Claes Oldenburg, Floor Cake

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:02] We’re once again at the Museum of Modern Art, in the room devoted to Pop Art. We’re standing in front of, sort of walking around, Claes Oldenburg’s “Floor Cake” from 1962. Both of us are smiling because it’s a hilarious work of art.

Dr. Beth Harris: [0:19] What’s really funny to me is that when we get up close, it really doesn’t look like cake at all. Actually, the giant cherry on top looks like a piece of poop.

Dr. Zucker: [0:28] Yeah, in fact the closer you get to it, the less appetizing it becomes. It’s this piece of canvas. It’s sort of disgusting and filthy, and it’s wonderfully not edible. We should just describe it first. It’s gigantic.

Dr. Harris: [0:41] Eight feet long.

Dr. Zucker: [0:42] A young woman who was just in the gallery just a moment ago was walking by and said, “I want to lay down and go to sleep on it,” because it actually kind of looks like a gigantic bed. It’s preposterous to have food this large, but it’s not just that it’s large, because in no way is it an accurate representation of a piece of cake.

[0:58] In fact, it’s wonderfully sloppy. The thing that I find incredibly endearing about it is the way it’s listing to the right. It’s this gigantic, soft series of pillows.

Dr. Harris: [1:09] Cake is a sloppy thing. It’s a messy, gooey, sensual experience, and the squishiness of this reminds me of digging into the frosting and having it smoosh down.

Dr. Zucker: [1:21] Right, but it’s not sensual. It is from a distance, and its association is, definitely. But as you said, when you get up close to it, it looks dry. It’s fabric. And it’s badly painted fabric. It’s got all of these competing associations that are completely at odds with each other.

Dr. Harris: [1:38] It has, to me, associations with over-sweetness, with saccharine-ness, of American culture burying itself in sweetness and mass-produced food.

Dr. Zucker: [1:48] It’s looking at what we as a culture would fetishize, right? This is 1962. It’s incredibly early. If you think about where Pop is at this moment, it’s just being really born in the US. Warhol is just creating his first soup cans. Lichtenstein is just at the early stages of his cartoons.

Dr. Harris: [2:03] So the pleasures of American consumer culture.

Dr. Zucker: [2:05] Absolutely.

Dr. Harris: [2:06] It undermines it, really undermines it.

Dr. Zucker: [2:08] And with a tremendous sense of humor as well, but you’re right, there’s a critical aspect here. Not only critical towards American culture, but about what art can and should be. There was that great quote — Lichtenstein said, “By the early ’60s, after Abstract Expressionism, you could take a rag that had been soaked in paint and hang it up on the wall, and it would be considered art. So we needed to find something that was still difficult.”

[2:30] It also raises questions about what representation is supposed to be and what representation is. If you think about representation as something that traditionally, at least coming out of the 19th century, is meant to refer to in some very direct ways. This is really sort of pushing against…I mean, it identifies what it is, but then in so many ways it’s at odds with what it’s meant to represent. It is still maintaining central identity as slice of cake, but when you look at it in any way other than sort of that broad identity, it refuses to be that.

Dr. Harris: [3:02] What it also reminds me of is the sort of heroic tradition of sculpture. It’s not this hard bronze or marble thing. It’s this smooshy thing.

Dr. Zucker: [3:10] Not only that, it’s not this idealized human body. It’s not this body of a god.

Dr. Harris: [3:14] Right, or something heroic.

Dr. Zucker: [3:16] Now we’re looking…

Dr. Harris: [3:15] It’s the exact opposite.

Dr. Zucker: [3:16] It’s hilarious.

Dr. Harris: [3:17] It’s the everyday, it’s the mundane, it’s the lowest.

Dr. Zucker: [3:20] It is the lowest brought up to this absurd height.

[3:23] [music]