Soft Viola

Both pathetic and comic, a gigantic viola made from soft, flexible materials slumps and sags under its own weight. The tuning pegs fall limply from the scroll, causing the strings to droop like loose spaghetti. The f-holes, tailpiece, and bow dangle from the body of the ersatz instrument towards the floor.

Claes Oldenburg, perhaps more than any other artist in the late twentieth century, redefined the terms of sculpture through enormous reproductions of commercial and quotidian objects that are at once whimsical, irreverent, and absurd. He moved to New York after college in 1956 and quickly became a prominent figure in Happenings and performance art, but his plaster sculptures shown in 1961 at The Store, a display in his studio that parodied American consumerism, launched him to fame as a leading artist associated with the emergent Pop movement. In 1957 Oldenburg (along with his wife, Patty Mucha) produced his first "soft" sculptures using canvas or vinyl filled with foam. Since then, soft sculptures became a staple of his practice, even as he turned to outdoor sculptures as his primary output.

A major late work by Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, the artist’s longtime collaborator and second wife, Soft Viola holds a striking relationship to the human body, through its outsized and lumpy form. Crafting a viola at this scale and in soft materials, the artists not only render the instrument unplayable but also offer a critique of sculpture’s typical reliance on solid forms and noble subjects.