Episode 49: Claes Oldenburg’s “Giant Toothpaste Tube” (1964)

My first real job out of graduate school was in finance.  It was early 2009, and everyone with arts degrees was standing in the smoldering crater of the great recession, and while I wasn’t able to snag a job in the vastly shrinking museum world, I was, pretty unexpectedly, able to get a job as a high-level administrator in a global asset management firm.  And for everything about the world of finance that I was unaccustomed to after spending so many years in academia, honing and musing on the life of the mind, the most striking was, of all things, Netflix.  You know, Netflix, which, to me, had been a furtive thing that I hid from the ivory tower, a thing that I used to procrastinate from the important work, a thing I wasn’t supposed to admit existed.  I mean, obviously it did.  We all watched it, my whole cohort, all the time, but God help you if you mentioned its existence in a seminar paper on the Ballet Russes, is what I’m saying. 

In the world of finance, though, of course Netflix is a thing, and you don’t have to pretend it isn’t.  It’s a holding.  It has a ticker symbol.  It attempted an ill-conceived split into Qwikster, which, if you were a portfolio manager in 2011, mattered, a lot.  And more than anything, it encapsulated, to me, this divide between my two worlds, between the life of the mind and the boots on the ground.  Art historians live in a world of theory and brushstrokes and what the marble communicates across time and space; a world high above our daily, mundane lives – the lives that actually affect the way markets move, the way the actual world spins.  And there’s a judgmental aspect to this, of course: art is supposed to speak to a higher version of ourselves, not the selves that, you know, lie on the couch watching Netflix. 

But what if there was art that did acknowledge that this is something that we do?  That we spend our daily lives not floating above the world on wings of high-minded ideals, but instead swimming in a sea of commercials and consumerism and commodity – a sea of stuff.  The stuff we buy and lovingly fondle and then have too much of and then Kon Marie and then get rid of; the stuff we use in our backstage lives, behind closed doors, before we present the higher versions of ourselves to the world.  The stuff we see so often that we stop seeing it.  What if art acknowledged the stuff?  Just maybe, we would look at the stuff differently.  Just maybe, we’d see it the way Pop artist Claes Oldenburg does.

You’ve definitely seen an Oldenburg in a modern art museum.  You don’t forget a thing like that.  Because you’ve just wound your way through rooms of Monets and Cezannes, Pollocks and Rothkos, and all of a sudden, you turn a corner, and right in the middle of the white-walled gallery, probably on a raised platform, there’s a hamburger, or a tube of lipstick, or here, a half-squeezed toothpaste tube.  And first you think, almost unconsciously, hey, I have that at home.  And then you think, well, wait, why is it here, super-sized, in a museum?  Didn’t I come to the museum to transcend that stuff?  And just by asking that, you’ve just asked a mouthful, and inadvertently tapped into a circle that so much of 20th century art tried to square.  Because on the one hand, you just sat amongst Rothkos; you probably did just transcend a tube of toothpaste.  But on the other, here is that toothpaste tube nonetheless, and maybe just by dint of looking at it in such close proximity to a Rothko, in the quiet, contemplative stillness of a museum gallery, it’s a little changed.  Maybe the longer you stand in front of it, the more disconnected the toothpaste’s form becomes from its function, like when you stare too long at the word ‘shampoo.’  Maybe you’ll find yourself, as Oldenburg hopes you will, encountering it as though for the first time.

And this idea, this reintroduction to the unremarkably familiar, which was first articulated in 1917 – and episode 17 – when Marcel Duchamp placed that subversive urinal in a museum, was formative to Pop art.  What happens when we retrain our eye and open our minds to the world around us?  What happens when, to paraphrase David Foster Wallace, our little fishy brains are blown with a newfound awareness that this whole time we’ve been swimming in water?  We suddenly see the billboards we’ve ignored, or the gruesome newspaper images that we’ve become desensitized to, like we saw with Andy Warhol’s electric chairs in episode 5.  Or maybe we start to think about these objects in artistic terms, how something disposable can be reimagined as timeless, like Roy Lichtenstein did when he painted comic book frames in episode 27, or the aesthetic beauty in the design of the streamlined, everchanging shape of a toothpaste tube as its innards get squeezed out.  And this is how Pop artists deploy their arsenal, the myriad ways that they open our eyes to the world around us, with, in the words of Andy Warhol, “images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second – comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles – all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice.”

