Magician, Clown, Child

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Washington monument has vanished. In place of its tapering obelisk, a pair of colossal scissors, several hundred feet high, slowly opens during the day and shuts during the night. In Chicago, a clothespin stands where the Tribune Tower once was. In London, Nelson's Column has been replaced by a giant gearshift, which twitches and gyrates erratically through its patterns, scaring the pigeons away from Trafalgar Square forevermore. Have we all been colonized by the Brobdingnagians? Not quite. Claes Oldenburg is at work, and an exhibition of his imaginary monsters, entitled Object into Monument, is now touring the U.S. After a first run at the Pasadena Art Museum in California, the show opens next week at the University Art Museum in Berkeley; through 1972 it will travel to Kansas City, Fort Worth, Des Moines and Chicago.

Like his show, the tall Swedish-American with the potato nose and ice-bag hat jets to and fro between Los Angeles, Stockholm, London. In New York his studio is appropriately gargantuan, consisting of two connected five-story warehouses with an elevator so large that Oldenburg is proposing to furnish it as his living room. He has become, in effect, his own museum: a traveling exhibit, documented and catalogued and spewing out work with minatory gusto.

"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum." So said Oldenburg in a celebrated manifesto written in 1961, which came to be interpreted as one of the charter documents of Pop art. But the museum, like the kraken, envelops even those who defy it. Oldenburg, at 43, is one of the most avidly collected artists in America. The reasons have little to do with the Pop ballyhoo of the early '60s; firmly independent of movements, he has been trying for the past six years to get clear of the narrow context of museum art and the still narrower one of private buying. So his projects for monuments are an effort to take over the environment--"to make," as he puts it, "something so big that nobody can possess it."

Nothing Oldenburg does is lacking in irony--and this includes his wish to make monuments. The traditional language of monuments was heroic--Napoleon gesturing on a marble plinth festooned with trophies and Graces, or Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni raking his bronze eyes across a conquered piazza from his striding horse. The monumental hero is, actually and metaphorically, bigger than life. But to make one, there has to be some belief in heroes, and there must be something to celebrate.

Dying Myth. People still build monuments, but the art died when the celebration stopped, when artists began consciously thinking of themselves as critics, not as exalters. of the established order. The mood was set a century ago when Gustave Courbet, one of the fathers of modern art, helped to topple the Vendome column during the Paris Commune of 1871. Modern democracy has flattened the myth of the hero, and there are still no good monuments to Churchill or Roosevelt; to imagine an equestrian bronze of Nixon or Pompidou on some future Capitol is to enter the realm of farce.

One way of dealing with Oldenburg's unbuildable projects is to see them as monstrous parodies of this situation. In 1965, he dreamed up a monument for upper Central Park in the form of a giant teddy bear: this woebegone and helpless image was, for Oldenburg, "an incarnation of white conscience; as such, it fixes white New York with an accusing glance from Harlem but also one glassy-eyed from desperation. This may be why I chose a toy with the 'amputated' effect of teddy paws--handlessness signifies society's frustrating lack of tools."

In 1969, Oldenburg came as close as he ever got to actually building a monument when a group of Yale graduate students asked him to design one for "the second American revolution." They had been inspired by the New Left's guru Herbert Marcuse, who, having seen Oldenburg's drawings, announced that "there is a way in which this kind of satire, or humor, can in deed kill. I think it would be one of the most bloodless means to effect a rad ical change." Oldenburg's response took the form of a vast red lipstick which telescoped up and down, stiff ening and softening, from Caterpillar tracks. It was polemical, a mixture of cosmetic, phallus and rocket carrier -- the ultimate weapon. The fate of this work was as appropriate as its original message: removed from the Yale cam pus, it now lies disintegrating in a Connecticut factory yard, along with the Yippies' fantasies of instant revolution.

But the lipstick provided Oldenburg with other, related images, such as his proposed monument for Marilyn Mon roe, Lipstick with Stroke Attached, 1971. It looks flat, decorative and in nocuous -- until one notices that the gleaming "stroke" of red-sprayed met al, lying flat on the floor, could also be the reaping blade of a scythe.

