Of course I like the picture because it shows two favorites of mine together – Oldenburg and Beetle – and I also like what rough shape his Beetle is in. It’s only about eight years old at this point: I think it’s a ’55 because even though those low-mounted front indicators were used from ’55 to ’57, in ’56 VW went to dual exhaust pipes, and I think I only see the shadow for one back there behind the car. And despite not being that old, it looks like it hasn’t been babied. The front fender has sideswiped something pretty good, there’s a missing hubcap, and somehow he seems to have lost his rear bumper as well. I think Oldenburg was fond of his Beetle, or Beetles in general, because he did make a wonderful soft sculpture Beetle on what may be an actual VW chassis (at least in part), with real parts:
What I like about this sculpture – and, really, all his soft sculptures – is that it feels like he wasn’t trying to make a soft version of the object, but rather he was trying to replicate the object, and the soft materials were all he had handy. It’s not built like you would do it if you understood you were working with such floppy materials. It’s built like you were expecting the materials to be rigid, and just ended up disappointed, but you finished it anyway. This gives these objects a strange and appealing plucky pathos that’s hard to convey in words, but hits me when I see them. He also made one of my favorite deliberate jokes in the art world, his 1967 piece Late Submission to the Chicago Tribune Architectural Competition of 1922:
Sure, it’s fun that his submission is a giant (nicely rendered) clothespin, but the very concept of a “late submission” to an architecture competition that had been over for 45 years and the resulting building long since known as a landmark is just a hilarious thing, at least to me. Anyway, who says I’m not using that Art History degree? If a city or college gave me enough money, I’m sure I could find a team to assemble a giant (looking around my apartment for Oldenburgian inspiration) cardboard box, dumbbell, pink platform stiletto (Pride month doesn’t end around here). But I’m not famous, so no one’s giving me $200,000 to hire a team to sculpt a giant oscillating fan. Old-man-screams-at-cloud aside, said clothespin is at Centre Square in Philadelphia, iconically placed behind Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places, and it fills me with joy every time I see it. Maybe that’s all Oldenburg ever set out to do. In which case, in a field of hackneyed messages and rhetoric shoehorned into $120,000 rotting bananas duct taped to the walls at Art Basel, Oldenburg is refreshingly delightful. You should start a series on (concept)ual art cars!
