ARTS & CULTURE

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In New York, Oldenburg’s painted sculptural work—rough-hewed from burlap, muslin, plaster, and wire and presented as installations in nontraditional gallery spaces—earned him acclaim. In his early New York years, Oldenburg worked in an aesthetic in some regards sympatico with his cohort from Chicago. Like him, Chicago artists of the 50s and 60s tended to turn away from abstraction and embrace figurative work. “I come out of Goya, Rouault, parts of Dubu et, Bacon, and the humanistic and existentialist imagists, the Chicago bunch,” Oldenburg wrote in 1960, “and that sets me apart from the whole [Hans] Hofmann-influenced school.”

By the time Oldenburg exhibited work back in Chicago in 1963 (at the Art Institute and the Richard Feigen galleries), he had already established himself as a central figure in the intersecting New York visual and performance art worlds.

That intersection was on full display at the University of Chicago’s Lexington Hall in February of that year, where Oldenburg and colleagues presented a multimedia “happening” entitled “Gayety: Composition for Persons, Objects, and Events.”

Given his background, it is not surprising that his oeuvre would have a theatrical bent. As a child, his singing-teacher mother got him a walk-on role in an opera “wearing a little suit,” he participated in high school dramatics, and he incorporated performance in a 1954 residency at Ox-Bow, the Saugatuck, Michigan, art school a couple hours from Chicago. “I remember the first performance involved a raft on the water, which we sank.”

In New York, Oldenburg had fallen in with like-minded practitioners who were devising happenings. His creations (or as he described them, parallel re-creations of a collective reality) were carefully scored series of actions utilizing props and costumes of his own design: “something,” he said, “like a living poem or objects in motion.”

With “Gayety,” the artist’s hometown finally got to see one. “I want to create a civic report on the community of Chicago, in the way I see it,” he wrote in the script. “This is like the civic projects one did in sixth grade.”

Oldenburg and his 23 cast members created a metaphorical map of Chicago, with a welder representing the Gary steel plants to the south, sinks representing Lake Michigan to the east; a central Loop area; and diagonal areas to represent the diagonal streets of Chicago, like Milwaukee or Archer avenues. “The place in which the piece occurs, this large object, is . . . part of the e ect,” Oldenburg wrote, “and usually the first and most important factor determining the events.” Despite 20-degree-below-zero weather, around 150 audience members attended each of three evenings of performances. At the end of the hour-long performances, a “huge stu ed airplane”—meant to evoke the airplanes that hang from the ceiling of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry—was lowered from the rafters and “thrown onto a group of spectators.”

As the decade progressed, Oldenburg’s schemes became grander in scope, and he began to conceive monumental projects for urban spaces. “The main reason for the colossal objects,” he wrote, “is the obvious one: to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel—the object.”

Chicago was a destination and an inspiration for such colossi. “I think I like to go back to Chicago to establish contact with my growing up there,” he told filmmaker Michael Blackwood, “but also with the sense of space and infinity that the great lake can present, out of which the city rises very clearly like a series of sculptures, or perhaps a gigantic cemetery.”

In his mind, Oldenburg created an alternative Chicago: instead of Graceland Cemetery’s simple headstone for architect Louis Sullivan, he imagined a “broom closet in monumental scale” containing a “600-foot-long figure of the reclining Sullivan;” instead of the Chicago Tribune Tower, he dreamed up an enormous clothespin; instead of Buckingham Fountain, a giant windshield wiper or a lumpy punching bag; in answer to Picasso’s 1967 steel sculpture on Daley Plaza, a soft canvas-and-rope version. Comiskey Park would be shut down and reopened as a ghost version of itself, a Memorial to Baseball. For the end of Navy Pier, Oldenburg’s “feasible monuments” included a pair of women’s boots, a bed-table lamp, a rearview mirror to reflect the city, and an inverted version of the fireplug that had fascinated him as a child.

None of these proposals were actually constructed, but the establishment of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in 1967 gave Oldenburg a venue to show o some of his visions. “Claes Oldenburg: Projects for Monuments” was one of two inaugural exhibitions for the upstart museum.

