Claes Oldenburg's Life and Creation - Literature review Example

Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden to a Swedish diplomat who was based in New York and he attended the Latin School ofChicago and afterwards went to Yale University where from 1946 to 1950, he studied literature and art history. He then returned to Chicago where he took classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago later, after moving to New York, he met and was influenced by such artists as Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow. Starting 1969 to 1977, Oldenburg was in a relationship with the artist and sculptor, Hannah Wilke with whom he shared several studios and travelled together with and in 1977, he married Coosje Van Bruggen (Scholarstic Art, 4 -5). Oldenburg’s first show was at the Judson Gallery of New York in 1959 and it included metaphorical drawings and papier - mache sculptures and in 1966, he was credited with an exhibition of his work at the Moderna Museet; in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among several others. Oldenburg won the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1989, in 2000, he was awarded the National medal of Arts, and he has also received honorary degrees from several universities in the United States and in Europe. His sculpture, named the Typewriter sculpted in 1976, and was one among an edition of three was sold was sold for $2.2 million at Christie’s New York in 2009. Oldenburg’s creativity can be traced to his childhood when he was often left to entertain himself with his father’s office machinery. He has always been fascinated by scale, and during the 1960s, he began enlarging everyday items, often imagining them the size of public monuments (Shannon, 136 – 161). Oldenburg’s art reflects the popular culture of the 1960s when he and his associates began to use images associated with popular culture in their work. In the early 1960s, Oldenburg helped to usher in the Pop Art revolution by using materials like burlap and canvas to create sandwiches and ice cream cones the size of furniture and everywhere he traveled, he replaced existing monuments with those of his own design. His non-heroic subjects challenged traditional concepts of public sculpture and the artist has envisioned a huge pair of scissors on the site of the Washington Monument, a giant fan to replace the Statue of Liberty, and two enormous toilet-tank floats installed on a river in the city of London. His work has concentrated more on environmental awareness and conservation. Oldenburgs installation The Street, exhibited twice in Greenwich Village in 1960, used banal, trash like materials to depict pedestrians, cars, street signs, and other elements of a New York City streetscape and as it turns out, the food sculptures are autobiographical. "The key to my work is that its about my experience," said Mr. Oldenburg, 83, in an interview in Vienna earlier in the year, "If I ate BLTs, which I did, I would sooner or later want to create them" (Marcus). Taking as his muse forms from everyday life-toilets, musical instruments, food, and appliances, Oldenburg transforms the small and insignificant into the huge and monumental and because monuments are traditionally in service of the ruling order, Oldenburg’s whimsical works subvert authority in their elevation of the mundane. The visual equivalent of a conspiratorial elbow in the ribs, it is very viewer friendly work since his work diverts the attention of its viewers from the more serious aspects of life to more domestic ones considering his use of everyday objects as models for his work. To grasp what Claes Oldenburgs art says today requires examining what it said to people in the early days of the Pop movement. Art like Oldenburgs tells people that Pops elimination of the boundaries between art and reality, high and low culture, upper and lower class, helped to usher in a cultural disaster. Over forty years ago, Oldenburgs sculptures reflected the high hopes and sunny esprit of the early sixties. In the early twentieth century, however, they speak of unemployment and the political impotence of the average American.  Annotation of Sources "Claes Oldenburg: Objects into Art." Scholastic Art -Article This is an anonymous article in the Journal Scholastic Art which profiles the artist Claes Oldenburg. It gives a complete biography of the artist’s life, his inspirations, as well as his opinion of his own work. Furthermore, it deals with the influences that affected the artist’s work and how this work has affected contemporary art. This article has been of great help in getting to determine how the work of Claes Oldenburg has helped in the revolution of the popular culture especially in the 1960s. The biography of this artist has been clearly stated in this article and it has enabled us to understand what early influences put him on the path to becoming an artist. It is an interesting article to read considering that it is well written and all the points that the author wants to pass on have been written in good order. "REVIEW --- Icons: Supersizing it with Claes Oldenburg"-Article by Marcus, J. S. This article discusses how in the early 1960s, the American artist Claes Oldenburg helped to shepherd in the Pop Art revolution by using materials like burlap and canvas to craft sandwiches and ice cream cones the size of furniture, and is based on a recent interview of Claes Oldenburg and it looks at his opinion of his own work. This article shows exactly what Oldenburg thinks of his work as well as what his planned future projects are. It reveals the inspirations behind his works and why he makes the sculptures. It discusses how Oldenburg’s work from the sixties went on a tour of the United States as well as his connections with his alma mater, Yale University. "Claes Oldenburgs the Street and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960."