And that dig at the art world is a critical piece to all this, because, as we just said, we’re used to thinking about both making and viewing art as a transcendent experience – you know, that indescribable awareness that the extraordinary is separate from the mundane.  But what Pop artists wanted us to see – all of us, artists and civilians, makers and viewers – is that the mundane itself could be extraordinary.  And it’s worth taking a moment and considering what these two audiences, the makers and the viewers, bring to this debate.  Because there’s a difference between not noticing something that’s so ubiquitous we don’t see it, like ads, and not noticing because we insist we’re above it, like when your art history professor pretends she didn’t watch “Tiger King.”  Pop artists found themselves setting up camp in the space between these two poles, deliberately drawing our attention to the real-world stuff, while insisting that there was a place for this stuff in the art world.  And in doing this, they gave everyone permission to recognize that we do indeed share the same world, and that art itself, in Oldenburg’s words, “should be literally made of the ordinary world; its space should be our space; its time our time; its objects our ordinary objects.  The reality of art will replace reality.”

So, okay, let’s get into Pop art by understanding its reality, that is, its history.  The 1950s and 60s, both in the United States and the UK, where Pop art technically began, the stuff began pouring in, courtesy of flush postwar economies and bolstered by the Marshall Plan, where the US provided the UK with more than $15 billion in aid to help its recovery, and led to an overwhelming boom in commodity culture.  And it led to a strange, repressed new social dynamic, because it’s hard to not equate economic recovery with spiritual recovery: to the victors go the spoils; if we have stuff, we must be doing okay as a society; maybe all it really takes to transcend the trauma of war is a superior vacuum cleaner.  And this brave, weird new world was encapsulated by the British artist Richard Hamilton, who created what is widely heralded as the first true piece of Pop art: the collage “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” from 1956.  The title is taken from an advertising slogan, and the image is an incredibly dense visual hodgepodge: a musclebound man and a pinup woman, whom Hamilton calls Adam and Eve, caught in a snapshot of their apartment, surrounded by American brand name goods – a ham on the coffee table, a tape recorder, a Ford emblem for a lampshade, and, most noticeably, a Tootsie Pop that the man holds like an Olympian with a barbell, which is somewhat apocryphally credited with giving the movement its name. 

The collage is obviously fun and a little unhinged, but what makes it so significant is that Hamilton is both tapping into how we experience the world as consumers, and also showing how consumerism and mass media culture has usurped the role in society that had been historically played by art.  Art told us what was beautiful, or desirable, or tasteful.  But now ideal beauty could now be found in a television ad for face cream.  The heroic narratives of history paintings are now found on the silver screen, illustrated by the marquee outside their window.  Political commentary now comes from the nightly news.  And, most crucially, aesthetic taste is now being dictated by attainable commodities, by stuff, which is epitomized by the sad little portrait of the notoriously essentialist British art critic John Ruskin that hangs above the TV and next to a much larger cover of a pulp comic book.  It’s so clear, in this present moment, that Ruskin, who was famous for the quote “there is no wealth but life,” has been woefully relegated to the past, the “okay, Boomer” of the 50s. 

And it’s okay to laugh at this collage.  It’s excellent satire, and if you find yourself charmed, it’s not because you’re a complicit consumer – or at least not solely because you’re a complicit consumer – but because it really is charming.  Why shouldn’t it be?  I mean, it’s speaking right to us.  It’s validating the obviously trivial stuff that we still hold dear, that makes us, at least temporarily, feel good.  Of course we can look at the trappings of commodity culture and realize that we’ve grown immune to something kind of disturbing, but sometimes we also want to let these objects just… spark joy.  I mean, who among us hasn’t been self-medicating by shopping online throughout this pandemic?  Why can’t we just enjoy being reintroduced to our own stuff as though for the first time?  So let’s look closer at the art that lets us do this.  Just what makes the same hamburger or a toothpaste tube we’ve seen a million times so different?  So appealing?

