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Michael Fried
The work of Claes Oldenburg, whose hallucinatory, prosaic environment threatens to overflow the Green Gallery this month, seems to exist merely, or chiefly, in order to pose questions of a conceptual nature. Everything depends on what we make of it, on the conceptual framework that, looking at it, we bring to bear. What makes criticism difficult is that Oldenburg seems to be embarked on at least three more or less related projects at the same time. The first has to do with making works of art out of everyday objects, either by fiat or imitation, in the imperious manner of Duchamp. This is not to say that Oldenburg is concerned with the surrealist opposition of signs to things signified of intellectual categories to protean reality or, as he puts it, illusion to reality. In fact Oldenburg's work suffers next to Duchamp's, say. From the lack of just such firm philosophical purpose: if there is an intellectual principle common to his giant, stuffed-sailcloth hamburger, stuffed calendar, outsized trousers, plaster of paris fried eggs, and plaster cigarettes in a real ashtray, I haven't found it. Arid I can't shake the conviction that work like Oldenburg's either has got to have such a principle or else be put down as mostly or wholly arbitrary and subjective.
It is here that Oldenburg's second project comes into play, as if to compensate for his philosophical slackness and redeem his work from subjectivity by the sociological, or rather, the archetypal significance of the objects chosen for imitation, presentation, fetichism and hyperbole. They are all common items, and so share the trivial passion of the completely mundane. But what is probably more important they are for the most part distinctively American: which I assume is meant to rescue them from merely personal subjectivity. This is the familiar melodrama of one kind of American artist, whose naive esthetic founds itself on the conviction that if only he can involve himself with America profoundly enough the objects he will cathect onto can't fail to have archetypal force and significance. There isn't space to discuss whether in general such aspirations inevitably doom works of art to at best parochial success; though it is hardly surprising that Patterson goes unread in England. But I will add that nothing of Oldenburg's forced me to ignore how shaky the thought behind his pieces was, and, often, how slapdash their execution.
Finally, there is in much American painting by young artists today clandestine, or more open, rebellion against the living edge of that dialectic which seems to have governed the recent development of their art: almost a nostalgia for the good old days of drip and drag and cubist space. This is evident, I think, in the work of Johns and Rauschenberg, and I query whether it isn't to be found everywhere in Oldenburg's environment as well which might account for some of the slapdash painting mentioned above. Moreover, aren't the calendars strikingly like stuffed versions of Johns's number paintings, and don't the popsicles, for example, owe something to Newman and Kelly at the same time? But if this is the case it only serves to add a third kind of sentimentality to the two already cited.
Art lnternational, October 1962: 72-76
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