Reading an autobiography by James Rosenquist has gotten me thinking about Pop Art, which officially started in Britain with Richard Hamilton (who later taught Bryan Ferry) among others, but really took off in the US. Rosenquist himself is an interesting example, using billboard scale to create enigmatic, surreal effects.
Claes Oldenburg, born in Rosenquist's ancestral land of Sweden, was also a big artist. His soft sculptures put common objects at giant scale in the public realm. That made him one of the most accessible Pop artists, and really among postmodern artists in general. Kids could get this, even if it wasn't made for them.
This video is a pretty good slideshow of his work. Strangely the narrator either wasn't familiar with ice bags or thought his audience wouldn't recognize them.
2 comments:
That was a sweet and naive little video of Claes Oldenburg's work. I noticed the young man didn't recognize shuttlecocks or the garden trowel either (he called it a shovel). The really important part he appeared not to know was that a lot of the work credited to Claes was actually done in collaboration with his wife Coosje van Bruggen. Claes was already well known when the two met in 1971. Coosje, who was nearly thirteen years younger, was an art historian and an art instructor in Holland when she met Oldenburg. The two worked together designing and making (although I'm pretty sure some of the very big pieces required the skills of professional engineers) all the large installations.
The Pace Gallery in NYC which represents their work has an interesting video and story about them on its website. A separate page has a timeline of their mutual projects from 1971 to 2009 when Coosje passed away after a long battle with breast cancer.
I'm glad you found this. What I've always loved about their work is that it's full of meaning and humor as well as beauty.
Shuttlecocks are a great subject for sculpture. It's a shame he didn't recognize them, but I guess that's the risk you take with representative art. As for Coosje van Bruggen, I'm a little embarrassed to note that I didn't know about her contributions either. It seems like she was pretty pivotal, though. It would have been easy for him to either endlessly repeat himself or drift into obscurity. She found a way for him to innovate while remaining recognizably Oldenburg. I suspect the world does not know her artistic vision as well as it would had she lived a little longer, but she has plenty to be proud of.
Thank you for linking me to the video from the Pace Gallery. It was nice to get a little glimpse of how they worked together. One of the art historians on talking head duties in that video talks about how research into art has become a primary material in the making of art. Interesting line of thought.
This was their last big collaboration. They still seemed to have their senses of humor intact.
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