Oldenburg's art is full of responses to, and memories of, other art. It may be true, as some feel, that to place Oldenburgs on plinths is to muffle and distort them To venerate his work is certainly to miss its point. But how much like old-fashioned high art so many of Oldenburg's best works now seem, and one of the great compensations for their museumification is that it enables us to see this fact more clearly.The dripped and painted plaster pieces have often been compared with Jackson Pollock's, but their an- cestry goes back further. The flickering outlines of Oldenburg's early sculptures carry echoes of Giacometti - indeed, Oldenburg's rowdy, vital, colourful art carries an implicit reproof to Giacometti's existential miserablisme and meagreness of invention. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toe on." Fame and money have made that impossible now, and the Oldenburgs assembled at the Hayward are, indeed, sitting on their asses in a museum "Do not touch the exhibits," say the signs. His earliest, drippiest works remember infancy, when the mouth is where we put everything. His soft sculptures remember a world of toys and the playpen.
His well-known enlargements of everyday objects like buttons, clothes pegs or billiard balls are also dreams of regression; the act of making small things enormous reveals the artist's desire to become, again, very small himself."I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum," Oldenburg once said "I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler.. I am for art you can sit on. Most of Oldenburg's dreams are of returning to the world of the child. Soft Baseball Bats is another Oldenburg conceit with pacifist undertones. America's favourite assault weapon, after the gun, has been comically robbed of its ability to wound.
Being beaten with one would be more like some surreal form of massage. Soft Drum Kit is a beautiful, limp epiphany, a gentle confiscation of tautness from drumskin and drumstick. Unlike most artists (unlike most men), Oldenburg loves limpness. Flaccidity, in his world, is all.If tumescence is a blight or disease in Oldenburg's imaginative scheme of things, perhaps that is because it is too serious and too urgent a state to suit his benevolent, relaxed, humane sensibility. His contribution to student unrest in America in the late 1960s was a giant lipstick which mechanically detumesced on the campus at Yale one day in 1969.
It even has the battered bald texture of a beloved teddy bear.Oldenburg's hatred of the hard, the upright and the monumental seems to imply a general distrust of the phallic, the masculine and perhaps the military. Softening the city is also a way of dreaming it to be a safer, nicer place to live in, and the artist acknowledges there is something childish about this. Soft Manhattan is a city converted into a cuddly toy, a thing you could take to bed with you. His fantasy has always been a city you could plunge into so completely that you could eat it.Softness is another means of redemption for him. His soft sculpture sets out to humanise the urban world by making things that are so much sharper, harder and more durable than us - pay telephones, electric plugs, light switches - suddenly collapse into yielding, organic, perishable forms. This is not the dream of a world you can eat but the dream of a world that can eat, or at least absorb, you. His earliest sculptures have a drippy, melting quality, so that whether Oldenburg is modelling a battleship, or a toy aeroplane, or a cash register, the result always looks as though it has been made out of ice-cream.
Oldenburg went on to create yet more ambitious culinary mises-en-scene, assembling entire artificial butchers' stalls or ice-cream counters The effect here is one of sanctification Displays of food have been turned into altar pieces. There is an oral urgency to his art, dramatising his desire to ingest the world he loves.Food fascinated Oldenburg to the extent that al- most all his early sculptures, whatever their ostensible subject matter, somehow evoke or suggest it. Later, Oldenburg would dream yet more gargantuan, unrealisable delicatessen dreams, imaging civic monuments in the shape of huge ice-cream cones or pats of melted butter. One of the tendencies of his art is to homogenise the different objects which it seizes on because everything he touches comes to look as if it is made of a comestible substance. Whereas everything Warhol did was designed to induce a sense of boredom, of separateness from the world of which we are a part, Oldenburg was always in search of communion. Oldenburg's subject matter may well be ephemeral and trivial, but his art is not.Like many 20th-century artists, Oldenburg in his youth was fascinated by the flotsam and jetsam of the city, by the infinite capacity of the metropolis to throw up huge quantities of poignant junk.
