Remembering Claes Oldenburg: Burger Edition
Sun's out, bun's out ☀️ 🍔 Plus food-art news from around the world
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Now that we’re at peak summer, it feels right to drop the next post in my series on food-artist extraordinaire, Claes Oldenburg. This time it’s all about THE BURGER. (You can find the first post, on his baked potatoes, here.)
Oldenburg’s Floor Burger is an icon. If you don’t know it already, you’ll be in love with it by the time you finish reading. And if you do know it, I think you’ll find at least one tidbit below that’ll make you love it even more. (Seriously, read to the end.)
Before we get to the burger content, you’ll find some quick links to food-art news that I’ve shared recently on Instagram — which is also a reminder to follow Weekly Special on the ‘gram for more frequent delights, such as ceramic donuts, IKEA bagel lamp hacks, and shrimp mesh bras, delivered to your Stories feed daily.
Let’s dig in!
The Variety Pack: Food-art news from around the globe
🥩 David Horvitz is making prints with Spam 🍞 Karon Davis released an open edition of multiples paying homage to the Black Panthers’ free lunch program 💦 Evan Kleiman interviewed LA’s famed water sommelier, who designed the water menu (RIP) at LACMA’s Ray and Stark Bar 🍎 Nic Dyer released a summer-ready print edition 🥒 Anastasia Inciardi installed a mini food print vending machine in Maine 🥬 Hyperallergic tells the story of a failed vegetable garden at Tehran’s contemporary art museum
🤩 Food-art exhibitions on view now: Feast, Standard Space, Sharon, CT ✦ Gathering, FiveMyles, Crown Heights ✦ Slavs and Tatars, Tanya Bonakdar, LA (and recently at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeitler, Berlin) ✦ Daniel Giordano, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA ✦ Food in New York, The Museum of the City of New York, NYC ✦ Michael Rakowitz, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK 😥 Just closed: Stephanie Temma Hier, Nino Mier, Brussels ✶ Sherrill Roland, Tanya Bonakdar, LA ✶ Lucia Hierro, Charlie James, LA ✦ Ben Sanders, Marta, LA ✦ Luisa Mera, Bill Brady, LA
This Week’s Special: A Tribute to Claes Oldenburg, One of the Greatest Food-Artists of All Time, Part 2 of Several
All works below are by Claes Oldenburg unless otherwise noted.
THE BURGER
Floor Burger — a 700-pound soft sculpture of a burger topped with a sliced pickle — is one of Claes Oldenburg’s most iconic works. Initially called Giant Hamburger, it debuted at his first uptown New York show in the fall of 1962, at the legendary Green Gallery run by dealer Richard Bellamy.
Like the baked potatoes chronicled here last year, the burger and its floor-bound mates Floor Cake and Floor Cone were all about bringing sculpture low, quite literally, while simultaneously elevating the stuff of everyday life. One of my favorite pieces of writing ever, in any genre, is Oldenburg’s 1961 manifesto “I Am For…,” where he argues fervently for the sublimity of the ordinary. At the end of a document pulsing with the heartbeat of Pop, he writes: “I am for US Government Inspected Art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, Ready-to-Eat art, Best-for-Less art, Ready-to-Cook art, Fully Cleaned art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art…”
A-fucking-men, Claes.
