An artist who opened a shop
In December 1961 a young American sculptor named Claes Oldenburg (1929–2022) rented a cramped storefront on East Second Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and turned it into something between an art installation and an actual shop. He filled it with handmade objects: rough plaster copies of the goods sold in the surrounding neighborhood stores, pieces of cake, slices of pie, shirts, dresses, hunks of meat, all of them lumpy, brightly painted, and openly fake, propped in the window and on the shelves as if they were for sale. He called the whole multi-year project The Store. It was an art gallery disguised as a cheap shop, and the merchandise was the art.
The idea behind it was a deliberate insult to good taste. The serious art of the moment looked inward and upward, toward private feeling and pure abstraction; Oldenburg pointed the other way, at the cheap, the greasy, the everyday commercial junk of the American street, and insisted that was the real subject. A few months earlier he had written a furious, joyful list of everything he wanted art to be instead of what it was, and one line of it became famous. He was for an art, he wrote, that did real work in the world:
“I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.”
That line comes from a statement called I am for an art…, written in 1961 for the catalogue of an exhibition, Environments, Situations, Spaces, at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. (The wording matters, because it is often misquoted as “does something more than”; the Walker Art Center, which holds Oldenburg’s archive, gives the line as “otherthan.” And Oldenburg later shrugged off the idea that it was a manifesto at all, calling it a literary effort, much of it written for the sound of the words.) Whatever he wanted to call it, the burger we are looking at is one of the things that statement produced.
The Store goes uptown, and grows
In the fall of 1962, The Store moved uptown for a show at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery in midtown Manhattan, and for that version Oldenburg made something new and much larger. Instead of plaster objects at roughly life size, he built a set of food sculptures blown up to the scale of furniture: a giant hamburger, a giant slice of cake (Floor Cake), and a giant ice-cream cone (Floor Cone), each one big enough to share a room with. And he made them out of a material no sculptor had used this way before. He made them soft.
That is the word to hold onto, because it is the whole invention. A soft sculpture is exactly what it sounds like: a three-dimensional artwork made of pliable, yielding material, sewn from cloth and stuffed, rather than carved from stone or cast in bronze or welded from metal. It has no rigid skeleton. It droops. It can be squashed. Oldenburg did not invent the very idea single-handedly, and the burger was one of a set rather than the lone first example, but these 1962 floor pieces are where the soft sculpture became a serious, room-scale thing, and the hamburger is the most famous of them.