Volume 13, Number 10 · December 4, 1969
Hamburger Heaven
By Hilton Kramer
Claes Oldenburg: Drawings and Prints
Introduction and Commentary by Gene Baro
Chelsea House, 274 pp., $25.00
Claes Oldenburg: Proposals for Monuments and Buildings 1965-69
Big Table, 196 pp., $12.95
Store Days: Documents from The Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962)
selected by Claes Oldenburg, by Emmett Williams
Something Else Press, 152 pp., $10.00
Claes Oldenburg is, in several important respects, the most appealing artist to have appeared on the New York scene in the last decade. Beside the increasingly constricted concerns of the abstractionists, his zany sculptures and offbeat designs for monuments offer a robust engagement with the world we actually encounter beyond the perimeter of the art gallery, the museum, and the millionaire's fancy pad. There is a comic energy in the work that suggests that art, contrary to what we had been led to believe, has not lost its capacity to intervene in the affairs of life—to criticize, make jokes, sentimentalize, exalt, and deplore. In Oldenburg's art, the emotions of the homme moyen sensual rarely, if ever, defer to the interests of the detached visual technician intent upon distilling from the plethora of workaday sensation some parsimonious aesthetic essence. There is an openness to experience, to the social environment, and to the mind's free-wheeling tendency to proliferate fantasy in the face of these that, in the context of so much bloodless formalism, would be liberating even if the results were not so amusing.
Review, 2124 words
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