The Washington monument has vanished. In place of its tapering obelisk, a pair of colossal scissors, several hundred feet high, slowly opens during the day and shuts during the night. In Chicago, a clothespin stands where the Tribune Tower once was. In London, Nelson's Column has been replaced by a giant gearshift, which twitches and gyrates erratically through its patterns, scaring the pigeons away from Trafalgar Square forevermore. Have we all been colonized by the Brobdingnagians? Not quite. Claes Oldenburg is at work, and an exhibition of his imaginary monsters, entitled Object into Monument, is now touring the U.S. After a first run at the Pasadena Art Museum in California, the show opens next week at the University Art Museum in Berkeley; through 1972 it will travel to Kansas City, Fort Worth, Des Moines and Chicago.
Like his show, the tall Swedish-American with the potato nose and ice-bag hat jets to and fro between Los Angeles, Stockholm, London. In New York his studio is appropriately gargantuan, consisting of two connected five-story warehouses with an elevator so large that Oldenburg is proposing to furnish it as his living room. He has become, in effect, his own museum: a traveling exhibit, documented and catalogued and spewing out work with minatory gusto.
"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum." So said Oldenburg in a celebrated manifesto written in 1961, which came to be interpreted as one of the charter documents of Pop art. But the museum, like the kraken, envelops even those who defy it. Oldenburg, at 43, is one of the most avidly collected artists in America. The reasons have little to do with the Pop ballyhoo of the early '60s; firmly independent of movements, he has been trying for the past six years to get clear of the narrow context of museum art and the still narrower one of private buying. So his projects for monuments are an effort to take over the environment—"to make," as he puts it, "something so big that nobody can possess it."
Nothing Oldenburg does is lacking in irony—and this includes his wish to make monuments. The traditional language of monuments was heroic—Napoleon gesturing on a marble plinth festooned with trophies and Graces, or Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni raking his bronze eyes across a conquered piazza from his striding horse. The monumental hero is, actually and metaphorically, bigger than life. But to make one, there has to be some belief in heroes, and there must be something to celebrate.
Dying Myth. People still build monuments, but the art died when the celebration stopped, when artists began consciously thinking of themselves as critics, not as exalters. of the established order. The mood was set a century ago when Gustave Courbet, one of the fathers of modern art, helped to topple the Vendome column during the Paris Commune of 1871. Modern democracy has flattened the myth of the hero, and there are still no good monuments to Churchill or Roosevelt; to imagine an equestrian bronze of Nixon or Pompidou on some future Capitol is to enter the realm of farce.