Image/Text/Sound: The Role of Intermediality and Poeticity in Claes Oldenburg

Swedish-American Pop artist Claes Oldenburg wrote volumes of imagist, expressionist, surrealist, and experimental poetry between 1956 and 1963. This paper closely examines his concrete poetry from 1959-1962 for its synergetic reliance on both poetic and pictorial strategies. Indeterminacy, invented orthography, lack of syntax, horizontal minimalism, permutation, indentation, syllabic sound structure, typewriting, or dripping ink in “Detest the Substitute of Language, “Wat I Makz is Konkrete Tawts,” “Man Yells,” “atta,” and “Moonpop” attest to the intermedial and transmedial qualities and effects of his understudied poetry. Recent literature on intermediality by Liliane Louvel, Jens Schröter, Irina Rajewski, and others is consulted to examine the nature of the inter-art dialogue between image, text, and sound. A rivalry between the arts (and between media) has given way to a new model of intermedial analogy in American postwar art based on a logic of the “as if”: what happens when painting/sculpture becomes writing and writing becomes painting/sculpture? How can we grasp and define this space of the “in-between?”