Claes Oldenburg in retrospect: old softies.

The chock-full, chronologically arranged Claes Oldenburg show at the Guggenheim Museum is called an "anthology" instead of a retrospective. Creative titling is an increasingly common tactic of curators, who are understandably weary of having their large but rationally limited one-person shows accused of lack of focus on the one hand and lack of compass on the other. (Artists don't care anymore what these shows are called, since the '80s phenomenon of the five-year "retrospective" denatured the very idea of career.) Yet "Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology," curated by the Guggenheim's Germano Celant and the first exhibition collaboration between the Guggenheim and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., poses the same question every retrospective is supposed both to propose and to answer, which is, What happens to an artist's art over time? In Oldenburg's case, the first answers are the ones we expected: it gets harder; it gets larger; it gets worse. Surprisingly, though, by ending the museum's spiral parade of Oldenburg's transformed mundane with the latest, bloodless pieces, the show makes it easier to see how the earlier ones are still as juicy as they are.

Why Oldenburg now? This is the other retrospective question, cynically answered always by a whisper: "the market." But it's worth asking seriously, because Oldenburg, along with his now-collaborator (and wife) Coosje van Bruggen, seems to have settled at a place not usually visited on the continuum of contemporary-art fame. Yes, he is "famous," undoubtedly part and parcel of Pop. Pop art, we know, changed not merely the way art apprehends popular culture and holds it for ransom; it also changed the way popular culture comprehends and processes art. Pop blew the image of art into the ken of the nonart world, usually in the form of reductive signs or Windows-like "icons": soup cans and Marilyns, Benday frames and LOVE stamps, even - for the art-world part of popular culture - a goat and tire. Click: silver Andy appears. Double click: young Rauschenberg. Where's the icon for Claes? You can roll your mouse up and down Wright's ramp without finding a single one.

Popwise, you'd expect some immediately recognizable large-scale icon to fill the lobby and announce the show, but what we see instead is the 12-foot painted-canvas and rope-trussed Houseball from 1985; the 1969 Monument for Yale University, a stylized tank with telescoping lipstick; and, drooping from an upper floor into the atrium, the busy beige Soft Shuttlecock, made this year specifically for this space and looking like a limp, bleached Icarus who got stuck on the way down. None of these three works adequately summarizes or stands for the Oldenburg oeuvre - Houseball is particularly self-contained and free of resonance, public or private. (The witty, Pop-ish Giant Pool Balls, 1967, were moved from the ground floor, where they did almost-icon duty, to the Tannhauser Room upstairs, where they wage mutually invigorating color war with the Legers.)

But the lipstick tank is powerful sculpture, attacking phallic warfare cosmetically by feminizing and deflating the big gun. "Why is the lipstick that funny orange and not bright red," I heard someone in the lobby say, someone too teenaged to know that a lipstick tank installed at Yale's Beinecke Plaza in 1969 would immediately be seen as a slap in Richard Nixon's face. Orange lipstick was popular then. Agent Orange was on everyone's lips, too, which is one reason the tank, for all its strength, is not a Pop icon. Most viewers would sooner forget a war than a can of chicken noodle.

History changes art. A commonplace? Perhaps, but rarely so well illustrated as via a stroll up the Oldenburg path. The first thing to notice and get out of the way is that all the early smallish objects, from the eight boxed, chewed-up Street Ray Guns of 1959 (which look as if ambient violence itself had acted on gutter trash and formed them), to the plaster-soaked muslin 7-Up signs and sausages of the 1961-62 East 2rid Street "Store," to the sewn and stuffed shirts, Good Humors, and pay telephones of the mid '60s, seem simultaneously too close together and too far apart, constrained and linearized by the Guggenheim bays. Oldenburg's "Store," for example, was an 80-by-10-foot storefront room with a rotating stock, so its movable feasts were meant to be site-specific - more needful of their certain context than is much of the later, colossal, aggressively site-unspecific public sculpture.

The immediate task and pleasure of the walk up is one of recognition. The pies in pastry cases, the forlorn chops, the awkwardly stiffened clothes, have been made both less and more sensuous by the additions from the expressive painter's hand, which cover them up with art's solidifying scrim. Of course there is no real cake buried within the enamel and plaster, but once appetite is evoked, and it is, it will float and fasten onto anything so cunningly displayed, hoping that what the child once wanted so badly is still underneath.