-Article by Joshua Shannon This article discusses how the work of Claes Oldenburg has helped to transform the streets of New York through his unusual sculptures. It further looks into the history of Oldenburg’s work from the very beginnings to the contemporary period. The work of Oldenburg displays his support for environmental conservation through his use of everyday discarded material to make his sculptures. It can be said that it is his way of encouraging people to recycle those items that they throw away because it is these items which end up polluting the environment. The large displays of his work that he creates might be considered his way of making this point using his work. Works Cited "Claes Oldenburg: Objects into Art." Scholastic Art 2002: 4-5. ProQuest Research Library; ProQuest Research Library. Web. 28 Aug. 2012. Marcus, J. S. "REVIEW --- Icons: Supersizing it with Claes Oldenburg." Wall Street Journal: 14. Feb 18 2012. ABI/INFORM Global; ABI/INFORM Global; The Advocate (Stamford); Baltimore Sun; Business Dateline; Greenwich Time; Hartford Courant; Los Angeles Times; Morning Call; National Newspapers Core; Newsday; Orlando Sentinel; ProQuest Newsstand; ProQuest(TRUNCATED). Web. 28 Aug. 2012. Shannon, Joshua A. "Claes Oldenburgs the Street and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960." The Art Bulletin 86.1 (2004): 136-61. ProQuest Research Library; ProQuest Research Library. Web. 28 Aug. 2012. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ Claes Oldenburg: Objects into art Author: Anonymous. Publication info: Scholastic Art 32. 5 (Mar 2002): 4-5. ProQuest document link Abstract: For many years, American sculptor Claes Oldenburg has been transforming ordinary items, making viewers see them with fresh eyes. In Oldenburgs world, the useful objects one counts on--plumbing, telephones, light switches--have become unreliable, even a little frightening. Oldenburg is profiled. Full Text: Headnote "I LIKE TO TAKE AN OBJECT AND COMPLETELY DEPRIVE IT OF ITS FUNCTION, SO AS TO USE IT ONLY AS A MOTIVE FOR CREATING ART." For many years, American sculptor Claes Oldenburg has been transforming ordinary items, making us see them with fresh eyes. He has bent, inflated, melted, and enlarged familiar objects until they have become almost unrecognizable. In Oldenburgs world, the useful objects we count on-plumbing, telephones, light switches-have become unreliable, even a little frightening. Oldenburgs creativity can be traced back to his childhood. The son of a Swedish diplomat, the artist was born in Sweden in 1929. As a childhood game, Oldenburg created an entire city complete with maps, newspapers, and magazines. He was also often left to entertain himself with his fathers office machinery-the typewriters, erasers, and rubber stamps that have appeared in so many of his sculptures. The family moved to the United States, and Oldenburg went to school in Chicago. He attended Yale, went to art school, then moved to New York in 1956. There he experimented with performance art which the artist felt "broke down barriers between the arts, becoming something close to an actual experience." During the late 1950s, a group known as Pop artists, which included Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Oldenburg began to use images associated with popular culture in their work. In 1961, Oldenburg opened his own "store", filling it with rough plaster, garishly painted consumer items and fast food such as Two Cheeseburgers with Everything (below). The artist sold these items right from his store. Later, he took hard, rigid items like kitchen and bathroom fixtures and made his own soft collapsible versions. Oldenburg has always been fascinated by scale. During the 1960s, he began enlarging everyday items, imagining them the size of public monuments. Everywhere he traveled, he replaced existing monuments with those of his own design. His non-heroic subjects challenged traditional concepts of public sculpture. The artist has envisioned a huge pair of scissors on the site of the Washington Monument, a giant fan to replace the Statue of Liberty, and two enormous toilet-tank floats installed on a river in the city of London. These early monuments may have been fantastic, but their design always had something to do with their location. The Thames (Terns), a river that flows through London, is affected by the rise and fall of its tides. If the tides are not controlled, the city could flood. Pollution is also a factor. The floats that regulate a toilets water level in Oldenburgs Proposed Colossal Monument for Thames River (below), not only make a social comment, but solve both problems. Sometimes Oldenburgs designs added to a citys difficulties, as in Proposed Colossal Monument for Park Avenue, New York (right). But since the streets of New York City are so congested, who would notice a mammoth ice-cream pop that fills an intersection? While people waited, they could enjoy the melting ice cream. And if they couldnt wait, they could pass through the gigantic bite taken out of the comer. In 1976 Oldenburg joined forces with author and artist Coosje van Bruggen. Married in 1977, the artists are equal partners in the creation of huge public sculptures. Subject: Personal profiles; Visual artists; Sculpture People: Oldenburg, Claes Publication title: Scholastic Art Volume: 32 Issue: 5 Pages: 4-5 Number of pages: 2 Publication year: 2002 Publication date: Mar 2002 Year: 2002 Publisher: Scholastic Inc. Place of publication: New York Country of publication: United States Journal subject: Art, Education, Humanities: Comprehensive Works ISSN: 1060832X Source type: Magazines Language of publication: English Document type: Feature ProQuest document ID: 211169343 Document URL: http://0-search.proquest.com.alice.dvc.edu/docview/211169343?accountid=38376 Copyright: Copyright Scholastic Inc. Mar 2002 Last updated: 2010-06-08 Database: ProQuest Research Library: Business; ProQuest Research Library: Health&Medicine; ProQuest Research Library: History; ProQuest Research Library: Literature&Language; ProQuest Research Library: Science&Technology; ProQuest Research Library: Social Sciences; ProQuest Research Library: The Arts; _______________________________________________________________ Bottom of Form ______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Report Information from ProQuest REVIEW --- Icons: Supersizing It With Claes Oldenburg Author: Marcus, J S. Publication info: Wall Street Journal [New York, N.Y] 18 Feb 2012: C.14. Abstract: In the early 1960s, the Swedish-born American artist Claes Oldenburg helped to usher in the Pop Art revolution by using materials like burlap and canvas to create sandwiches and ice cream cones the size of furniture. Full Text: In the early 1960s, the Swedish-born American artist Claes Oldenburg helped to usher in the Pop Art revolution by using materials like burlap and canvas to create sandwiches and ice cream cones the size of furniture. As it turns out, the food sculptures are autobiographical. "The key to my work is that its about my experience," said Mr. Oldenburg, 83, in an interview in Vienna last month. "If I ate BLTs, which I did, I would sooner or later want to create them." The full range of his work from the 1960s -- complete with giant cheeseburgers, ketchup-topped fries, a pastry case and a cash register -- is on view in a new exhibition at Mumok, Viennas museum of modern art, and is headed for New York and Minneapolis in 2013. Among the 250 works, theres a fragile puppetlike cardboard-and-wood piece called "Mug," created in 1960 and part of a collection in Cologne, Germany. "Normally you cant transport these works," said Mumoks director Karola Kraus. The son of a Swedish diplomat, Mr. Oldenburg grew up in Chicago and attended Yale University. In the mid-1960s, he started to conceive of familiar objects towering over cities, drawing a banana soaring above New York ("Proposed Colossal Monument for 42nd Street: Banana"), or an ensemble of giant red lipsticks in Londons Piccadilly Circus. "My work is a transformation of my surroundings," he says. In the late 1960s, he managed to transform his alma mater a little, when he erected a controversial 24-foot lipstick sculpture at Yale. The red lipstick, mounted on steel caterpillar tracks, seemed to comment on both the Vietnam War and the male-only makeup of Yale Colleges student body. Mr. Oldenburg sees the work as a breakthrough, calling it "my first feasible monument." The Vienna show displays a small model of the piece and a film documenting its construction. Mr. Oldenburg, who lives in New York, spent much of his later career creating huge public art projects with his wife, curator and critic Coosje van Bruggen, who died of cancer in 2009. Among his best known is the 45-foot-high clothespin sculpture (1976) that stands in the plaza of Philadelphias Centre Square complex. The new show reveals the origins and inspiration for these later works. Mr. Oldenburg thinks of his public art as "a step into architecture" and always insisted on permanence -- his public art was meant to last, like a building. In recent decades, though, public art has changed. Starting in the mid-1990s with Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, a new, sculptural style of architecture has given large-scale public art a run for its money. Projects like the Guggenheim have become "the monuments of their cities," says Danish-born artist Michael Elmgreen. These days, cities are less likely to commission something for permanent show. Mr. Elmgreen and his partner Ingar Dragset have created a giant child on a rocking horse for Londons Trafalgar Square; some 15 months after Thursdays unveiling, it will come down to make way for something else. Mr. Elmgreen says that regularly bringing in new works makes the art on view "relevant all the time." "Claes Oldenburg: The 60s" runs through May 28. After Vienna, versions of the show will travel to Cologne, Germany and Bilbao, before moving to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in April 2013 and to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis that September. Credit: By J.S. Marcus Subject: Sculpture; Art exhibits; Visual artists Location: Vienna Austria People: Oldenburg, Claes Publication title: Wall Street Journal Pages: C.14 Publication year: 2012 Publication date: Feb 18, 2012 Year: 2012 Publisher: Dow Jones&Company Inc Place of publication: New York, N.Y. Country of publication: United States Journal subject: Business And Economics--Banking And Finance ISSN: 00999660 Source type: Newspapers Language of publication: English Document type: Feature ProQuest document ID: 922011684 Document URL: http://0-search.proquest.com.alice.dvc.edu/docview/922011684?accountid=38376 Copyright: (c) 2012 Dow Jones&Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. Last updated: 2012-06-29 Database: National Newspapers Core _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ Report Information from ProQuest Claes Oldenburgs The Street and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960 Author: Shannon, Joshua A. Publication info: The Art Bulletin 86. 