Claes Oldenberg

[Music] n [Music] well I start every time I start a show I start as if I never made a show before and um absolutely from nothing now it doesn't appear that way at this time but it did appear that way last summer and it's very frightening and U uh I don't know if this is good or bad whether this just means that you repeat your mistakes or whether this is a a very good way of of uh saving your innocence because U it is very important to be innocent I think to approach to approach a show uh Without Really knowing what's going to happen and just to have the confidence that it will happen this is the way that I approach the happenings too I I think it's terrifying to do it this way but U it's always a great pleasure if it works and it hasn't failed entirely so far there have been some things that have been disappointing things I haven't been able to bring off but on the whole i' I've met my obligations or my deadlines what I when I develop a show everything usually hangs together that's uh that is after after a while the the um uh uh one form sort of leads to another form and there's a kind of consistency in the forms there maybe two or three forms that dominate the soul in different u in different guises so there's kind of consistency in form and you could say almost that every show uh has a has has two or three themes and variations on the themes I find it helpful to work that way there's I think I strive for a consistency which is something that's almost never noticed in by a reviewer it's noticed I suppose by people who see the show but no one ever mentions that the show as itself is a composition Claus oldenberg is one of those artists for whose work the pace and texture of urban life are necessary conditions born in Stockholm he grew up in Chicago where his father was formerly the Swedish console it's hard to think of another artist who is more American in his Outlook and in his perception of the details of contemporary life oldenberg came to New York in the late 50s now he and his wife Pat live and work in an immense Loft on the Lower East Side along with several others oldenberg was of the first to explore the vein and Contemporary Art which later was to be called pop and he was one of The Originators of the new kind of artist theater called happenings in this film we see him working and preparing for a major exhibition of his new work last summer um I uh went through about two months of what might called uh inspiring myself of priming Myself by uh reading and buying uh hundreds of magazines and walking the streets of of New York and and uh um I even I took off 40 pounds I gave up smoking I um I did all kinds of things to myself to to to get myself uh stimulated or started in in some direction and um uh then I I went through my notes which is always a good stimulation the notes from the past there many pieces that I've been intending to make but I never get around to making and so on and finally uh I sat down or as I wouldn't say fine let's say as the beginning I sat down and made a list of about 50 things I would like to make just uh what came into my mind as a result of this U of this self priming but um gradually as I go along the list gets shorter I knock out things that don't seem to be particularly important or that can be saved for later or that seem just plain silly and um the list get shorter and shorter and shorter and more and more realistic everything progresses from the wildest dreams to what can actually be done and it's surprising how little one can do really you know when you get right down to it but it's it's enough I found that I had more than enough for this show and I have as a residue from from U thinking about all the things I could do I have maybe 100 ideas here for future shows which I I don't know if I'll ever get around to um it accumulates there's a awful lot of paper lying around the studio awful lot of sketches that will never be realized but you know all it's all all you care about is that there should be maybe out of all of this stuff maybe there should be uh 50 good ideas because you can really work a Lifetime on one good idea I write every day and um I feel um very unsure about what I write and as a matter of fact I have a suspicion that I write them to get them out of my system I some of them are are certainly an honest attempt to explain what I'm doing to myself but many of them are very uh frivolous and and nasty there's not a lot of nasty remarks in it really they're kind of a um a way of getting the stuff out of my system so they don't serve as a guide to my work necessarily they're quite tricky that way and I think they're also rather badly written but it's a compulsive thing thing uh the need to touch the typewriter and to uh to make the words appear on the White Page uh it's something um among other things which makes the day go by I think it's very hard to be an artist because there's nothing going on in your life I mean unless you're working with something Monumental like carving marble uh your day goes by and you you have to find all kinds of different ways to engage uh your senses you know something with the hands or uh I I mean I read about poets constantly drinking tea and so on and um you have to um because I work all day long I don't stop for lunch or anything like that I just get up in the morning and I I um wander around my studio all day long and and sometimes half the night you know until something happens so typing is a way of relieving the um the boredom of the studio Sometimes some rather nice things come out and I try so I try after a show to