Typewriters, telephones, even toy aeroplanes - Claes Oldenburg has a way of making the stuff of urban life look good enough to eat.
Claes Oldenburg's Soft Typewriter is a writer's nightmare: literary ineffectiveness given object form. A self-evidently unworkable proposition, its keys are white buttons sewn to an ingeniously typewriter-shaped cushion upholstered in shiny black PVC. Fashioned with calculated perversity from a material more commonly associated with the clinging mini-dress or the thigh-length boot, Oldenburg's mock-typewriter is a fetish object. Its inutility is sexy, making it a thing to be touched for itself. Its keys might be blank but the absence of qwertyuiop, asdfghjkl and zxcvbnm sends out a signal none the less. This is a ma- chine for producing not text, but more inarticulate sounds, thrummings, crumplings, soft squeaky caresses. A small, sensual redemption has taken place.
Two years before he created his soft version of one, Oldenburg sat at a real typewriter and hammered out a manifesto for his art. "I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself." The Hayward Gallery's Oldenburg retrospective which, like Oldenburg, peaks early, opens with several galleries filled with marvellous demonstrations of what he meant.
"I am for art that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes. I am for an art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief. I am for an art that is put on and taken off, like a pair of pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned, with great contempt, like a piece of shit." Hence the writhing, coiling...