1 (Mar 2004): 136-161. ProQuest document link Abstract: Claes Oldenburgs installation The Street--exhibited twice in Greenwich Village in 1960--used banal, trashlike materials to depict pedestrians, cars, street signs, and other elements of a New York City streetscape. Shannon seeks to understand Oldenburgs odd streetscape as a cogitation on a contemporary crisis over the shape and nature of New York City. In particular, he also considers The Street as a means of thinking about the possibilities for and limitations on the city, in view of the giant, and highly controversial, program of modernist urban renewal then reshaping much of New York. Full Text: Pedestrians walking down Thompson Street off Greenwich Villages Washington Square Park in the winter of 1960 were beckoned, by means of a messily painted sign and mural, into the basement of the Judson Church House (Fig. 1). The building served as the center for the social programs of the progressive Judson Memorial Church, which had presided over the south side of the square for more than a century (Figs. 2, 3). In the late 1950s, the basement of the church house had been converted into living and studio space for a handful of the neighborhoods many artists, and by the beginning of 1960, it had become the Judson Gallery, a public venue for the new urban and quotidian art working to counter the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism. Those curious enough to descend the stairs that winter found themselves in an exhibition called Ray Gun. The first room had been turned into an environment called The Street by Claes Oldenburg, a thirty-year-old neighborhood artist.1 The Street greeted the visitor with a visual cacophony of cardboard, paper, newsprint, wood fragments, and black paint (Figs. 4-7). Scraps of trash blanketed the floor from corner to corner, strips of newspaper hung from the light fixture, and the walls were covered with a brown and sooty-looking cardboard relief. A few freestanding sculptures shared the viewers space in the middle of the scrap-strewn floor. The whole work, which Oldenburg described as a three-dimensional mural, bore marks of black paint, in places seeming only to give the installation a sullied look, but in others forming letters of the alphabet, denning scorchedlooking contours, and identifying facial features.2 In fact, the careful tearing and cutting of the cardboard, the nailing together of a broad variety of braces and sculptural supports, and the particular-if untidy-application of paint all worked, in their clumsy way, to make a legible representation of an urban environment. After spending some time looking closely, viewers would have been able to make out at least nine major human figures and four small automobiles, among other forms. The surviving exhibition photographs, flash-bleached as they are, allow a fairly thorough reconstruction of the installation. Entering the room and facing right, the visitor would have confronted a bearded man in a top hat, slumping behind a shoe-shine stand (Fig. 4, lower right). At the shoe-shine mans shoulder was a shopwindow displaying indefinite goods and a small, illegible sign.3 Further to the left, but along the same wall, there stood another figure, perhaps holding a gun in outstretched arms (Fig. 5, right). As the viewer turned left-negotiating the floors muck of discarded shoes, empty bottles, and scraps of wood and wire-she would have approached a huge silhouetted face looming in the corner, its hair formed of scrawled-out words (Fig. 5, right). Her passage would have been obstructed, however, by two sculptures standing on the floor of the installation: a striding figure and, beside it, a prominent traffic barricade. Nevertheless, our viewer would have seen a few small forms floating in the undefined pictorial space on the far wall, some describing cars and figures (one, it seems, with a gun), some more ambiguous. Turning left again to face back toward the entrance, the viewer would have seen four major figures populating the remaining walls. Two of these (Fig. 6), although talking, were facing away from each other and rendered quite differently-one in round bulges of paper, the other in angular swaths of cardboard. The last two, on the wall by the entryway, had indistinct bodies, which seemed to merge together (Fig. 7). Just beside these were another automobile and, below that, a large illegible form, painted with the contours and indistinct splotches that ran across the entire installation.4 Most of the historical and critical literature on The Street has focused on its innovative use of banal materials or its dark representation of urban suffering.5 This essay, by contrast, seeks to understand Oldenburgs odd streetscape as a cogitation on a contemporary crisis over the shape and nature of New York City. In particular, it considers The Street as a means of thinking about the possibilities for and limitations on the city, in view of the giant, and highly controversial, program of modernist urban renewal then reshaping much of New York. The essay argues that The Street offered a reflection specifically on renewals central effort-through the promotion of order, negotiability, and legibility-to render a newly abstracted city.6 This reflection was chiefly a negative one, insisting on the obdurate materiality of the city, but it was also far from single-minded. A proper understanding of The Street will require us to consider the work in both of its installations (Oldenburg installed a rather different version of the work at the Reuben Gallery in May 1960), as well as in its various contexts; first of all, it will involve us in a recovery of the earliest clamorous death throes of New Yorks classic period of urban renewal. Modernist Renewal and New York City From at least the 1980s, American urban planning had been shaped by the hegemonic European modernism of Le Corbusier. In his books The City of Tomorrow and When the Cathedrals Were White, Le Corbusier had proposed the wholesale destruction of chaotic, dirty old cities such as Paris and New YorkJ In their place would rise gleaming, new cities of uniform towers, surrounded by parks and connected by ribbons of high-speed automobile expressways (Fig. 8). This sort of urban planning became a kind of official program among Europes leading architects when, in 1933, the Congres Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM) adopted the Athens Charter, a manifesto for the new city. Meanwhile, in the United States, the means of engineering the new expressways were being worked out by the German immigrant Fritz Malcher, whose 1935 book The Steadyflow Traffic System proposed soft curves, dedicated turn lanes, median strips, and separated