Oldenburg’s relationship with the MCA was to continue, including his contribution to their “Art by Telephone” exhibition in 1969, considered to be a seminal moment for con- ceptual art. For his contribution, Oldenburg telephoned museum sta each day to dictate messages, which were then written (like a seer “getting messages from the other world”) on a blackboard in the galleries.

The police violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, however, would profoundly alter Oldenburg’s conception of the city and his artistic vision for it.

He had intended to attend the August convention as an observer, even procuring press credentials for the event. But when then-Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the brutal suppression of protesters, Oldenburg was caught up in the riot. “In Chicago, I, like so many others, ran head-on into the model American police state,” he wrote to his gallerists Feigen and Lotte Drew-Bear. “I was tossed to the ground by six swearing troopers who kicked me and choked me and called me a Communist. Fortunately my head wasn’t split, my wrists broken, or my groin gored, but I got the message—the evil in Chicago (which is considerable) had been mobilized to destroy the values I came looking for.” Oldenburg informed Feigen that the experience had unsettled him, and that he wanted to postpone his upcoming exhibit at Feigen’s Chicago gallery: “A gentle one-man show about pleasure,” he said, “seems a bit obscene in the present context.”

Feigen responded by filling the October slot intended for Oldenburg’s show with a “Richard J. Daley” protest show, featuring not only Oldenburg but a who’s who of American art: Lee Bontecou, Christo, Donald Judd, and many more.

The reaction to the exhibition was predictable. As Feigen writes in his memoir, “Daley’s people obviously noticed, because despite the burly bodyguard Oldenburg hired to escort our gallery director, Lotte Drew-Bear, to and from her apartment, some goons came into the gallery and trashed the place.”

Oldenburg’s proposed monuments for the city now took on a new tone. His punching bag images assumed an altered meaning for him, now that “Chicago’s finest” had punched and kicked him, His Feasible Monument to be Scattered in a City Park: Fragments of Nightstick Contact commemorated that beating; even something as insubstantial as smoke was “a good subject for a sculpture there,” Oldenburg wrote. “In April, 1968 [after the assassination of Martin Luther King], I watched parts of the city being burned. The people who set those fires intended it to mean something. That could be called making a monument.” continued from p. 22

After becoming Chicago’s punching bag in 1968, it is quite the twist to see Oldenburg return to the city wielding a giant baseball bat in 1977. At the unveiling of Batcolumn, acting mayor Michael Bilandic welcomed the artist who had been the victim of his predecessor’s vicious crackdown a decade earlier. Now, the forces of power were arrayed behind Oldenburg. Second Lady Joan Mondale—an Oldenburg fan—struck a patriotic note at the monument’s unveiling, saying, “How fitting, how uniquely American, that the visual arts should flourish in a city that is also a center for commerce and industry.” Oldenburg rhetorically hedged his bets a bit: “The Batcolumn could be called a monument to baseball and, undoubtedly, to the ambition and vigor that Chicago likes to see in itself.” The United States Navy Band played. Chicago Cubs greats Ernie Banks and Billy Williams were on hand, and Banks joined the Second Lady in releasing dozens of white balloons, printed with thread designs to resemble baseballs.

By now, Oldenburg was an establishment figure, and criticism came from the political left. Across the street from the unveiling, artists calling themselves the Surrealist Movement of the United States protested, calling Oldenburg “a miserablist lap dog” and the Batcolumn a “serviceable symbol of repressive authority. . . . When the workers of Chicago tear down this five-story nightstick, then we shall have a game worth playing.”

Oldenburg, however, was no longer equating his work with the police truncheons of ’68. He now said, “I don’t always see the things in my work that other people see. To me, Batcolumn is just a simple object, very pure, but also very suggestive. It’s always a matter of interpretation, but I tend to look at all my works as being completely pure.” He was thankful, he said, “for the opportunity to create such an unusual project without compromise.”

In reality, the project had faced a history of compromises. His original conception of a giant bat, in 1967, was not exactly “pure form.” He imagined it outside the new Latin School at the corner of North and Clark, and it was to be “kept spinning at an incredible speed.”

