Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [136]
Oldenburg magnified the scale of objects like clothespins, baseball bats, and lipstick tubes to the epic size of Times Square billboards. He also altered their composition, constructing a typewriter out of soft vinyl, clothespin out of steel, or icepack out of painted canvas stuffed with kapok.
Oldenburg’s soft sculptures are like 3-D versions of Dalí’s limp watches. His magnifications and transmogrifications “give the object back its power,” he said, by disorienting viewers and shocking them out of their torpor. “Soft Toilet,” for instance, turns all expectations topsy-turvy. What should be hard is soft and sagging, what should be sanitary looks unhygienic. “Gravity is my favorite form-creator,” Oldenburg said.
Besides his soft sculpture, Oldenburg is also known for his proposed civic monuments, most of which exist only as witty sketches. He has suggested replacing standard memorials like soldiers and cannons with colossal enlargements of everyday items like spoons, cigarette butts, or peeled bananas. For the Thames River in London, Oldenburg proposed huge toilet bowl floats to rise and fall with the tides.
Like James Rosenquist, who painted billboards before becoming a Pop artist, Oldenburg was interested in the power of scale as a property in art. “I alter to unfold the object,” Oldenburg said, to make us “see,” perhaps for the first time, an object we look at every day.
OP ART
Riley, “Current,” 1964, MoMA, NY. “Op,” “ or “optical” art, was developed in the mid-’60s by English painter Bridget Riley, French-Hungarian Victor Vasarély, and the Americans Richard Anuszkiewicz and Lawrence Poons. It combined color and abstract patterns to produce optical illusions of pulsating movement.
CASTING CALL
Segal, “Walk/Don’t Walk,” 1976, Whitney, NY. Around 1960 American sculptor George Segal (b. 1924) created a new art form: plaster casts of figures set in actual environments. By wrapping surgical bandages around living people, he created eerily lifelike, stark white sculptures. Although cast from the living image, Segal’s molded people are ghostly and depersonalized. Often in a group, as on a bus, they project loneliness and alienation. Segal’s joyless sculpture is to Pop what Hopper’s grim pictures are to upbeat American Scene paintings. Like the Pop artists, however, Segal fuses reality with unreality to intensify the impact of ordinary experience.
MINIMALISM: THE COOL SCHOOL
The inevitable conclusion of the modern artist’s urge to reduce art to basics was Minimalism. Although monochrome canvases by painters like Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, and Agnes Martin are called Minimalist, it is primarily a school of sculpture. The founding fathers are all American sculptors like Donald Judd, who defined Minimalism as “getting rid of the things that people used to think were essential to art.”
SOLID GEOMETRY. Minimalists, like Hard Edge painters, eradicated the individual’s handprint, as well as any emotion, image, or message. To attain such a “pure,” anonymous effect, they used prefab materials in simple geometric shapes like metal boxes or bricks.
Judd, “Untitled,” 1969, Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, CA. Minimalism is art reduced to the absolute minimum, totally abstract and commercially manufactured, without reference to the artist’s emotions, personality, or any recognizable image.
Minimalism was a reaction against both the swagger of Abstract Expressionism and vulgarity of Pop. After they jettisoned both personality and consumerism, what Minimalists had left were cold, mechanical forms for the viewers to make of them what they would. Metal shelves attached to a gallery wall, panes of glass on a gallery floor, a plank leaning against a wall are all Minimalist art. The ultimate Minimalist exhibit was French artist Yves