern Art — Referred To “the Street” (1960), Mr. Oldenburg’s First Mature Work, As “an Absolute Masterpiece.” It Was An Art Installation Before The Term Was Current, Shown For Six Weeks In A Shabby Basement Gallery Run By The Judson Memorial Church On Washington Square. Walls Were Covered With Crude, Barely Legible Cutouts Of People, Cars, Bikes And Guns — Basic Ingredients Of Life On The Lower East Side — Made From Found Cardboard And Slathered In Black Paint. The Floor Was Awash In Detritus Picked Off The Pavements Around Mr. Oldenburg’s Home, And The Whole Mess Also Functioned As A Backdrop For Some Of The Earliest Happenings. For The One Called “Snapshots From The City,” Mr. Oldenburg Dressed In Rags And Writhed And Jerked Amid The Trash, Finally Pulling Out A Cardboard Gun And Miming Suicide. “we Were Received In Not Too Friendly A Way,” He Recalled. “we Were Changing The Rules.”

Ms. Temkin Said She Detects An Echo Of Mr. Oldenburg’s Early Work In The Rise Of Garbage Art And Abject Assemblage Today, As Well As In Performance. “i See A Whole Host Of Performances By Artists In Their 20s, And I’m Convinced That They Don’t Know About These Precedents,” She Said. “they Shouldn’t Think They’re Inventing The Wheel.”

Mr. Oldenburg Said He Remembers When That Was Precisely What He And His Peers Were Doing. “it All Sort Of Coalesced As The ’60s Came. It Was Magical, When You Think About It, Because Everything Seemed To Start All Of A Sudden.” With The Election Of John F. Kennedy “there Was A Feeling That The Country Was Going To Come To Life.” The Artist’s Job, As Mr. Oldenburg Saw It, Was To Plug Into That Energy And To “engage Our Surroundings, To Use The Material Around Us In Imaginative Ways.” That Engagement Is What Some Younger Thinkers Now See As Mr. Oldenburg’s Forte.

Joshua Shannon, 41 And A Professor At The University Of Maryland, Is The Author Of An Essay In A New Volume On Mr. Oldenburg In The Prestigious October Files Series. He Describes Mr. Oldenburg’s Earliest Art As Bearing Crucial Witness To A Moment When New York’s Economy Was Shifting From The Production Of Goods, As Seen In The Sweat Shops Of The Lower East Side, To Financial Services, Advertising And Other Sponsors Of The Glass-And-Steel Skyscrapers That Were Leveling The Old Fabric Of New York Just As Mr. Oldenburg Began To Revel In It. (He Said That He Shuns Skyscrapers To This Day And Pointed An Accusatory Finger At A Rare One In Soho That Now Fills The View From Windows In His Loft.)

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