Then come softness and changes of scale, moves in which some part of easy identification is lost. I saw puzzled viewers read the wall cards in order to identify the Soft Toilet of 1966 or the absurdly moving Soft Manhattan #1 (Postal Zones) of the same year, which hangs on the wall like a side of urban beef. Many stop to gaze at two early soft masterpieces, Floor Cake and Floor Cone, both 1962, partly because the works fall out dropsically from the bay onto the floor and block the viewer's way, but also because it isn't immediately clear what they "are." Yes, the color cues of layer cake are there, and there's even a dollop of chocolate frosting in the shape of a Hershey Kiss on the top. So why does this grace note look like . . . a turd? Why indeed is the whole slice so spiteful, the lime-and-yellow cone so resistant and threatening?

The soft stuffed works, especially when simplest in form but most anomalous in scale, evoke discomfort the way gravity evokes shape. Yes, there are pendulous scrota and sagging female breasts to be found if fleshly resemblances are sought, but it's the fact that consumer objects - ultimately, art objects! - can so proudly demonstrate physical mortality that makes the attracted viewer queasy. Manufactured objects have stolen our humanity: now they'll filch our old age.

These works succeed at this balancing act because the hand of the maker is on them. Each feels - because each was - intensely hand-constructed. The cake and cone are dirty with paint, rife with a rash of Abstract Expressionism on their skins. The handmade shiny vinyl Soft Switches, 1964, and Soft Juicit, 1965, on the other hand, resist the '50s painter but call to the beanbag maker, the go-go bottler: here we are, household moppets of the '60s. That's what the work said then, in dialogue with the hip boutique. The medium, vinyl, was the message.

What message, what connotation, does shiny vinyl reflect now? It's vintage, not the same. And what happens when the hand of the maker disappears completely and medium currency vanishes? The object petrifies, and its life drains. The 1971 Vacuum Cleaner, a generic, uninflected, Donald Judd-ified simplification of the familiar upright (a trick with a working lightbulb in its base), has no art suction whatsoever. It is the first of many one-joke objects, some fearfully large, to follow. The walk through to the top level is much faster than expected.

Oldenburg was prescient about many things, finding a way, before the historical need to do so was obvious, of adding, rather than removing, humane expressiveness to representations of the mass-culture object. He also understood as early as 1963 how "design" would attack art, and how art could fight back. When as a young man I first viewed the 1963 Bedroom Ensemble, I realized, for the first time, that everything I needed to know about the future of art was contained in this thrilling hermetic nightmare. I recognized the normal, department-store contemporaneity of everything: the sleek bed with two white-vinyl pillows at the head and two fake-zebra pillows at the foot, the aqua Formica end-tables and dresser, the swirling-patterned cylinder lamps, the ottoman sofa holding the flat black-vinyl bag - Holly Solomon's? - in anticipation of a swinging evening, and, especially, the pictures on the wall, multiples of black-and-white wallpaper squiggles.

Of course, every painstakingly hand-fashioned object was actually abnormal: rectangular forms were turned into rhomboids, details were erased and shapes generalized into maquettes so that the room could "mean." This suite-prison was the revenge the '60s would take on every hysterical bedroom in every Douglas Sirk '50s soaper. (Oldenburg says the inspiration was a Malibu motel in which each room had a different fake-fur motif.) And we youthful contemporaries, open-mouthed at the idea that art could be this, also considered how we could make our own rooms look like that.

The Bedroom Ensemble now looks like an involuntary friend. That particular Formica pattern is out of production, so the 1995 re-creation in this show relies on a painted imitation. Imitation of Formica. Pop proposals such as this suite ultimately destabilized the terms "art" and "design," registering the modulations forced on each one at the hands of the other: Duchamp looks down, bemused. The brilliant bedroom still has the force to demand attention and even delight because the bout between "design" and "art" still rages, but at this time, Oldenburg notwithstanding, everyone pretty much knows that the decision can only be a draw.

"Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology," which has shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, is at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum until 21 January 1996 and will later travel to the Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, and the Hayward Gallery, London.