Sculpture in the Form of a Bicycle Saddle

Description

March 28, 2009
Swedish-born artist Claes Oldenburg has made a career of turning everyday objects into works of art. While Pop art also used imagery from consumer culture to challenge prevailing notions of what constitutes high art, Oldenburg had a unique approach to doing this that took its cues from the earlier movements of Dada and Surrealism. Where Pop artists like Andy Warhol, for example, would retain and even flaunt the fact that an object was industrially manufactured, Oldenburg transformed the object through free-association and visual puns. He was in search of what he has called “parallel realities,” or the multiple identities a form can take on through changes of material, scale, or physical setting.
Here Oldenburg uses the form of a bicycle saddle to pay tribute to his avant-garde legacy. Ever since Marcel Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool and created the first “readymade,” the bicycle has taken on special symbolic significance within the context of modern art. The orientation of the seat in Oldenburg’s sculpture, with the narrow end pointing up, echoes the shape of another iconic Duchamp readymade, Fountain, a urinal turned 90 degrees from its normal position and signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt.”