Blog task two

Claes Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929)  (age 85) is an American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009 after 32 years of marriage. Oldenburg lives and works in New York.                

Oldenburg's first recorded sales of artworks were at 
the 57th Street Art Fair in Chicago, where he sold 5 items for a total price of $25. He moved back to New York City in 1956. There he met a number of artists, including Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow, whose Happenings incorporated theatrical aspects and provided an alternative to the abstract expressionism that had come to dominate much of the art scene. Oldenburg began toying with the idea of soft sculpture in 1957, when he completed a free-hanging piece made from a woman's stocking stuffed with newspaper. (The piece was untitled when he made it but is now referred to as Sausage.)

In 1959, Oldenburg started to make figures, signs and objects out of papier-mâché, sacking and other rough materials, followed in 1961 by objects in plaster and enamel based on items of food and cheap clothing. Oldenburg's first show that included three-dimensional works, in May 1959, was at the Judson Gallery, atJudson Memorial Church on Washington Square. During this time, artist Robert Beauchamp described Oldenburg as "brilliant," due to the reaction that the pop artist brought to a "dull" abstract expressionist period.

In the 1960s Oldenburg became associated with the Pop Art movement and created many so-called happenings, which were performance art related productions of that time. The name he gave to his own productions was "Ray Gun Theater". The cast of colleagues who appeared in his performances of included artistsLucas Samaras, Tom Wesselman, Carolee Schneemann, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Richard Artschwager, dealer Annina Nosei, critic Barbara Rose, and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. His first wife (1960–1970) Patty Mucha, who sewed many of his early soft sculptures, was a constant performer in his happenings. This brash, often humorous, approach to art was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature, art dealt with "profound" expressions or ideas. But Oldenburg's spirited art found first a niche then a great popularity that endures to this day. In December 1961, he rented a store on Manhattan's Lower East Side to house "The Store," a month-long installation he had first presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, stocked with sculptures roughly in the form of consumer goods.

Oldenburg moved to Los Angeles in 1963 "because it was the most opposite thing to New York I could think of That same year, he conceived AUT OBO DYS, performed in the parking lot of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in December 1963. In 1965 he turned his attention to drawings and projects for imaginary outdoor monuments. Initially these monuments took the form of small collages such as a crayon image of a fat, fuzzy teddy bear looming over the grassy fields of New York's Central Park (1965) and Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London (1966). In 1967, New York city cultural adviser Sam Green realized Oldenburg's first outdoor public monument; Placid Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with a crew of gravediggers digging a 6-by-3-foot rectangular hole in the ground. In 1969, Oldenberg contributed a drawing to the Moon Museum.

 This is a sculpture from 1990 and it is located at the Israel Museum;

 In this sculpture of an apple eaten to the core is made of stainless steel, urethane foam, resin and urethane enamel;

 This work show us the two main characteristics of Pop Art: art for the masses; daily life objects

 This masterpiece is the face of the consumerism:

        This apple core represents the need and the desire of material and ordinary stuff from the consumerism society;

         Consumerism prevents people of thinking individually and having their own identity. The apple is the so called “forbidden fruit” and these expression wonderworks in this sculpture because it shows that people buy and consume things that they don’t need and with have difficulties (economy) to have it;

        We can related this work with the 60s in the way because in the 60s people were shallow and hypocrites and  based their life according to consumerism (it was on the 60s it beginning);

         This unbridled searching for material things is related to the need of the people to aspire to be something that they are not.

                     This sculpture can as well be the face of the unsustainable               model of development of few years ago (and even now):  

     This apple portrays the overexploitation of our resources;

  Located near a modern building this shows this type of development;

   The Human being does not realise that he is the responsible of the “run out” of our resources so they consume and overuse the natural resources until their core. 

I like Claes's work I think its creative and unique he thinks outside the box the apple core makes something thats not so nice beautiful and the apple looks like it would make a nice seat.