Reminiscing years later on the impact of his sole visit to the Green Gallery, sculptor Richard Serra (best known for his monumental works of curved steel) recalled his encounter with Oldenburg’s burger. “I thought it was unusual and the scale was absurd,” he said. “I thought it was coming out of a tradition that didn’t have anything to do with Dali’s soft watch, yet it was three dimensional and it was displaying spaces of volume and thumbing its nose at traditional sculpture. It was good as art and empowering because it gave you permission in a good way. I never thought that anybody, up until Oldenburg, used gravity as a force to build anything with.”1
The burger was sewn on a little Singer sewing machine that Oldenburg’s wife, Patty Mucha, had bought in order to make her own clothes. (The machine was also once stolen and recovered, a story Mucha tells in her 2015 oral history.) This wasn’t the first time the two had worked together professionally. Oldenburg and Mucha had performed together in Happenings staged at Oldenburg’s Store a year earlier, but on the question of whether they were true collaborators, Mucha was conflicted:
I was a slave. No. I was not. I’m always happy. All these young art historians tell me I’m a collaborator. Crazy. I was a fucking slave. I’m physical. I’m a doer. Everything you see here, I’ve done. Painted the walls. I do things, so I did things there too. We had to strip the place between every week, the change. I’d help make the props. I’d paint on the walls. I’d do everything. I’d stuff—he’d keep saying, “Poopy, stop reading stuff,” because we’d stuff with newspapers and I’d be reading.
No. I think if it’s a collaboration, maybe now it’s called a collaboration. But then, I didn’t feel like it was a collaboration. Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d thought it was at that point in my life. I don’t know. I loved him so much so it didn’t matter. We were having a good time. It was so much fun. He was so cute. I mean, he was so intelligent. He was so much fun. He had a good sense of humor. At that time he did; I think he still does.2
Mucha wasn’t the only neglected “woman behind the man” in the evolution of Oldenburg’s work. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has since become an international superstar, alleged that Oldenburg stole the idea of soft sculpture from her, having seen her breakthrough work Accumulation No. 1, a phallus-covered armchair, in a Green Gallery exhibition in early 1962 — a show that also included a papier-mâché suit jacket by Oldenburg.3
Thankfully Kusama has since gotten her due (and then some), but it was deeply painful for her at the time to see yet another white male artist receive greater fanfare for an innovation that wasn’t entirely his own — and one that developed a different psychological charge in the hands of a male sculptor, whose turn away from the traditional hardness and masculinity of sculpture would be seen, perhaps, as more radical than the gesture Kusama was making.
“I always say I’m not doing a hamburger, I’m doing a sculpture.”
The burger’s next chapter was equally fraught. In 1967, five years after the burger’s New York debut, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto announced plans to acquire the work for its permanent collection, reportedly for $2,000 CAD — about $13,000 USD today, which is a TOTAL steal.4 (That amount would mayyybeee buy you a modest Oldenburg drawing now, nothing approaching a big-ass soft sculpture.)
Taxpayers — at least a very vocal handful of them — were not pleased. Even though the museum took pains to inform the public that zero tax dollars were being used to buy the burger, naysayers, including a group of high school students, protested the purchase and the debased frivolity it represented. Though they intended it to be mocking, their giant ketchup bottle is the perfect Oldenburg homage:
But nobody can stay mad at a giant burger forever. The acquisition went through (kudos to AGO leadership of the time for staying the course!) and after the initial fanfare subsided, Floor Burger became a beloved fixture of the museum. If you want to feel the affection for yourself, read this chronicle of the burger’s 2013 conservation treatment, which readied the sculpture to return to New York for the first time in 50 years.
I have more to say about the burger, but if you’ve made it this far with me, thank you and please enjoy this spicy parting treat:
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, take a second to hit that heart icon — or, better yet, forward it to a friend who needs more meat joy in their lives. Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!
Erik La Prade, “‘A Constant Witness’: Richard Serra on Richard Bellamy,” artcritical, September 27, 2016.
Patty Mucha, “The Reminiscences of Patty Mucha,” by Alessandra Nicifero, Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project, August 12, 2015.
See Melissa Malamut, “Inside ‘Infinity Mirrors’ artist Yayoi Kusama’s tragic years in NYC,” NY Post, April 18, 2021.
Shiralee Hudson Hill, “AGO history: The controversial arrival of Claes Oldenburg's Floor Burger,” AGOInsider, October 22, 2012.
Wow amazing photos in here !
So glad Weekly Special's back in top form!