Page 40 - Studio International - June 1970

The Airflow

multiple of

Claes Oldenburg

Barbara Rose

As a child, Claes Oldenburg's favourite toy
was a maroon scale-model Chrysler Airflow
with battery-powered headlights. The Prous-
tian quality of Oldenburg's imagination
imprinted this image, with its rich overlay of
childhood memories, with particular vivid-
ness. Since Oldenburg's practice is always to
use the chance events and occurrences of his
life as material for the content of his art, it is
not surprising that he eventually chose the
Airflow, an object so charged with personal
associations, as one of his major themes. His
friendship with the film-maker and sculptor
Robert Breer, whose father, Carl Breer, de-
signed the classic 1936 Airflow, reinforced
Oldenburg's earlier associations. Through his
friendship with Breer, Oldenburg was able to
gain access to original documents and photo-
graphs which could serve as a point of
departure for his own technological fantasies. ceded his celebrated Store—the Street, which drawing, imitating the technological 'style'
In dealing with the Airflow as a theme, Olden- was shown at the Judson gallery and recon- of mechanical drawing, conforms to our
burg as usual engaged in role-playing. Indeed, structed at the Reuben gallery in 1960. To traditional ideas of graphic art : it is on a flat
the choice of an assembly-line creation (which begin with, Oldenburg saw the Street as full of surface, has depicted contours, and conven-
ironically found its ultimate destiny as a mass- death, and the car as man's worst enemy. The tional shading. Yet the clear plastic relief
produced multiple) was deliberate. It allowed lopsided misshapen reliefs of cars which ap- covering it is just as much drawing as the
Oldenburg to make the transition from The peared in the Street were distorted by angry sheet of paper visible through the moulded
Home, the general environment in which he expressionist drawing. It is interesting to note shell. Lines, instead of being depicted, are
created The Bedroom Ensemble and the various that Oldenburg's original conception of the literal—formed by edges of the different parts
domestic objects that accompanied it, to The car as a motif was as a graphic theme. The of the car. Like Oldenburg's graphic work in
Factory, the imaginary milieu in which he is Street figures and objects emphasized contour; general, the Airflow multiple is involved with
now creating colossal objects like the Giant they were like large drawings whose back- reflections, transparency, tactile sensuousness,
Lipstick and the Icebag, whose scale is so large ground had been cut away. In the Street, scale, depth and mass. The difference, how-
they must be commercially fabricated. This Oldenburg brought drawing into real space ever, is that in the drawings these qualities
role-playing aspect of Oldenburg's career is by hanging silhouetted shapes away from the are depicted illusionistically, whereas in the
central to his understanding of art as a kind wall. The Airflow multiple completes the multiple they are literally actual.
of process which feeds off real-life experience. process of making a graphic conception One of the reasons Oldenburg was so fasci-
In 1961, he set himself up as an ersatz small entirely actual; in this sense it is the first nated by the theme of the Airflow was
businessman in The Store of Manhattan's three-dimensional drawing. Behind the trans- because he could accept it as a problem with
Lower East Side where he impersonated the parent plastic mould of the body of the Air- built-in limitations. Since he was consistently
butcher, the baker, and the tailor. Actually, flow, a photographic blow-up of Oldenburg's interested in the concept of 'style' both as
the theme of the automobile appears in original sketch for the Airflow (which was to an art-historical problem and in terms of
Oldenburg's first environment which pre- have been a soft sculpture) can be seen. This personal expression, he enjoyed the challenge