This is where Claes Oldenburg shines.  While so much of Pop art is described as cynical and slick and no less judgmental than the snooty art world they’re rebuking, Oldenburg is constantly on the lookout for whimsy, for sparks of joy.  His broader critique of consumer culture is no less incisive, yet he still wants this reencounter with our stuff to be a positive one.  He was born in Sweden in 1929, though immigrated to the US as a kid, and, having grown up steeped in both the war and its aftermath, found himself a voracious consumer of images, taking great pleasure observing how those images responded to the changing world.  He grew up in Chicago, studied art history at Yale, and settled in New York City in 1956, where he befriended a number of artists toying with alternatives to Abstract Expressionism, which was beginning to be seen as overly navel-gazing and a little dull.  Oldenburg was particularly inspired by the storefronts of Lower East Side of Manhattan, the shop windows boasting everything under the sun, clothes and foods and all manner of goods.  They seemed so incongruous with the self-important worlds depicted by Pollock and Rothko, so wonderfully unremarkable and down-to-earth that their banality seemed almost profound. 

His first major exhibit was actually a month-long instillation in 1961 called “The Store.”  In collaboration with a local gallery, he rented a store in his Lower East Side neighborhood and stocked it with his sculptures: painted plaster reliefs and pliant canvas depictions of cigarettes, lingerie, burgers, a banana split, a candy apple missing a bite, a cash register, dolls, dresses, hats, shoes, and on and on, all rendered bloblike and bulbous, with shiny, dripping paint, some pristine and exact, others deliberately naïve, like what your 8-year-old brings home from art class.  You can see the artist’s hand in this handmade style, which was unique for Pop art, which tended to mimic mass production – see under: Warhol’s soup cans – and this presence of the artist is made all the more striking by the physical presence of Oldenburg himself, who participated in the installation, morphing it into a kind of performance art piece.  The historically aloof artist became a friendly shopkeeper, inviting you into this utterly whimsical space, giving you his explicit permission to enjoy this exuberant celebration of stuff, where form is everything and function is nonexistent, where cheap diner food and five-and-dime objects are now rendered simultaneously useless, and, because they’re one-of-a-kind, kind of priceless, or at least far more valuable.  And you can imagine the delight of walking around this space, as visually packed as Hamilton’s collage, as the artist sits watchfully in the corner.  So much of what you’re used to overlooking is, here, constructed with so much intent.  And it makes you realize that maybe you’ve overlooked the actual aesthetic intent went into these commodities in the first place, even as they were created to be expendable and replaceable – and for more on that, subscribe to the design podcast 99% Invisible.  And this all-consuming experience of his work, a “totality,” as art historian Martin Friedman describes it, becomes a thumping pleasure for the senses that doesn’t end when you walk out the door.  On the contrary, it opens your eyes to the world around you, that world you never thought to notice.  “I am for the art of underwear and the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete,” Oldenburg said.  “I am for an art that is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”

And there are two elements that I specifically want to pull out of The Store that help us better understand Oldenburg’s work: first this is idea of an all-consuming experience, and second, the idea of form being everything and function being nonexistent.  In terms of the experience, when it comes to an Oldenburg, much like with a Louise Bourgeois spider, the experience of the art varies wildly depending on the context.  It’s one kind of experience, as we’ve discussed, to come upon a toothpaste tube in the middle of a museum, and one that drinks explicitly from Marcel Duchamp’s well.  After all, Duchamp’s subversive experiment wasn’t just the urinal as art, but the urinal crossing the hallowed threshold of a museum – again, listen to episode 17.  But the museum is just one place you can experience an Oldenburg.  Another, probably more common place, is out on a public plaza or a campus.  And public art is really different from art inside a museum.  You can interact with it without a guard breathing down your neck – often you’re even encouraged to.  After all, it’s on your turf.  There’s less prescribed self-seriousness, more free association – you rarely worry that with public art, you’re missing the point.

