Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

effect, dematerialized theiroriginal everyday versionsby spotlighting the aspectof their form. He ignoredthe uses and materials ofthe baseball mitts, threewayplugs, clothespins, andpay phones he pulled out oftheir everyday contexts andinstructed viewers to observethem purely as forms.“I’d like to turn people onto the fact that the world isform, not just function andmoney,” Oldenburg said.“Think of the fun it wouldbe to sit on your porch andlook at the world as form.”Through this almost mysticalapproach to form, Oldenburgattempted to wakeup viewers to the subtle butpowerful influence of theeveryday functional formsaround them and continuedin a new way an olderAmerican artistic dialogueon the visual relationshipbetween form and matter,idea and substance.Figure 24. Claes Oldenburg. Soft Toilet. 1966. Vinylfilled with kapok painted with liquitex. WhitneyMuseum of American Art, New YorkMinimalismI will conclude with a short discussion of mini-malism, a style that didoccur in the flat, monochrome paintings of Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, RobertRyman, and Agnes Martin, but was primarily centered on sculpture. Almostthe opposite of the flamboyance of pop art, minimalism first emerged in theone-person shows of Donald Judd and Robert Morris in 1963, although noneof the somewhat different artists involved liked the label minimalism. Minimalistsculpture consisted of elementary geometric volumes or symmetricaland serial sequences of modular geometric volumes placed directly on the143