Page 41 - Studio International - June 1970

of a, so to speak, 'styleless' motif, whose lines wild nature, the automobile might be seen other, Oldenburg equated the hard contours
were predetermined by an industrial de- as a modern hybrid, half way between man of mechanical drawings with a linear classi-
signer—in this case Carl Breer. Modifying a and machine, whose power and speed ideally cism, and the soft washes and deep spaces of
pre-established design to mass produce it in a summed up the modern experience. his expressionist drawings with the painterly.
new form, as a multiple work of art, Olden- In his search for a symbolic image that would It was essentially the desire to work simultane-
burg sets an admirable example for tech- most typically embody the spirit of the tech- ously in both styles—the personal subjective
nology in general: implicit in his feedback of nological age, Oldenburg must have had as and painterly and the impersonal geometric
a reprocessed form is a rejection of the waste one of his associations the poet Marinetti's machine style—that led him to reconsider the
which accompanies affluence. Once again, original Futurist Manifesto, in which Mari- theme of the Airflow. Working on his first suite
one sees parallels with the Street, which was netti evoked a Fellini-like image of the con- of colour lithographs, the .Notes published by
made of second-hand discarded materials. frontation between nature and the machine : Gemini in 1968, Oldenburg, who constantly
'Everything must be used,' Oldenburg wrote 'A crowd of fishermen armed with their poles, cultivates (one might even say craves)
in his notebooks. and some gouty naturalists were already variety, decided to develop simultaneously
Because it challenged the concept of 'style', crowding around the wonder. With patient another project which would be the opposite
Oldenburg found the Airflow congenial. The and meticulous care they put up a high of the intimate statement of the Notes.
theme of the car itself interested him because framework and enormous iron nets to fish out The realization of the Airflow multiple created
the automobile is the machine closest to man. my automobile like a great beached shark. many technical problems. Oldenburg des-
Serving as an extension of the human body, The machine emerged slowly, shedding at the cribed the qualities he wished to Ken Tyler
the car was a particularly appealing theme to bottom like scales its heavy body so sound, —translucent material that would be firm but
Oldenburg, who relates all his subjects to the and its soft upholstery so comfortable.' appear soft, be solid but appear fluid, be
human body or to nature or to both. Maximizing associations—with art history, rigid but flexible enough to give if pressed. It
This analogy between automobile and body with the immediate environment, with psy- might have been possible to find the proper
becomes even more obvious when we con- chological overtones—Oldenburg finally chose mould and material if scale had not been an
sider Oldenburg's soft sculptures relating to as the colour of the Airflow multiple a watery issue; but Oldenburg also wanted the relief
to be quite large so that it would have the
proper monumentality and degree of detail.
Anything that was soft and pliable enough to
have the qualities he wanted would, on the
scale he demanded, have been too heavy and
have sagged. After two and a half years of
tests in a variety of factories and research con-
cerns where eighteen technicians investigated
the problem, Oldenburg and Tyler ended up
making the Airflow in Tyler's garage, where
roughly one 'car' a day can be 'mass' pro-
duced. The material finally chosen because it
was both stable and elastomeric was a two-
part polyurethane—apparently the only ma-
terial capable of fulfilling Oldenburg's con-
tradictory specifications.
Oldenburg claims that he chose a familiar
image to emphasize execution as the uniquely
personal factor. For this reason he spent over
a year refining the wooden relief from which
the Airflow theme: the muffler, dashboard, blue-green. The choice of this colour to- the moulds were taken. In 'tooling up' his
motor, etc. Dissecting the car into its com- gether with the transparency of the material model, he went through several stages,
ponent parts, Oldenburg becomes the anato- create a strange nature-machine image re- including collages made with string, balsa,
mist of the inanimate, the Dr Tulp of Detroit. calling not only Marinetti's description but latex and gesso; a plaster relief simplified
And of course it is no accident that the parts also the swimming pools and beaches of with the help of a Disney craftsman; and the
of the Airflow resemble human organs so Southern California, with their clear blue- final highly-refined model for the plaster
closely. At first Oldenburg had tried to green water and sunny reflections. moulds into which liquid plastic is poured and
realize the body of the car as a whole. He had Thus the theme of the Airflow itself was one of left to harden. Throughout the process,
planned to make a giant soft Airflow out of the most powerful and association-loaded Oldenburg feared the result would be too
black vinyl stretched over a wooden armature Oldenburg has ever chosen. Deliberately cold and impersonal—a risk he took by in-
resembling the wooden struts of the model air- choosing an industrial 'classic' and refining corporating so many mechanical elements.
planes he made as a child. But disaster its lines still further, Oldenburg wished to If the Airflow multiple proves one thing, how-
plagued the project; and its partially finished create the modern symbol imagined by ever, it is this : no artist of Oldenburg's calibre
hulk still sits gathering dust in Oldenburg's Marinetti of 'a race-automobile which seems and powerful originality has anything to
studio, looking like some great primitive ...more beautiful than the Victory of Samo- worry about the 'dehumanizing' or 'deperson-
beast in hibernation. thrace'. Indeed, in Oldenburg's mind, the alizing' aspects of technology. The unpre-
The symbolic content of machine imagery 'technological' style he began to use in 1964 dictable visual impact of the Airflow, in which
obviously also drew Oldenburg to the Airflow to make the original sketches for the Bedroom contour reads as alternately concave and
as a theme. For many modern artists, the represented a classical geometric antidote to convex depending on how the image is
automobile was a highly potent image, a the baroque quality of the soft sculpture. focussed, added to its obvious expressiveness,
kind of modern equivalent of the centaur. As Proposing to transcend the traditional art- reveals that the contemporary artist can
the centaur had dignified for the ancients historical categories of the 'linear' and the master technology as his ancestors conquered
man's gradual differentiation of himself from 'painterly' by oscillating from one to the nature probably with as much effort. q