Nadja Rottner, Object Lessons
2/21/20
Thoughts
- Warning: Many quotes that follow.
- (173) Softness could mean both a flowing together and flowing apart of definitions.1 —Claes Oldenburg
- I want my work, my language to be as light as words and as changeable.2 —Claes Oldenburg
- (176) As Rosalind Krauss has shown, Oldenburg’s soft sculptures share much with his contemporary performance art—rewriting conventions of viewing in art and reality, and pushing static media toward a durational and intersubjective mode of theatricality in which meaning is not deter- mined a priori, but rather created in the extended moment of the view- er’s individual response. And thus soft sculpture “performs its own drama of experience.”5
- Krauss concluded that the soft object debunks an older model of idealist sculpture (and a Hegelian dynamic of form and content in which matter is sublimated into conceptual content) with a more con- temporary phenomenology of viewing; furthermore, it makes the viewer aware of this paradigm shift.
- More specifically, Krauss argues that the soft object conforms to a model of “physical shock” in the tradition of Antonin Artaud, with gigantism and softness sensorially assaulting the viewer.
- Likewise, Oldenburg’s theater (like his soft sculpture) presents an experience of heightened physicality and seeks, as the artist put it, to make the viewer “receptive to a new way of looking at things.”8
- Anti-intrepretive stance part of a post-war move toward a “recovery of the senses”
- (177) Henri Focillon’s theoretical text on the internal workings of form, structure, and experience, The Life of Forms in Art (1934), was an important book for Oldenburg during his years as an English major at Yale University in the early 1950s, informing his deeply rooted belief in the expressive relevance of nonformal elements in art.10
- Focillon, like Oldenburg, firmly believed in the irreducibility of art to interpretation; he argued that words and plastic forms had become mere signs for experience and, as such, only distorted reality, presenting viewers with a limited, preconceived, intellectual idea of objects.
- (178) “Brobdingnagian”?
- The viewing experience resists any easy resolution, as the object presents a new, alterna- tive way of reading the alignment of form and content. Form contributes to content without being sublimated into it. The ideality of the image and the verbal expression of content are undermined by the nonformal (nonconceptual) expressivity of matter. Matter, in the Floor Burger, is not formless, but takes shape in the form of a “deformed” image. The shape of the burger stands in the way of visual iconicity and, by the same token, matter is formed by the image. Furthermore, both the word “burger” and the immediate visual identification of a burger’s shape stand in the way of an unmediated sensory experience of Floor Burger. To impose (either visually or verbally) the concept “burger” onto the sculpture is to limit one’s experience.
- And, the “name of the thing tells you how to grab it.”14
- Similarly, the Ray Gun Theater is scripted by breaking the link between objects and their role in everyday life, a link simultaneously reflecting conventions of everyday speech and the quotidian function of task-based objects. “I now attack the abstrac- tion of language” is a rallying cry that applies to Oldenburg’s sculpture and performance art, as is manifested in Floor Burger and its dual role as both independent sculpture and prop.15
- (179) “Inversions in categorical hierarchies”
- (180) The earlier downtown installation, in the small space of a former dinette, exerted a constant intellectual push and pull between annihilating art (viewers were instructed to handle the art object “as if ” it were an everyday commodity) and enforcing aesthetic distance (unlike a mass-fabricated item, the artwork was precious, unique and handmade).
- At the Green Gallery, however, viewers were no longer able to expe- rience an interactive atmosphere and handle the objects “as if ” they were commodities. Instead, the new line of soft sculpture now pushed and pulled viewers between two different visual techniques of modern art: cognitive distantiation and physical estrangement, and empathetic affect and emotional proximity.
- Soft sculpture employs a formal defamiliar- ization of scale and physicality that catapults the object out of normal relations with human scale and, simultaneously, relies on the affect of pliable softness to shrink distance and pull the object back into the realm of the human body.
- Cognition and affective perception are ineluctably linked in soft sculpture in an eternal push and pull between intellectual measure (objective knowledge) and affective charge (subjective experi- ence).
- Form, in the soft object, is made up of elements both formal (the recognizable image of a burger) and nonformal (the expressivity of the matter out of which the form was constructed). Hence, content is the active staging of the interaction of both formal/conceptual and nonformal/nonconceptual forces; the object simultaneously invites an intellectual reaction to the form (of a burger, a cake, or a cone) and provokes an intangible, emotional response to the material’s pillowy, sag- ging appearance, which in turn is linked inevitably to representational content, which links back to form, and so on and so forth.
- Oldenburg rejected both simple discursivity and a simple phenom- enology of viewing in favor of a circular experience of internal tension and structural ambiguity enacted in the viewer’s perception of the work. Form, for Oldenburg, is not the limit of meaning, but the gateway to an unconstrained realm of signification beyond the grasp of standard anal- ysis. He values participatory response to his art and incorporates the con- tingencies of perceptual experience—now conceived as a vehicle itself of becoming, relaying a form of knowledge that resists classification.
- (183) According to the rules of one-point perspective, the object very far away is very small, and the one right in front of us is very large. If we “undo” this learned geometricity and set aside the rules of “real” reality, the object far away becomes gargantuan.25 Oldenburg’s art incorporates his own perceptual experience, imbued by the forces of his artistic imagination and the “as if.”26
- (184) He seeks to combat what he calls the “clichés” and “stereotypes” of the media landscape. The soft works were fashioned after advertisements in the print media, rather than drawn from reality.
- (185) It [the brain-body duality] is a bizarre distinction: since [the] brain is also nature. [I]t is hard to think of anything that is not nature, it is a problem of language—referring traditionally to separate things, I use them [the brain and the body] consciously in the work as [a] dy- namic, [between the] representation of conceptual versus [the] repre- sentation of [the] natural/physical. [M]y work is not philosophical, I do not represent unity, my object is the third object. . . . [I]f I would resolve it my work would not have a dynamic. . . . [M]y work is the confrontation between brain and body, nature and the interpretation of nature/handling of nature.34
- The genesis of Soft Toilet (1966) best exemplifies Oldenburg’s artistic process (figs. 12.3–12.7). First, he felt aesthetically attracted to a real toi- let, observing it “as if ” it were a sculpture.36 Over the next two years, in the manner of a media archaeologist, he worked on a composite image of a toilet after images in the media (billboards, magazines, newspapers), creating what he called the “universal shape” of the toilet. (Figure 12.3 shows one such image clipping.)37 The final prototype preserved the dramatic vantage point and oblique angle of commercial photography, in which the object is pushed toward the viewer (almost as in reversed perspective)—a popular convention in contemporary advertisement to enhance the immediacy of the appeal (fig. 12.4).
- (191) Soft skin sustains both pictorial (deflated) qualities and sculptural qualities (when stuffed)
- Soft sculpture is simultaneously 3D and flat, painterly and sculptural, abstract and representational.
- Rather than thinking of stuffing objects as “deforming” form, he thinks of its as a biological process, swelling and inflating
- (192) Walter Benjamin, “sex appeal of the inorganic”
- (193) Weary (wary?) of psychoanalytic interpretations, sought to distance himself from Dali’s soft watches
- (193) Focillon’s conception of the aura developed around the same time Benjamin bemoans the lack of it, but Focillon celebrates art’s ambivalence
- Whoa I didn’t know this — that Judd read into the light switches a um… impotence in the process of making.
- (194) Check it out? Dario Gamboni, history of ambiguity in art of the twentieth century, difference between hidden and potential images in art.