Claes Oldenburg Quotes

Everything I do is completely original-I made it up when I was a kid.

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.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.

My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying; I was remaking them as my own.

The main reason for the colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel - the object.

Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.

For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two; eat one and drop the other.

I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

Mine was not pop art. I maybe started with a subject, but I changed the subject.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.

The right angle is one of the world's basic shapes.

I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.

Painting, especially much better than words, allows oneself to express the various stages of thought, including the deeper levels, the underground stages of the mental process.

Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.

Actually, New York is great for playing around. I made a lot of studies for New York-a big vacuum cleaner lying on the Battery in Manhattan.

The sexual is part of everything, and it's highly formalized. I hadn't done figure for a long time. And I thought to myself, "Why not the erotic figure?"

Judson Church was a very important place because they believed in art. They also took care of drug addicts. Without the Judson, nothing could have happened.

The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.

All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

I knew I wasn't that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I'm better at drawing than I am at writing.

Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.

I just started to do my own thing for about a year and a half, and I worked in the evening selling phonograph records. Then I said to myself, "I'm afraid I have to go to New York after all."

Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.

I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.

I always knew America was all about guns. You go to the movies as a kid, everybody's got a gun.

My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.

In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me.

You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas.

I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.

I'm always careful to say that I changed everything I found.

I had, over the years, collected things, small things, as people do, and I had put them all together and showed them in what became a building in the form of the Geometric Mouse.

There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.

I started to draw buildings. I called them Proposed Colossal Monuments - they weren't for real, not for actual building. It was more a critique of architecture.

The thing about the ray gun is, you pick up anything you see on the street that's the shape of a gun.

I think the Freudian impulse is in everything, so I just accept it. I don't always believe what Freud is saying but it sounds like fun.

My work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.

'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.