Soft Toilet
1966

In 1961, Claes Oldenburg wrote a manifesto asserting his radical artistic position: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” Soft Toilet, a work that eschews the conventional properties of the art object, does not sit on anything—even a pedestal, like much sculpture—but rather hangs from a metal support. Oldenburg emerged as a Pop artist in the early 1960s with his so-called “soft” sculptures of quotidian objects, such as this work. Here he transforms the toilet—a factory-produced, rigid porcelain symbol of modern hygiene—into a hand-sewn, pliable object made of stuffed vinyl. Beginning, as he usually did, with drawings of the fixture, Oldenburg produced three separate iterations of the toilet: a hard version constructed out of cardboard, a soft model of sewn canvas (which he called the “ghost” version), and the vinyl Soft Toilet. Limp and drooping like an aging human body, Soft Toilet is endowed with a personality and sense of drama all its own.