parking areas in order to promote the ceaseless, signal-free flow of cars across cities.8 His book, which began by excluding any discussion of sidewalks, formed the foundation of American urban traffic engineering. The tower-in-the-park program and the expressway program became the two chief elements of modernist urban planning. Although the sheer scale of Le Corbusiers schemes made them virtually impossible to adopt completely, at midcentury many governments found ways to incorporate aspects of the Athens Charter in their urban plans. Brasilia is the ultimate example of this kind of planning, but it was constructed from scratch. If existing cities were going to adopt the modernist model, they needed laws of eminent domain allowing them to dynamite existing blocks to make way for the new towers and greenery.9 In the United States, such a possibility was opened by Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, which appropriated $1 billion to initiate a national program of urban renewal, and which allowed governments, for the first time, to seize private property in order to offer it, below cost, to private developers.10 (The developers, who stood to profit neatly when areas were declared blighted, were often under no obligation to provide affordable housing in their new buildings.) In New York City alone, $267 million had been spent on Title I housing reconstruction by 1957, twice as much as in all other American cities combined.11 This private development was accompanied by the public projects of the New York City Housing Authority, which by 1960 had completed fully a third of the multiple-dwelling construction in the city since World War II-virtually all of it by razing old brick tenements in order to put up neo-Corbusian towers.12 Meanwhile, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 established the interstate system, guaranteeing federal money to cover 90 percent of the cost of its construction, and initially committing $25 billion. Despite confusion at the highest levels of government about whether the interstates were meant to continue within city limits at all, 7,000 miles of urban highways were planned as part of the system, an amount that would more than quadruple total city highway mileage.13 Greater New Yorks urban highway boom was particularly robust, with 899 miles existing or under construction by 1964, twice as many as in the runner-up, metropolitan Los Angeles.14 A plan adopted in 1951 called for the easing of street traffic as well, and by 1960, Manhattan had converted nearly all of its avenues to one-way flow.15 Over roughly the same period, the borough narrowed sidewalks on over 450 of its streets.16 At the head of virtually all of New Yorks rebuilding efforts was Robert Moses, who simultaneously held jobs as city planning commissioner, chairman of the Mayors Committee on Slum Clearance, and commissioner of parks, among other positions. As director of the extremely lucrative and autonomous Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Moses bullied governors and mayors-from the 1930s to the mid1960s-into letting him realize his plans for New York City and its suburbs. His biographer estimates that, counting only the projects executed directly under his authority, Moses built public works costing $26 billion and displacing a stunning half million people.17 He oversaw the construction of the Long Island, Gowanus, Brooklyn-Queens, and Major Deegan Expressways, among many others, as well as the erection of towering housing projects from Brooklyn to the Bronx. The realization of a new vision of the city through renewal and highway construction was accompanied by subtler methods of controlling urban chaos. The Big Sweep, an annual street-cleaning campaign begun in 1956, formed one front in the battle for a more ordered city. The 1959 campaign was to be "longer and more intense than ever before," with "very rigid enforcement" imposed throughout the spring, summer, and fall.18 A twenty-foot-tall trash-basket sign was displayed that year in Times Square, Herald Square, and Harlem, and in the fall, the Sanitation Department made the largest purchase of new bins in its history, nearly doubling the number on the streets.19 By one measure, sidewalks in New York were nearly seven times cleaner in 1959 than they had been just four years earlier.20 At the same time, New York City also launched a major antijaywalking campaign to promote traffic flow, safety, and order. The city had experimented with an antijaywalking law briefly in 1929, but after its hasty withdrawal, there were no regulations of pedestrian behavior until the summer of 1958, when special signals (the now ubiquitous "Walk-Dont Walk" lights) were introduced at many intersections. New Yorkers were then prohibited from crossing against these lights and from otherwise interfering with the flow of traffic; by the end of that year, the citys police had issued nearly 20,000 citations to pedestrians.21 Mayor Robert F. Wagner declared June 1959 Pedestrian Safety Month and launched a public awareness campaign that included radio and newspaper ads, stickers on taxis and buses, and 100,000 antijaywalking posters hung on the citys light posts.22 For decades, Moses and the citys renewal campaign enjoyed the approbation of both the press and the public-at least, the powerful, white public that imagined itself benefiting from the changes. Indeed, many officials in New York and around the world shared the commissioners vision of the city. However, in the late 1950s, the fortunes of renewal in New York began to change. In 1956, a group of well-connected citizens defeated Mosess plans for a new parking lot in Central Park. In 1958 The Exploding Metropolis-a group of essays by authors irate about renewal, sprawl, and urban expressways-appeared in mass-market format, echoing arguments that had been available in publications from Architectural Forum to the New Yorker ana Fortune for several