go through the material and select out what um what seems valuable and true but I'm a very poor critic of my own writing and I I I really don't want to be a writer I I feel I'm much more honest in expressing myself through plastic form I um I should have started becoming an artist much sooner because I was always very interested in art in drawing but as it turned out I didn't um become uh professionally involved with art until after I had been to college and after ID worked a year and a half after college uh in as as a an apprentice newspaper reporter which seemed like a um a dead end I I I then um took the leap into art and into full-time studying art but I studied mostly on my own I didn't U I had already gone to college so I didn't feel like going through that again so um uh more or less I worked out the problems myself I did go to a few classes and met some people some other artists and uh talked about the problems of being an artist but it was really what I did what I've done has been um result of my own analysis of what uh um what I think the thing called Art is it's mainly been through U uh going into myself and finding U um what um I mean rooting expression in in my own daily life of my perception of Nature and and um a process over a number of years of sort of digging into myself and finding the form for what I what I discovered in myself in the work of Claus oldenberg the inanimate objects in the world around us assume an almost terrifying intensity and vitality enormously enlarged in size expressively exaggerated in texture and brilliantly colored with shiny paint his art is a kind of unprecedented sculpture to which he brings the sensibility of a painter and the passion of someone who loves sensation goldenberg's early pieces were mostly about food he made pies beyond the Glutton Wildest Dreams ice cream to tempt the oldest child hamburgers as big as tents at first these objects were all made of plaster and painted with enamel later as the scale became even larger oldenberg worked out a technique of sewing the pieces in cloth and stuffing them his interest in the most immediate and direct experience of familiar objects eventually led him from food to clothing and ordinary household things oldenberg gave to objects a new personality particularly in the softness of the later sewn pieces we begin to feel a sinuosity sometimes indolent sometimes threatening sometimes sexual which breaks down our accustom Assurance at the distinction between animate and inanimate occasionally oldenberg has turned to other materials like wood and plastic one of his most extraordinary Ventures was the furniture Ensemble called bedroom like the rest of his work Larger than Life uh the um the bedroom is one of the rooms of the of the house and uh the first room that I um I I tried the second room being the bathroom and um I suppose we wanted to start with the um the rooms where there was most U um physical contact or or sensuousness but many people have interpreted this as a uh as a ferial bedroom or as a anti- sensuous bedroom or as the death of sensuousness and um there must be that element in it too there is a kind of uh uh of U formality about theed which is frightening especially the geometric forms um so as in most of my work there is a there are two contradictory uh interpretations and impulses and you have to make up your mind which one you want to follow or you can follow one a little bit and then come back on the other one so it's very hard to sum it up and to say it's any one thing I like to look at this room I like to pass it it's kind of the noasis in the lot in here things don't uh change you know outside everything is flying around and in here protected by this plastic there's a kind of like an aquarium atmosphere then I got involved also with the automobile I don't exactly know why I got involved with the automobile but this was a new theme and there probably are some very deep reasons that I don't can't put my hands on moment why and then uh suddenly the air flow floated into view and and everything came together in in that area by a curious coincidence it happened that the airflow Chrysler an advanced car of the 30s wholly appropriate in its forms to the spirit of his work was conceived by the father of goldenberg's friend the sculptor and filmmaker Robert Breer oldenberg photographed and sketched a restored air flow owned by Mr Breer of um it's like an exploded view and it's all types of pieces or kinds of pieces of the car uh of different size models and different type models also within the airflow uh scheme and each U each part is is um is treated differently uh there some are on the floor and some are hung from the ceiling and some lie in the corner and we expect uh we expect to keep making these parts and to work on this thing for uh a rather long period of time it's like composing a symphony uh compared to a shorter piece and um it's it's quite a job it may be too much for us but uh even if we don't complete it we still will have a lot of stuff if we work on on the idea for about another year and we're going to have another show um next year in which the airflow idea will dominate uh just as the bathroom dominated the show uh this year and uh I expect uh many things to come out of it there's quite a lot of freedom and quite a lot of possibilities you could make many different models I I'm right now working with six models and six uh sizes of which one is a full scale in a sense goldenberg's loft is a factory where he works out the problems of handling new materials in new ways with the help of with his wife Pat