This not-so-hidden menace in Ol denburg's work is truly obsessive, and it supplies one of the reasons why his art cannot be seen clearly in the Pop art atmosphere of flaccid, easygoing ac ceptance of the commercial image.

Some of his monuments, if built, would be lethal. One consists of twelve-story-high bowling balls rolling inexorably down the alley of Park Avenue. "The balls," notes Oldenburg, "are an at tempt to make tangible my feeling that Park Avenue is a dangerous street where you can get run over and killed very easily. The balls intensify and monumentalize this danger." Another, for Grant Park in Chicago, is a pro digious windshield wiper, slapping back and forth between two long rectangular pools. Says the artist: "These serve as swimming pools for the city's children.

However, from time to time the blade of the Giant Wiper descends into the water. If one doesn't want to get hit, one must watch it and get out in time.

The Wiper makes the sky tangible in that it treats the sky as if it were glass.

Making the intangible tangible has al ways been one of my fascinations.

But 'wipe out' is slang for 'kill,' isn't it?"

Haunted. At such moments, Ol denburg is death's buffoon. The wind shield wiper will never be built. But the mere fact that it has been designed reminds one of Dean Swift's A Modest Proposal, in which the satirist suggested the fattening and roasting of infants as a solution to the Irish famines. Indeed, allowing for the limits within which an artist can resemble a writer, there is something very Swiftian about the whole cast of Oldenburg's imagination -- haunted by death, fascinated by the elaboration of fantasy worlds in which the uses of objects are transformed.

Even Swift's "excremental vision" has its counterpart in Oldenburg. Any object -- from a typewriter eraser to a toothpaste tube, from an ice bag to an electric plug -- can be seized and turned into a visible metaphor of the body's shapes and functions.

The result is that everything Olden burg makes is a testament to polymor phous perversity. Men construct arti facts and these, by some mysterious process of imitation, end up looking (to Oldenburg) like parts of bodies. These similarities are basic to his imagery.

"Any art that is successful in project ing positive feelings about life," Olden burg maintains, "has got to be heavily erotic." So the kapok-stuffed blades of a soft blender dangle like pendulous breasts; a fireplug mimics a torso.

Because they are humanized, these objects take on a marvelous, even clownish pathos. The blue vinyl mass of Oldenburg's Three-Way Plug -- Scale A hangs from the ceiling, drag ging its prongs on the floor like a deflated giant; its sockets gaze mournfully at the room; one feels an urge to speak gently to the thing and soothe its defeat. By contrast, Oldenburg's Heroic Sculpture in the Form of a Bent Type writer Eraser, 1970, which was com missioned -- and then rejected -- for an office plaza on Manhattan's 57th Street, is a veritable parody of the hero-figure -- all attention and verticality, the hairs on its brush metamorphosed into ropes of braided steel cable.

Epic Images. Oldenburg has a unique power to perceive things both organically and schematically -- even his own face, as in his Symbolic Self-Portrait with Equals, 1969. "The face is a cutout, like a mask, which is past ed on the diagram of objects . . . One side shows the kindly aspect of the art ist; the other, his brutal one. The body is introduced in the image of the face via the representation of the body's juices -- the tongue (bringing out the insides) -- which doubles as a heart and a foot . . . The ice bag on the head signifies that the subject was on my mind ... I alternated between the image of a magician and that of a clown, trying to make a combination of the two."

Indeed, it could be said that no living artist combines the roles of magician and clown with as much skill as Oldenburg -- except, obviously, Picasso.

His achievement has been to take an extraordinary range of banal objects, invest them with consistent metaphoric power, and turn them into near-epic images of love and death. Baudelaire once remarked of talent that it "is nothing more nor less than childhood rediscovered at will -- a childhood now equipped for self-expression, with man hood's capacities and a power of anal ysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated." So with Oldenburg, whose art, for all its complexity, signals a way back to the unrepressed appetites of childhood. "Everything I do is completely original," Oldenburg wrote in 1966. "I made it up when I was a little kid."

. Robert Hughes

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