years.23 By the spring of 1959, Congressman John Lindsay had introduced federal legislation to diminish the secrecy under which Title I renewal was planned, and in the summer, the New York Times ran a series accusing the Mayors Committee on Slum Clearance (which Moses chaired) of corruption. The Times reported conflicts of interest on the committee, unfair bidding processes, and profit-motivated delays in development.24 Even excepting scandal, however, arguments against renewal were becoming vociferous. In one contribution to The Exploding Metropolis, for example, Jane Jacobs-soon to be famous for her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities-argued that cities needed old buildings and small blocks in order to flourish. In Jacobss view, good planning required "leaving room for the incongruous, or the vulgar, or the strange."25 She was direct in naming the linchpin of a successful city: The best place to look at first is the street. One had better look quickly, too; not only are the projects making away with the noisy automobile traffic of the street, they are making away with the street itself. In its stead will be open spaces with long vistas and lots and lots of elbowroom.26 William H. Whyte called special attention to this point in his introduction to the anthology: "in laying out the superblocks of the huge urban redevelopment projects ["many of the people who are redesigning the city"] banish the most wonderful of city features-the street. . . ."27 Indeed, the elimination of the street was, in the words of one major proponent of modernist planning, the "first necessity" of future cities.28 The street, a narrow space used for many purposes, made the city a place of chaos. In its stead, a system of parks and expressways would guarantee order and steady flow in the urban fabric. This modernist hostility toward complex, mixed-use urban space was perhaps nowhere mure apparent in 1960 than on Thompson Street, just, south of Washington Square Park, in New York Citys Greenwich Village. Greenwich Village For over a century and a half, Washington Square Park, in addition to being the unofficial front yard of the judson Church, had served as the heart of Greenwich Village. Its famous plaxas provided "the refuge, the summer vacation place of those who cannot afford to leave the citys heat.. .. a meeting place for the elderly men who enjoy their chess and checkers under the great tree[, and a]bovc all... the childrens playground."29 Since 1900, a modicum of trafficprimarily the occasional bus-had run across the otherwise tranquil square. During the midcentury renewal and roadway boom, however, the parks open space attracted the eye of civic planners, including Moses, who wanted to ease the flow of down town traffic. In 1946 and again in 1952, plans to build a more substantial thoroughfare across the park had been pushed, but they were delayed by local opposition. In 1958, however, the Board of Estimate and the City Planning Commission both preliminarily approved a proposal to extend Fifth Avenue-which terminated at the north end of the park-across the square, joining it with an existing street to be widened and renamed Fifth Avenue South (Fig. 9). Residents, neighborhood groups, and architectural critics were outraged, fearing the loss of the square. Some believed that Moses, who had advocated a roadway broader than the one approved, had covert plans to use the park as part of a major conduit for carrying traffic right through Manhattan and across to New Jersey.^ Lewis Mumford called the road an "almost classic example of bad city planning," and the Judsons own Rev. Howard Moody spoke out against it, in testimony and in public letters to both Mayor Wagner and Tammany boss Carmine De Sapio.31 Although the roadway seemed inevitable, two rallies, a torrent of published letters and opinions, and a petition of 30,000 signatures also appeared to protest the plan. Finally, at a dramatic Board of Estimate hearing, the mayor "brought down the house" when, in consideration of the objections, he canceled his plans to travel to Albany that evening and declared, "It is much more important to me to be here."32 The board that night voted to delay a final decision, and when it met again in late October, it ordered a temporary closing of even the small existing road in Washington Square.33 The study was a success: in the spring of 1959, the board voted to close the park permanently to all traffic.34 Villagers held a celebration that June, burning a mock car in effigy.35 During the long battle, the press had often called the project an expressway, while Moses objected that it was merely "a wide avenue."30 Whatever it was, it was certainly not a street. Indeed, the very point of the project had been to upgrade the course of traffic in the neighborhood, mitigating the complexity and obstructions caused by the diverse uses of true streets. Had the project gone ahead, circulation in the area would have been denned not by multiuse public spaces fringed with sidewalks and old facades, but rather by a constant flow of automobiles through a freshly widened roadway. The symbolic outcome of the Washington Square battle was a triumph for traditional paved public space over efficiency of travel. "Progress" was stopped, and to this day the square blocks and fractures the flow of traffic at the (bot of Fifth Avenue.37 Despite their victory over the Washington Square roadway, opponents of modernist renewal in Greenwich Village were not so fortunate in other respects. A slum-clearance construction project that the roadway had been intended to support, for example, went ahead. Built one block from the judson Gallery between 1957 and 1900, Washington Square Village is a mammoth Title I development that demolished "191 old stores and lofts" and replaced them with a superblock (now Greenwich Villages biggest block) of privately owned "luxury" apartments (Figs. 9, 10).38 The project