IX: “Shelf Life” Claes Oldenburg at the Pace Gallery

Claes Oldenburg has always been one of my favorite sculptors growing up with a deep love for the playful sensibilities of the Pop art movement. Oldenburg’s work is fun while at the same time being the catalyst for a serious discussion about the nature of sculpture in the history of art. He glorifies the everyday object and simultaneously questions the tradition of sculpture being made from solid and finer materials. Oldenburg did all of this starting in earnest in the early 1960s and altered many people’s ideas about how sculpture was made and what art was supposed to make you think about or feel. Oldenburg transitioned from making large soft sculptures of everyday objects to monumentally sized everyday objects out of more permanent robust materials that could withstand the elements like powder coated steel. 

Upon entering the gallery Oldenburg had created a series of Mickey Mouse bags that definitely had a place in the Mouse Museum from the seventies. They were all the same form made out of canvas and painted in different colors, one brown, one green, one red etc. all spinning on motorized pedestals like they were new cars at an auto show. I found them charming in the way his earlier work was that was sewn by his ex-wife Patty Mucha and crudely painted by him. As one walks further into the gallery they are greeted by a room surrounded by shelves with what looks like just a bunch of stuff on them. 

It was interesting to see that over fifty years after his success with the advent of soft sculpture, and probably around twenty five years since his last soft sculpture that he is exhibiting them again and on a much smaller scale. To me the show looked like a miniature retrospective covering his work from The Store and Mouse Museum. Oldenburg is in his late eighties now and has suffered from recent injuries and the death of his wife and long time collaborator Coosje van Bruggen in 2009. These are all valid reasons as to why Oldenburg may be winding down his career and taking stock of his life. The name of the exhibition, “Shelf Life” seems to be a nod at the fact that perhaps the shelf life of Oldenburg’s work and even Oldenburg himself is coming to an end. Ever the jokester and maybe in order to not come off as overtly bleak, Oldenburg decided to put all of the works on shelves, reinforcing the title of the exhibition and the connection to The Store. 

The exhibit was comprised of little objects and models that Oldenburg had seemingly collected and made over the years, and probably stored somewhere on a shelf, that were then put into a new context, relationship, and composition with other objects on shelves in the Pace gallery. This sounds like “Shelf Life” may be lacking in effort but the keen observer might be able to parse out a departing message from Claes in these perplexing and whimsical assemblages. Oldenburg may just be trying to breathe some new life into his old work. One of my favorites out of the exhibition was a piece that was obviously made from a series of models for a number of his past works. In the piece was a soft shuttlecock, a wireframe of an apple core, a wire martini glass, and a drawing of what became a sculpture of a banana peel. Making models is a big part of what I do as a designer so I have an attachment to the category but also as a student of the history of sculpture I have come to witness that models for larger projects are one of the ways one can truly see the artist’s hand. It was heartwarming to me to see that Oldenburg kept these relics of his past work and appropriated them for new work because this is the kind of thing I tend to do myself. Some call it hoarding but it seems that the curators at the Pace gallery would call it an opportunity for an exhibition. 

#hadpratt,  #hadsopratt, #hadstories, #hadhistoryofsculpture