and other assistants now working with the soft sculpture uh using the canvas or the vinyl uh we're working with a medium that's U uh very exploratory and there are other ways to join the parts uh for example heat sealing but I think sewing is uh is more involving and um complex and and and therefore more satisfying it's also um sewing is very much like drawing and also uh this is like a translation of of flat into round is I make a pattern and then I give it we trace it and she uhu uh sews it together so that then it turns into a a round or sculptural object I I get a great deal of pleasure out of involving other people in my work and this is particularly strong in Pat case and her sewing is also um is something very special it's very aesthetic and the pieces on which she works on become very much a collaboration pieces oldenberg explores the formal problems raised in these objects by first making corated cardboard models and then developing patterns for the shapes to be sewn well it's necessary it is necessary if you have set your mind to making something out of vinyl it's necessary to make a very clear pattern uh to be followed in the sewing so I started using cardboard and I uh I keep using it and cut it very easily and if I have an idea I can very quickly make a model out of it through cardboard and that's followed by uh taking the pattern and making it into canvas and if that works that's follow followed by a vinyl I think though that the the models have a kind of directness which U um people appreciate I mean the models in i i exhibit the models the canvas pieces uh they um they originally served a function of working out the sewing um problem but then they seem to be um something in themselves very different from the vinyl pieces for example they seemed uh uh um proletarian in relation to the vinyl pieces or they seemed austere or they seemed more spiritual less sensuous um or they seem well I call them ghosts because they I painted them white and they see they're they they had a kind of a double uh uh existence like the the um the thought behind you like the the platonic idea uh behind the the sensuous uh actuality so um there are many people who prefer the canvas pieces to the vinyl pieces for one reason or another and usually the canvas pieces are sold for Less so there all kinds of uh you know you could work up all kinds of feelings about one as opposed to the other goldenberg's art often utilizes humor and untrammeled fantasy some of the best examples of these attributes are his drawings of schemes for monuments to be built in New York City and look what look at these I mean there's no such thing as as a as an honest Monument I don't know of any if I say put a hot dog on LS Island which I proposed a giant Frankfurter then um it's only because a giant Frankfurter is one of U my personal objects and I feel that in that position in relation to the Bay it would be very well located so um see that would be a very good instance of how you could get in trouble by bringing the Two Worlds together the world of Art and the world of the people outside a monument gets you into trouble right away if I just made my things and call them Mar and uh but that's because I was I I was brought up to believe that um uh one should try to reach people and one should try to sum uh to sum up what people are feeling and uh once to try to make people all into one and so on and even though I know it doesn't work I keep doing it the bathroom is the second room of the home which I started doing uh uh a couple of years ago I started with the bedroom and uh now it's time for the bathroom the U that is tied in with the idea that um the um the home is full of sculptur like objects um such as U the sink or the toilet or the tub or the appliances that you use the toaster the uh orange squeezer and the can opener uh objects that are um sculptur and concept they stand in space uh it's also uh the U the fact of of porcelain or enamel that it looks so much like a patent vinyl and uh it's possible to make something out of vinyl that looks like soft porcelain uh that had a lot to do with this choice but it's it's really to develop the theme of the home the next step would be the living room and I've already dealt with parts of the kitchen but I might deal with an entire kitchen using a stove and uh maybe a washing machine or a dryer something like that I prefer a material and a subject that suggests change and flow which is for example why I choose uh ice cream and uh the representation of ice cream in plaster and uh here I uh I'm using a soft cloth soft vinyl fabric um to suggest the possibilities of change uh in relation to an object that is in the soft version of the sync it's possible to see the sink from above and from beside and from the front at the same time because the front of it falls down in the soft version and also there are changes in meaning uh or changes in subject matter and changes in in image that happened as a result of the softness the uh what is U identifiable as a sink U takes all kinds of different forms and can be identified in many different ways if the material is changed into soft material the whole thing is that I I start I say this is a sync and uh from there it can be U almost anything depending on who's looking at it you can always go back and say it's sink that it's defined as a sink but but I wouldn't want to set any limits to where the uh um the image can go after that people will see their own images or whatever they want to see in general my Approach is to set a limit a general limit and within that limit let