Art is one of the key components of Elio Petri's film La decima vittima (The 10th Victim): Petri loved paintings and this movie shows his in-depth knowledge of contemporary artists.
Director of photography Gianni Di Venanzo's Pop Art colors call to mind Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland’s vivid shades; Jasper Johns' paintings of targets are turned into real targets in "The Professor"'s gym, while the giant eye that opens and closes in Marcello's apartment, a three-dimensional version of Joe Tilson's "Look!" (View this photo) in motion and the props for the Ming Tea ad are reminiscent of Andy Warhol's Pop Art works based on adverts and Claes Oldenburg's three-dimensional oversized objects.
Throughout his career the Swedish-born artist, who died last year at 93, turned ordinary objects into monumental sculptures.
Mundane objects and items such as a baseball bat, a clothespin, a rubber stamp, matches, a saw, ice-cream cones, hamburgers and toothpaste tubes (just to mention a few of them...), were reimagined in a fantastic key.
In 1961 Oldenburg unveiled "The Store" in a rented shop on the Lower East Side, New York. It was stocked with sculptures of everyday consumer goods, including clothing and food items; his soft hamburger made its debut the following year.
In the early days Oldenburg produced soft sculpture of everyday items employing vinyl and kapok; often these pieces were stitched by his then wife, Patty Mucha.
This process reversed the very essence of traditional artworks: sculptures in solid, hard and noble materials like marble, were turned indeed into soft pieces, dedicated to unassuming objects, their softness, or rather limpness, almost implying a loss of the masculinity that characterized classical artworks. Apart from being soft, his sculptures, such as "Giant Soft Fan", were also outsized.
Displayed at the US pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, the artwork invited visitors to imagine walking around a hot and sticky summer day and finding a moment of respite thanks to the cool breeze blown by a giant fan positioned near the Statue of Liberty.
Gradually Oldenburg moved onto harder materials such as steel and polyurethane enamel (think about the colossal aluminum and stainless steel "Spoonbridge and Cherry", 1985-88, situated in the Walker Art Center's sculpture garden in Minneapolis).
Oldenburg produced many of these works in collaboration with his second wife, Dutch-born art historian and critic Coosje van Bruggen.
Despite this shift in materials, one consistent feature remained unchanged: the enduring theme of monumental proportions. Oldenburg's art retained its ability to transform everyday objects into oversized, fantastical landmarks within urban landscapes.
In doing so, it had a curious effect akin to a sort of "Alice in Wonderland" syndrome as, by magnifying the small and ordinary, the scale of human passersby was reduced to an ant-like perspective (yesterday we looked at Václav Cigler's glass jewelry that magnify, shrink, reflect and decompose the light and colors, so consider this post as a progression of those themes...).
In some cases the pieces turned into parts of buildings: the binoculars by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen were for example located in 1991 at the entrance to Frank Gehry’s offices for Google in Venice Beach, California.
In other cases the sculptures pointed at hidden metaphors and meanings: "Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks" (1969) referenced America's involvement in the Vietnam war. Originally installed on Beinecke Plaza, at the center of the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut, it was meant to be used as a speaker’s platform for anti-war protesters.
Installed outside Philadelphia's City Hall Oldenburg's "Clothespin"(1976), looks instead like an ordinary everyday item at first glance, but the two sections at the top of the sculpture are reminiscent of Constantin Brancusi's iconic 1908 creation "The Kiss," which portrayed two lovers, a man and a woman locked in an intimate embrace, gazing deeply into each other's eyes.
Accessible and relatable to the general public, while demystifying art, these sculptures of ordinary products therefore still provided wider meanings and often pointed at consumerism.
As the years passed, these works also inspired a sort of dialogue with fashion: it is for example hard not to look at Oldenburg's hamburger without connecting it to Katy Perry dressed like a hamburger at the 2019 Met Gala for the Costume Institute exhibition "Camp: Notes on Fashion" (View this photo). Her ensemble, designed by Jeremy Scott, may have been a wearable tribute to Claes Oldenburg that, unitentionally, transformed into a reference not just to consumerism but to fashion as a consuming force that swallows those who follow it.
Oldenburg's vibrant visual vocabulary, characterized by soft and oversized volumes and the whimsical notion of an "Alice in Wonderland" syndrome where objects expand while the body seems to shrink, present a source of inspiration for interior designers.
"Joe" (1970), the armchair designed in the form of a giant baseball glove by Jonathan De Pas, Donato D'Urbino, and Paolo Lomazzi for Poltronova, combined for example the poetics of Pop Art, the admiration for the legendary American baseball star Joe DiMaggio and a shift of scale.
Giorgio Ceretti, Riccardo Rosso and Pietro Derossi’s "Pratone" (1971), was an unconventional crazy seat reproducing giant blades of grass.
"Pratone" was produced by Gufram, a company that created further iconic pieces such as Studio 65's striking "Bocca" (1970), a lip-shaped sofa, and "Capitello", "Attica" and "Attica TL" (1971-72), a Greek column that could be broken up into different interior design pieces.
Made of polyurethane foam, a material frequently used by Italian radical designers, these pieces played a lot on surrealism: they looked whimsical with their bright and bold colours, dramatic proportions and shapes that didn't go well with the more conventional interior design of those times.
It is obviously possible to use oversized proportions in subtler and more minimalist ways: in 2008 Italian fashion and interior designer Cinzia Ruggeri created a modular seating solution called "Cerchi concentrici" consisting, as the title of the piece says, in a series of concentric circles.
Each of them came in a different color and texture (a trick reminiscent of her "Una sola moltitudine" - A Single Multitude - armchair); the biggest circle also featured a soft cylindrical element, a sort of functional handle that may have allowed you to effortlessly move the piece around.
When dismantled and displayed in a different configuration, the piece was reminiscent of a stackable toy - think about the "Rock-a-Stack" by Fisher Price (View this photo) or, even better, the more classic "Color Cone Tree" stackable toy designed in 1938 by Jarvis W. Rockwell (part of the Brooklyn Museum collections).
In fact, in Cinzia Ruggeri's case, this is probably a more apt connection for the configuration of the rings that have a sort of squarish edge and aren't as round as Fisher Price's (please note that I'm not saying that Ruggeri was inspired by this particular toy as her seating solution is not stackable but modular and concentric, so that each circle can be reincorporated into the previous one).
In a nutshell, while art forms can inspire us set designs or interior design pieces, altering the proportions (or the function) of mundane items, can also spark creativity and help us coming up with innovative concepts and with novel and adaptable narrative experiences.
So, always keep your eyes open: who knows, your next striking design may be lying in front of you in that pile of discarded toys scattered around by your children or abandoned on a forlorn beach as summer dies.
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