Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg (born in 1929) is largely known today as a pop art sculptor.Oldenburg himself described his formless canvas and vinyl soft sculptures--gigantic hamburgers andice cream cones, cushiony toilets and typewriters--as "objects that elude definition."This collection of writings revisits not only Oldenburg's soft objects from the early to mid 1960sbut also his pioneering installations The Street (1960) and TheStore (1961--1962) and his often overlooked multimedia performances. As the artisttranslated his ideas and beliefs into various media and formats, his work drew on a range of stylesand schools, including abstract expressionism, Happenings, pop art, minimalism, and postminimalism.Perhaps because of their refusal to be classified, these artworks are as contemporary today as theywere when they were created between 1960 and 1965.

This collection serves both asa summation of early critical thinking on Oldenburg's art and a starting point for consideration ofthe artist as a forerunner of current art trends of stylelessness and intermediality. It includesboth contemporary criticism and more recent scholarly reassessments, interviews with the artist, andOldenburg's own unpublished manifesto on the Ray Gun Theater (the artist's name for his performanceseries in the back of The Store).

Nadja Rottner is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Michigan--Dearborn.