things have a life of their own take their own form and that's what happens with the cloth and that's what happens when I do a uh a performance happening I set uh very general limits within which people develop themselves in relation to the objects that I give them I I don't know why the toilet should be offensive to people as a subject it um it has never hit me that way at all that is I'm not CH I have not chosen a subject that deliberately to shock anybody uh I just assume that that's one of the sculptures of the home and um it's such an important and obvious part of the home that I just have accepted it it's a highly idealized uh version of a u of a common toilet also magnified in scale it's placed up on a pedestal and everything is done to make it uh to emphasize its uh its existence as a sculpture object to to remove the uh uh the association I think just to to make you see the thing as itself but as I say there are many people who simply cannot see beyond subject matter uh my work is always having this trouble this is kind of a deliberate OB obacle that I make for people because I choose a uh a very simple uh subject which is usually very close to people's experience and um that might give them the idea that they they can dispose of the whole thing simply by referring to their experience but uh that's only the starting point and U uh it's um I say it is an obstacle for many people uh well I was watching TV or um sometimes reading the newspapers and um I see the uhu kind of um general public view reflected uh general public view of what I'm doing and um it's very puzzling because uh it it's very different from uh uh what I think I'm doing and what a few people uh know that I'm doing so that U uh well if I was say an artist who was removed from the objects of the world who was uh say U say I was an abstract artist then uh perhaps this would be pretty consistent I mean this uh sense of being uh of finding the general opinion strange but because I deal with things that enter into everybody's lives uh it seems that they the general public should also see what I'm doing the way a few people see and the way I see of course they don't and u i I have to accept that the uh the problem is that you have to um uh in order to to get an honest piece of work you have to um follow your own feelings and uh you can't listen to other people uh telling you what to do uh if uh at the same time you have a desire to uh do things for other people as say a moral purpose in making your art which I do then um it might it does get confusing I don't know of any way to make art other than following my own my own feelings and Notions and um the fact that I do use subject matter um indicates that um it's not just for myself it's uh it's for other people to ponder or to be led into and that's kind of a traditional notion of art is that if people can be fastened by the subject matter they can be led into the deeper areas of the thing which is really problems of form and balance and and Grace and Order and you know the Finer Things of life I mean my thinking is very traditional along those lines but I find that instead of instead of having this work for me I find that my U my uh I'm stepping on all kinds of toes and uh uh I'm not being taken seriously and um people are not uh seeing what's there and um perhaps they're being led away rather than led into and I'm becoming more and more isolated rather than more and more at one with them that's something that uh I I always hope over a period of time will change but uh in my heart I know it really doesn't work you know but I keep trying and uh however I mean I must say that that there are a lot of people who love my work and they tell me so and a lot of people who see it perhaps uh you know comforting amount of people I mean more than I would expect who see something in it and who like it a wonderful yeah you are she was going to show aano but I didn't give it the plan I had no idea that it took so long to make plans like so many others who explore new ground oldenberg worries about the loneliness of his path particularly because the flavor and intensity of his work disturb some sensibilities the justification comes when his exhibition opens when people arrive to to confirm his special unique accomplishment the openness and extravagant intensity of goldenberg's objects mean more than pleasure for our senses he like some of his contemporaries insists that we examine our familiar surroundings with a fresh eye that we discover new ways of seeing and feeling to enlarge the meaning and significance of everyday life art for oldenberg can no longer be separated from life he shares the optimism which has become a keynote of Contemporary American art no I'm I'm serious I want to see what's going on over I made I haven't made there's six possible models you only have two little ones here little ones then there's one bigger one it's number two and then the parts the insides come from other models number five and number six this car does it open up does it have an engine in it or is it like would be well it' be more the outside what the inside this is the inside I mean like your toilet opens up and you got inside you don't open up the the car and well I don't know that it's very difficult to make a car I mean and then you don't even ask yourself do you really want to make a car you know or you want to make I mean I'm just using the car as a subject it's not going to be a car like one may be split this way the other spit the other way you I was surprised to see the this is NE the national educational television network