American Art Collaborative

Claes Oldenburg began making sculptures and sculptural installations out of common materials—principally newspaper and cardboard—in the late 1950s, assembling totemic figures and fetishlike props for loosely scripted performances on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. By 1961 he was using a different set of common materials to render common objects, generating rough-hewn, multicolor depictions of everyday things by draping plaster-soaked muslin over wire structures and then covering the resulting shapes with enamel paint. Any product or consumable was fair game for re-creation, from sausages and ice-cream to party dresses and soda pop logos. As the 1960s progressed, Oldenburg’s choice of objects became more selective. He worked with multipart themes, such as the living room, and multipart forms, such as the car. He also focused on the representation of ubiquitous technologies—among them the light switch, the telephone, and the vacuum cleaner. And he became known for returning to the same subjects repeatedly, rendering them in different materials and arranging them in a succession of “poses,” first in drawings and then in three dimensions. As Oldenburg pared his subjects in number, he increased the sense of movement and animation evident in many of his forms, regardless of the scale at which they were achieved. Dynamism is especially inherent to his various depictions of the typewriter eraser, a now-obsolete tool that would have had a place on the desks of most office workers when it began to figure in Oldenburg’s art in 1968. That same year Esquire commissioned him to produce a performance “script,” or the written directives for a Happening. Oldenburg’s contribution, which appeared in the magazine’s May 1969 issue, characteristically involved an object, in this case a typewriter, which he paired with a three-dimensional mockup of its accompanying eraser and a succession of drawings. By 1970 Oldenburg had identified several positions for the eraser, repeatedly drawing and sculpting it to resemble, among other things, a sphinx, a tornado, and a reclining odalisque. The “Bent Position,” so named by the artist to describe the grounded tilt of the eraser wheel and the diagonal flourish of its brush, became Oldenburg’s favorite, and in 1970 he proposed this version for a sculptural commission on 57th Street in New York. What he envisioned for the site was a “dropped” object, as if an eraser had been released from the hand of a secretary on the upper floor of the adjacent building and arrived on the sidewalk monumentalized. Not surprisingly the building’s management took issue with the aggrandizement of, in the artist’s words, “the lowest organism in the office” and, by implication, its mostly female users. This particular version of the inspired antimonument went unrealized. Oldenburg remained enamored with the design and eventually enlisted the Connecticut-based fabricator Lippincott and Company to produce it in two editions in 1976 and 1977, one room-sized with a height of seven-plus feet and this version intended for a pedestal (in an edition of 18). More than two decades later, in 1999, Oldenburg and his wife and collaborator Coosje van Bruggen produced Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, a monumental outdoor version of this form, bringing to fruition an idea that began, as the artist once admitted, on a paper napkin. Viewers who have grown up in the era of computers often fail to identify this object and the promise of typographic redemption it offered its users, but its playfulness and vitality remain unmistakable.Elizabeth Finch