comprises two seventeen-story buildings (three were originally planned), each running the entire length of what had been three blocks. Between them is a large courtyard with trees, benches, and-of course-parking. The projects addresses deny any relationship to the surrounding neighborhood, refusing ordinary street numbers. In a Herculean achievement of Gorbusian order, 148 distinct street addresses on seven separate streets were replaced simply by numbers 1 through 4, Washington Square Village.39 And Washington Square Village was only one of many major new building projects in the neighborhood; at the end of 1957, the New York Times counted ten active construction sites within about 1,500 feet of Washington Square (Fig. 9).40 Several blocks along the south side of the square, for example, were razed for New York Universitys Title I renewal. These developments included the property directly facing the entrance to the judson Gallery, which remained an open lot during the run of Ray Gun. When one of the new New York University buildings was nearing completion, the Village Voice, barely veiling its contempt, charged that the building, "with its rigorously modern, glassy look, has dramatically changed the aspect of the Square" (Fig. 10, at extreme right, and Fig. 11).11 This rebuilding faced criticism throughout the late 1950s, but it was in the spring of 1959, with Washington Square Village mostly complete and the roadway battle over, that local opinion decidedly turned against the new construction. John Lindsay argued in March that Washington Square Village would never have been built if the public had known more about it in advance.42 In April, the Voice ran an editorial asserting that Greenwich Village was threatened by the current building boom; in july, the paper bemoaned the neighborhoods "vanishing local color"; and in August, it ran a lengthy letter charging that the "orgy of destruction" was destroying the physical character that attracted artists and intellectuals to the neighborhood.43 The letter ended imperatively: "Save the Village!" By October, the Save the Square Gommittee had been formed to "preserve the present architectural character and scale of Greenwich Village," and a "Save the Village" petition had been launched "to preserve the character of the area from obliteration by spreading apartment projects."44 Of course, there were many reasons for this backlash in the Village against modernist renewal. Corruption and rising rents were high among them. But what is striking about the objections is how often they centered on rhetorical claims that the simplicity and uniformity of the new buildings threatened the cultural fecundity of the neighborhood. Again and again it was claimed that the Villages artists and bohemians would be driven out by a loss of the neighborhoods particular qualities. Perhaps the most sustained example came very early, in the eulogistic article that appeared on the front page of the New York Timess real estate section on December 8, 1957: "New Projects Will Change the Face-and the Character-of the Washington Square Area: Bohemian Flair Fades in Village." The article mentions climbing rents and the arrival of the bourgeoisie, but the real threat to writers and artists, it would seem, came from the new "curtain of blue-green glass" emerging in the neighborhood. In the articles final paragraph, its author, Ira Henry Freeman, described in vivid terms the special elements of the Village that were disappearing: "There are now under construction, or soon will be, in the Village at least eight modern apartment buildings where crooked studios with smoky fireplaces used to huddle. There wont even be an ailanthus tree and a broken fountain in the back yard."45 This is a particular kind of nostalgia, leaning heavily on terms such as "huddle," "smoky," and "crooked." The denotative accuracy of these terms is questionable-Can studios really be "crooked"? How many of the old buildings had broken fountains in their yards?-but their force is clear. The nostalgia is for disorganization, irrationality, and excess matter in the face of the plans for an ordered and sensible new city. Oldenburg and the Judson Gallery Soon after arriving in New York in 1956, Claes Oldenburg moved into an apartment on Ninth Street, a few blocks northeast of Washington Square. Asked in .1973 about these quarters, he stressed one salient quality: "At that time they were tearing down a big building there called Bible House so that in my room I could only see the flames and the wreckage that they were tearing down. Its where Cooper Union has now built a new building."46 The artist soon moved to an apartment at 330 East Fourth Street, just east of Greenwich Village.47 he offered very similar recollections of this place, where he lived while making The Street. "When I lived in the Lower East Side there was a great deal of tearing down going on, especially between where I lived and where I worked. So I could pass through all these ruins all the time."48 Oldenburgs keen awareness of the urban renewal surrounding him turned, in at least one case, to harsh critique. In an absurdist prose poem he wrote at the time, renewal is associated with class-based oppression, as a public official shouts: Civic improvement, pla/.as, mails, centers, ports, projects, projects, projects. Got two heads full! Cut the folks up, cut up the plain folks, trim em like trees, saw em to size, make bricks of em, beams, pile em up, seal em to each other by their juices. Build Build Bid.49 With "plain folks" literally sacrificed to urban building projects, this is very grim satire. Taken as a whole, however, Oldenburgs thoughts about renewal were complicated and even contradictory. he seems, for example, to have had an aesthetic appreciation of "the flames and the wreckage" around him, as well as a satisfaction in the fact that he "could pass though all these ruins all the time." At around the time of The