But public art, and, more specifically, forfeiting the seriousness of a museum, has its own challenges.  Because a big object just hanging outside on its own can feel a little silly at best, and ridiculously kitschy at worst.  And I’m reminded of when my husband, in-laws, and I took the long way home after chasing the 2017 eclipse, by passing through Casey, Illinois, a small town on the map exclusively for being home to a whole bunch of the world’s biggest stuff: rocking chair, crochet hook, birdcage, wooden shoes, golf tee, I could go on.  And we had a merry old time posing with them and ‘gramming the evidence.  But would I call them art objects?  Please.  But then I think about last week, when I went to Willard Park in Cleveland and happened upon “Free Stamp,” an enormous metal sculpture shaped like a rubber stamp, with the word “free” in its stamping area, which was designed and bequeathed to the city by Oldenburg and his wife and artistic partner, Coosje van Bruggen.  It is, unequivocally, public art.  But what really is the difference between Free Stamp and the world’s largest ball of twine?  They’re both charming, and arguably unnecessary, and totally divorced from their function.  What makes one art and the other just kind of wonderfully ridiculous?

First, there’s the question of intent.  The world’s largest crochet hook was intended to be just that, just a regular thing made absurdly gigantic for the sole purpose of whimsy, and to set a record, and to generally just be neat.  And while we can experience Oldenburg’s Free Stamp as an enormous whimsical plaything – at least, my nieces and I sure did when we were running around it – it was actually created, I later found out, to be an offshoot of the famous Civil War-era Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument located across the street, the “free” actually referring to the emancipation of slavery.  There’s artistic intent behind its impact, even if few people know it, and in the larger debate between art and craft, this really matters.

The second point, which I actually think is more interesting for our purposes, brings us back to this larger idea of the relationship between form and function.  If it were an actual, functional rubber stamp, we’d be focused on, well, its function.  But the very fact that it’s a sculpture of a rubber stamp means that our focus is now on its form.  Because if you’re the world’s largest ball of twine, you are still indeed a ball of twine, not a sculpture of a ball of twine.  And the fact that something is deliberately an art object, made from wholly different materials, and not just an enormous version of a usable thing – it makes all the difference.  It’s what makes Jasper Johns’ “Target” from episode 22 different from an actual target, even though you could shoot an arrow at both.  It changes the way we’d be inclined to interact with it; it opens our eyes to it again, for the first time.  And you could argue that this applies to so many of Oldenburg’s objects, how his reintroducing us to the essence of their form comes at the expense of their function, and that if we really want to appreciate art, then this is a good thing.  And there’s value to this form-forward, even form-exclusive approach.  It allows us to meditate on an object’s design, to seek out the extraordinary the utterly ordinary, without being distracted by our human impulses with regards to its function: the mouthwatering aroma of an enormous Man versus Food-sized hamburger, or the need to wrap our minds around the sheer amount of toothpaste that it would take to fill this five and-a-half foot tube. 

But you could also argue that Oldenburg’s particular gift isn’t just his ability to make us see a familiar object through this profound emphasis on form, but, as we’ve been hinting at this whole time, to actually collapse the space between the hallowed art world and ordinary, Netflix-watching us.  He wants our worlds to collide, to come together, for art and life to amalgamate into one.

