Claes Oldenburg

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

“I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum.”

“If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.”

“Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.”

“My single-minded aim is to give existence to fantasy.”

“A life cycle can be imposed on an object. An object can be very energetic and active, and then it has a dying phase and a phase of decomposition.”

“My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.”

“I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary. 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 think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.”

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

“I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'”