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OBJECT-MAKING Oyvind Fahlstrom
Why should it be meaningful to make objects if one is an American artist?
In the U.S.A., as we know, objects (goods) have an ecstatic quality - so that they can be sold, so that new objects can be made, so that more people have the means to buy more objects. If the U.S.A. is half a warfare state with a strategic industry "for the good of the nation" (of politicians, the military and industrialists), the remainder is a market state "for the good of the individual" (of the industry). To speed up this crazy circle, the Americans are reminded from the time they wake up in the morning until the time when they lose consciousness, that goods are fetiches which make them (better) Americans, mothers, millionaires, filmstars, fighters, mistresses and cowboys.
The tiresome thing about African fetiches is that they can only be (for us) beautiful shapes and a form of exoticism. The engaging thing about Claes Oldenburg's objects is that besides bringing out basic shapes and sign characteristics inherent in universal, everyday objects, he deals with fetich qualities with the glamour which ecstatic objects radiate. (Oldenburg has never made objects which are unpainted, "pure" sculpture.) Furthermore, his objects do not allude to everyday objects and are generally larger than life: they are not intended to be used, only to radiate.
Every hamburger or typewriter by Oldenburg becomes a monument to the ecstatic object. Recently, Oldenburg has also begun to make projects for monuments in New York consisting of colossal objects. (If this is really necessary. In Europe, monuments are erected to Garibaldi or the Unknown Soldier. In the U.S., for example, the puffing "Camel" cigarette in Times Square has become a national triumphal arch erected to the Unknown Consumer - otherwise it would surely have been pulled down, as "Camel" is almost extinct.)
Because Claes Oldenburg conducts experiments into pleasure magic it does not follow that he translates the bourgeois clichés of Madison Avenue. Even though the external quality of his objects differs from that of everyday objects, this does not imply anything expressionistic which introduces an orientation towards the ego. The marked character or personality which his objects possess is rather the result of a perspicacious, friendly and lyrical (crazy) recording of the milieu in which the artist lives at the moment he is making them.
In form, material and dimension, or "style," his earlier, papier mache-like objects and his reliefs tell something about New York's shabby, seething and hectic Slavonic-PuertoRican East Side. The big pieces of furniture are concerned with the (white) West Coast Americans, the frank and naive, grown-up mentality of Los Angeles and Hollywood. His French delicatessen objects are the smallest he has made, like dry, sober, rather finicky Parisian gourmets. The recent medium-sized objects from New York have, with the artist, emerged from the slums; like the new middling jet-set bourgeoisie of parties and private views they are spinelessly blase or plump and positive.
He can be seen as BIG, SOFT, STRONG. The most striking thing about his objects is that they are SOFT. In earlier years, the content of his objects dealt entirely with softness: clothes, meat, cakes. Since then, most of the objects made by Oldenburg have been soft (with the principal exception of the French objects) while the subjects have been hard. Why is all art hard? Hard and taut like a canvas, hard and brittle like a sculpture. Is this a tendency towards sublimation and the rigours of the super-ego? Does this perhaps give the impression of changelessness, perfection or eternal life?
But the object which yields is stronger. It is the same with Oldenburg himself; when he directs his performances, it seems as though he is always yielding to circumstances, materials, people. This allows people, material or space to be themselves, but in the end what results is always a characteristically Oldenburg work. But to yield to people does not mean for Oldenburg that he does this out of kindness or with the intention of improving them, as in psychological drama. They are entirely subordinated to Oldenburg's vision, but within it they have life. In the same way, I imagine that nowadays he manages to direct his army of assistants who sew for him: impoverished women artists and dancers, rich housewives, professional seamstresses and, first and foremost, his wife Pat. Without her stitching and her contribution to his performances, Oldenburg, as we know him, would not exist.
Oldenburg's quality of involved detachment means that he can plunge into and grope about in a sea of people just as easily as he can root around in the Salvation Army's boxes of tattered and faded old clothes on Second Avenue. (Pat's and his way of looking through their address book and ringing up candidates for their Happenings was like a virtuoso pianist looking over his music.) It must have been the same when he plunged into the slums of Chicago during his prehistoric years as a crime reporter.
In the same way, he was busy browsing his way through the Lower East Side when my wife Barbo and I first met him in the autumn of '61. For the most part, Puerto-Ricans lived in this area, and every now and then, neighbours threw bricks through the windows in the yard so that Claes had to put up bars.
