By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. My work is always on its way between one point and another. Although his objects often have fetishistic associations the ray guns above all , the Oldenburg world is finally less phallic than anal, as is the case with other masters of regression, such as Kurt Schwitters before him and Mike Kelley after.
This is especially the case with Jacket and Shirt Fragment , β62, with its fecal brown and blood red, but Cash Register , , also looks as though it were deformed by intestinal acids.
Ernest Jones once proposed that the prototypical act of artmaking is the infantile shaping of shit. But might not the anal also be a site of emergence into difference? In this regard, Oldenburg treats us not to the collapse of form into formlessness, to the breakdown of language, so much as to the development of signs from amorphous stuff, from things seen on the street, like a piece of bent metal or scrap wood that might be used to signify a gun or a flag.
Or, rather, Oldenburg offers us a range of a signifying possibilities. For me, though, his work calls to mind an even more mythical eventβthe moment when signification exploded into being. In the wake of [this] transformation. Oldenburg has this mana touch, too; his art is a ray gun of magical transformation.
Throughout the s, Oldenburg also clipped and saved advertisements from a range of mass-market magazines. Search Icon. Search for: Search Icon. Search for:. Arrow Icon.