How does he do this?  Well, a few different ways.  Take, for example, Oldenburg’s use of soft sculpture: throughout the 60s, he became known for taking familiar, prosaic, and usually hard objects like toilets, typewriters, and car parts, and, by rendering them in canvas and paint, made them soft and mailable.  And doing this, he argued, makes them vulnerable, as if they’re encased in mortal flesh that could sag with age.  It quite literally makes them human.  Or consider the sculpture “Grater Divide,” from 2002 by the artist Mona Hatoum, though impossible to not at least conceptually trace back to Oldenburg.  It’s basically a giant cheese grater that stands up, dividing space like a Japanese screen.  This massive version of an every day object both elicits our human reactions of fear and repulsion – as Honey I Shrunk the Kids taught us, even the most anodyne objects can become menacing when enlarged – and yet also makes unexpectedly beautiful art: the light through the grater holes spray the walls and floor with a meteor shower of dappled shadows.  Or consider, too, how life, and its commodities, is timebound, meaning that once an object’s function has passed, it can fully become form: to this end, one of Oldenburg’s most well-known objects is a giant Typewriter Eraser, which is so antiquated now that younger viewers can’t help but see it as a sculpture, as art, as disconnected from its original function as the floppy disk save button on Microsoft Word.

And when you bring art and life together, as Oldenburg does so well, you tap into something crucial about why we’re drawn to art at all.  To this end, one of my favorite Oldenburgs has always been “Floor Cake,” his giant, handsome soft sculpture of a piece of cake from 1962, not because of its intrinsic artistry, but because I crack up thinking about Homer Simpson seeing a piece of pie Bart put on the floor to lay a trap, and delighting in his discovery of “floor pie.”  And in trying to articulate what about that throwaway moment is so funny, I realized that it helps me understand what about ourselves Oldenburg was tapping into.  And for the sake of argument, let’s sub in Oldenburg’s equally scrumptious soft sculpture of a slice of pie on the floor, also from 1962, titled “Pie a la mode” but, which is, essentially, “Floor Pie.”  And here’s what I discovered: placing the pie on the floor completely changes its context, enough to even change its name, but in Homer’s mind, it doesn’t do anything to change its fundamental desirability at all.  Floor pie is as delicious as any other kind of pie.  That’s really funny, and explains how critical context is in explaining why we like the thing in the first place.  If we didn’t like pie, we wouldn’t be tempted by floor pie, but the very fact of its being on the floor – and, in Oldenburg’s case, made out of canvas, foam, and paint – makes us encounter this pie very differently, makes us appreciate it objectively, its fundamental pie-ness, that then makes us recognize our desire for it all the more. 

And that’s the kicker: this is a piece of art that makes us keenly understand our love for a piece of pie.  And that’s actually a pretty generous thing to do.  Most works of art don’t take the time.  They don’t bother to recognize that as we walk through a transcendent art gallery, we’re still human beings, engaging in the life of the mind with our boots still on the ground, squeaking away on that museum floor.  They don’t usually appreciate that we’re maybe getting a little bit tired, a little bit peckish, and probably planning to stop in the café for a slice of pie before heading home.  With Oldenburg sculptures, we still get to be our human selves – like them, at once extraordinary and totally mundane, heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid.  And we don’t have to pretend that we aren’t.

CREDITS:

Special thanks to Adrianne Mathiowetz, Ma’ayan Plaut, and the Blanch family for being my intrepid museumgoers at my new home base of the Cleveland Museum of Art.  For more information, past episodes, and all the images, go to the lonely palette.com, or follow us on Twitter, @lonelypalette, or on Instagram @thelonelypalette, or like us on facebook, and get the show out into more ears by leaving us a rating and review on Apple podcasts.  And hey, if The Lonely palette is filling that hole left in your lift from all those months of closed museums, then why not toss a few bucks into our plexiglass box near the exit by supporting the show on Patreon.  That’s patreon.com/lonelypalette.

 The Lonely Palette is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of Boston-centric, idea-driven podcasts.  And if Oldenburg has gotten you excited about celebrating the beauty of every day objects, then you’ll love a recent episode of Erica Heilman’s Rumble Strip, where she sits down with Clare, the curator of the Museum Of Everyday Life, which lives in a barn on Route 16, about eight miles from Glover, Vermont, population 2000.  Clare is a nurse, and her most recent exhibit on the knot has gotten waylaid by the pandemic, and just maybe there’s something to be said about the human condition in that, and if so, Erica will find it.  Listen at rumblestripvermont.com, or at hubspokeaudio.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.