Fall Samhain Moon
Caught up with docent friend Allison Thiel today. We had lunch at Gather, bison burger for me, fish taco for her, discussed MOOCs, Gertrude Stein, our boys. Her LA son has a new bar underway, part of the craft brewing scene and it will have brewery on site soon. Her Chicago son has his MLS (master of library science) in sight.
After lunch we toured Claus Oldenburg, the early years. He used what he called “anti-art materials”, the stuff of everyday: cardboard, burlap, soft plastic to portray the stuff of everyday. He collected right angle objects, too, which he called Ray Guns. A tiny museum in the show showcases his collection.
There is a soft droopy toilet, a human sized fan in black shiny droopy material, a cardboard wall switch the size of a door. Another museum within the show featured small objects, everyday objects again, clothespins and bottle openers, for example displayed in a curving layout. This was a large collection, larger than the ray guns.
The roots of pop art are squarely in the domain of modernism. Anything can be the subject matter of art: urinals, wall switches, fans, food models. Make it new meant stepping outside the old artistic traditions to shape words or paint or plastic in a new way, or to use new material altogether like cardboard, burlap, found objects. Focus on the fragment rather than the whole: a toilet out of a bathroom, a light switch too big for a wall, a mouse, but just the head made out of metal and twisted. Oldenburg’s project made a good deal more sense to me as a result of the two MOOCs I’m taking right now.
This is an interesting show, an intellectually fascinating show and an aesthetically bold show, but I found it, as I do much modern and contemporary art, strangely bloodless. The emotional impact fades into irony and satire, making me go, huh? rather than wow or oh.
As I wrote this, I thought of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma and how moving it was. Probably I’m not seeing enough. Need to look and experience more.
