Search results
Jun 25, 2019 · 9-10, 11-12. Duration. 15 classes, at 50 minutes per class. Materials. Cardboard, paste (half water, half elmers), tape and hot glue. Media. Lesson Objectives. Students will learn how use scale and proportions skills. They will gain group and communication skills as well as creative thinking with others.
- Overview
- Gender, consumerism, and war
- Going public
By Dr. Mya Dosch
A monumental tube of lipstick sprouting from a military vehicle appeared, uninvited, on the campus of Yale University amidst the 1969 student protests against the Vietnam War. While the sculpture may have seemed like a playful, if elaborate artistic joke, Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks was also deeply critical. Oldenburg made the 24-foot-high sculpture in collaboration with architecture students at his alma mater and then surreptitiously delivered it to Yale’s Beinecke Plaza. In Beinecke Plaza, the sculpture overlooked both the office of Yale’s president and a prominent World War I memorial. Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks claimed a visible space for the anti-war movement while also poking fun at the solemnity of the plaza. The sculpture served as a stage and backdrop for several subsequent student protests.
Oldenburg had experimented with lipstick forms earlier in the 1960s, pasting catalog images of lipstick onto postcards of London’s Picadilly Circus. The resulting collages showed lipstick tubes looming like massive pillars over Picadilly’s plaza. In the Yale sculpture, the artist combined the highly “feminine” product with the “masculine” machinery of war. In doing so, he playfully critiqued both the hawkish, hyper-masculine rhetoric of the military and the blatant consumerism of the United States.
In addition to its feminine associations, the large lipstick tube is phallic and bullet-like, making the benign beauty product seem masculine or even violent. The juxtaposition implied that the U.S. obsession with beauty and consumption both fueled and distracted from the ongoing violence in Vietnam.
Oldenburg had been designing large-scale, vinyl versions of household objects since his Green Gallery exhibition in 1962. He had created collages and drawings that played with the notion of massive domestic objects in public places, but Lipstick was his first large-scale public artwork. Oldenburg went on to make several other public sculptures that enlarged everyday domestic items to monumental dimensions. For example, he rendered a clothespin on the scale of an ancient Egyptian obelisk in a 1976 sculpture for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
By bringing both domestic and military objects into a public space, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks blurred the lines between public and private, and between the war in Vietnam and culture of the United States. In doing so, it upheld Oldenburg’s 1961 declaration that:
"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum [...] I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary." [1]
Notes:
[1] Claes Oldenburg, "I Am For an Art..." in Environments, Situations, Spaces (New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, 1961); reprinted in an expanded version in Oldenburg and Emmett Williams, editors, Store Days: Documents from The Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962) (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), pp. 39–42.
Additional resources
Claes Oldenburg. born Stockholm, Sweden 1929-died New York City 2022. Also known as. Claes Thure Oldenburg. Born. Stockholm, Sweden. Died. New York, New York, United States. Active in. New York, New York, United States. Nationalities. American. Works by this artist (59755 items) Activity/Lab. Museum in My Pocket: An Off-the-Wall Art Game.
- January 28, 1929
- July 18, 2022
Jul 18, 2022 · 1 of 8. Summary of Claes Oldenburg. With his saggy hamburgers, colossal clothespins and giant three-way plugs, Claes Oldenburg has been the reigning king of Pop sculpture since the early 1960s, back when New York was still truly gritty.
(1929–2022). An artist best known for his giant, soft sculptures of everyday objects, Claes Oldenburg was closely associated with the development of pop art in the United…