According to Rose, Oldenburg “maintains that his Bat Spinning at the Speed of Light, to be located in front of the school he attended as a youth, originated as an anti-masturbation fantasy—a monument that burned your fingers if you touched it.” Feigen tried to make the idea a reality, but—not surprisingly—funding was unavailable.

The instigation for Batcolumn finally came in the form of a commission (including $100,000 for the artist) from the U.S. General Services Administration, for a sculpture outside the new Social Security Administration building on Madison. The funding garnered controversy. Wisconsin senator William Proxmire gave the project one of his “Golden Fleece” awards, presented to government programs that fleece the voting public. “Baseball is indeed our national game,” he said. “A statue of Babe Ruth, Ernie Banks, or Bill Madlock, the Cubs’ current star, would have some merit. But a $100,000 bat paid for by all of America’s taxpayers is a strikeout with the bases loaded.”

“I don’t want to be critical,” Oldenburg replied, “but somebody wrote that Proxmire’s hair transplants had gone too far down into his brain.”

Oldenburg toyed with various ideas for the sculpture—an iteration of his fireplug, a giant spoon, a Dutch boy cap—before settling on the (nonspinning) bat. Various contingencies continued to compromise Oldenburg’s schemes: due to property lines, the sculpture had to be moved closer the the building than he would have liked; the color red was rejected because it had already been used for Alexander Calder’s Flamingo outside the federal building. But eventually, the engineering was worked out; sections of steel cage were fabricated, welded together, and sandblasted, and the whole long thing was trucked, horizontally, from Connecticut to Chicago. There, it was lifted into position by cranes from the aptly named Midwest Steel Erection Company, and it joined the fabled skyscrapers—real and imagined—of the city.

On July 18, 2022, Oldenburg died in his New York home. The New York Times printed an extensive obituary and, a day later, an appraisal of his work by critic Deborah Solomon. Artforum and Art in America published significant tributes. Even the Kansas City Star , the Dallas Morning News , the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times , and the Provincetown Independent published original articles celebrating the artist’s connections to their cities. Obituaries referenced his Chicago upbringing and his Batcolumn , though most skipped over his postgraduate period in the city, when he was cutting his teeth as an artist; Solomon elided those years, writing simply, “In 1956, after graduating from Yale University, Oldenburg moved to New York.”

Chicago media were even less forthcoming, with the local dailies both publishing the Associated Press obituary. The most significant Chicago-centric look at Oldenburg came weeks after his death from venerable Tribune columnist Rick Kogan, who—on the day he wrote the piece—decried the lack of coverage in an interview with the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. “Claes Oldenburg died, and we don’t run in the Tribune —sadly—the number of obituaries we used to. We did run one of him, but it barely mentioned that he grew up here, for Christ’s sake! . . . And I’m thinking, ‘Wait, this guy deserves more than this.’”

Kogan is right. Oldenburg’s death has been met with a collective shrug from the “City of Big Shoulders.” Given Chicago’s central role in Oldenburg’s personal genesis and artistic evolution, a more thorough reckoning is warranted. In ways big and small, Chicago—with its skyscrapers and museums and graveyards and strippers and smoke—primed Oldenburg to create a new kind of art: one that remade everyday objects in new forms, forms that were often funny, erotic, political, theatrical, and imbued with connections to Oldenburg’s personal history.

As a child in Chicago, Oldenburg cooked up the imaginary island state “Neubern,” and the same exuberant impulse and meticulous world-building went into his reconception of Chicago as an adult artist. His Chicago illustrations, his Chicago happening, his “feasible monuments,” and finally his Batcolumn, all in some way generated an alternative Chicago, one that captured the city as Oldenburg conceived it. Chicago’s Oldenburg transformed the international art world through his public monuments; Oldenburg’s Chicago—with its melting buildings and giant fireplugs and soft airplanes—represents a di erent kind of transformation, one that accords with Oldenburg’s “single-minded aim,” as he wrote in 1960, to create “a parallel reality according to the rules of (my) fantasy,” a “geography of the human imagination.” v

@writesaacson