Street, he wrote delightedly in one of his notebooks, "The city is a landscape well worth enjoying-damn necessary if you live in the city. Dirt has depth and beauty. I love soot and scorching.50 Oldenburg was clearly attentive to the changing form of the city around 1960, but his investment was not that of a partisan in the political battles. Rather, the changes in New York formed the environment in which the artist viewed his own creative production. The new slabs everywhere supplanting lower Manhattans tenements, the recent roadway fightthese were symptoms of the modernist vision of an ordered, negotiable, and legible city. This dream (and its active antonyms) deeply interested Oldenburg: Ray Gun and The Street were, among other things, his complicated response. "A new definition of NY is needed you see," Oldenburg wrote, "and that is why New York will be renamed Ray-Gun."51 The installation of The Street at the Judson Gallery was a carefully constructed mess. Its discards and other banal materials covered every surface, and even the grandest sculptures in the installation were made of trash-cardboard, crumpled package paper, and broken slats of wood. Oldenburg had liberally stained the whole scene with black paint. Scale and representational mode were inconsistent, and the parts floated in an unordered pictorial space, with tiny cars jostling against giant silhouetted heads. It was not only in The Street, however, that Ray Guns aesthetic of disorder was at work. The whole exhibition was conceived and directed by Oldenburg as a festival of sorts for a new post-Abstract Expressionist art form.52 The other fixture of the show was Jim Dines similarly chaotic installation The House (Fig. 12), which was made from newspaper, childrens paintings, a ripped umbrella, and other scraps of trash and overpainted with nonsensical expressions such as "Yes eggs" and "Goo."53 The exhibition also hosted several happenings, or "Ray Gun Spex": one performance each by Oldenburg, Dine, Red Grooms, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, and Bob Whitman.54 These, like most happenings, were characterized by a conspicuous lack of narrative sense. All the untidy abjection at the Ray Gun exhibition made at least some viewers recoil sharply, sensing an attack on order and logic. Perhaps the Village Voice critic stretched slightly in claiming that some people-square uptowners, presumably-"feel that [Ray Gun] must be stamped out or that civilization will be in peril," but the show certainly garnered brisk dismissals in the mainstream publications that deigned to review it.55 The tiny review in Artnews described Ray Gun as "varied junk," and the reviewer for Time magazine, discussing the happenings, concluded sarcastically, "It was beat, man, though up-beat, and it was, like, existential. Real children might do it better."56 These are easy, and empty, cliches. But Times invocation of children, even in sneering disapproval, speaks to something of Ray Guns deliberate refusal of logic, its camivalesque delight in disorder and nonsense. Notice, for example, the hair of that imposing silhouette in the far corner of The Street (Fig. 5): the ambiguous words "YEAH," "WELL," and "TELL" join, in a Dada nursery rhyme, with the nonsense expressions "HYNO" and "GURB." Then there is the careful ambiguity of the form to the left of the silhouette, suspended beside the word "Ray."57 Here we have the most illegible of objects, representing, we might guess, a human figure, an automobile, or even an airplane. If any art in New York in this period deserved the label neo-Dada, The Street is it-a kind of Merzbau of the sidewalk, rendered in trash. Predictably, the happening Oldenburg staged in The Street, "Snapshots from the City," offered no more order or sense. Instead, the mediums potential for narrative seems only to have compelled a further refusal of these terms. "Snapshots" was performed three times for live audiences and separately recorded in 16mm for a film version directed by Stan Vanderbeek almost identically entitled Snapshots of the City. Aside from a few documentary photographs (Fig. 13), this film is the only formal record we have of the happening, which was performed by Oldenburg and his partner, Pat Muschinski.58 The film, no longer than five minutes, devotes itself chiefly to brief shots of Oldenburg and Muschinski writhing in exaggerated, jerky motions. These are separated by periods of blackness, created by Lucas Samaras, who turned the light on and off "when he felt like it."59 Meanwhile, sounds of sirens, car horns, and rumbling traffic alternate at random with periods of monosyllabic yelping and apelike grunts. Visually, Oldenburg is tied to The Street by his costume of large sackcloth boots, white underwear, and a dirtied shirt, open to the chest. Strips of cloth hang from his head, neck, shoulders, and wrists. Muschinski wears a newspaper mask, marked with simple outlines of empty eyes and a frowning face, and a set of bloated braids made of stuffed rags. Eventually, Oldenburgs character shoots himself several times with a gun of cutout cardboard.60 The character seems to recuperate each time, however, until someone offscreen slowly but fatally pushes a dark, barely legible cardboard car at his shoulder, causing him to crumble. The camera then pans across Oldenburgs lifeless body and holds a final close-up of his upturned hand, deathly still and dirtied as if with gun soot or the effects of poverty. Of course, "Snapshots," both as happening and as film, has elements of social realism, representing characters of urban abjection, whose formal similarity to their garbage-strewn surroundings articulates their position under the heel of New Yorks capitalist wealth. And it is not just an agonizing poverty that is on show here, btit also a pedestrian world bombarded by the sounds, soot, and mortal effects of automobiles. All of this could be read as a desperate representation of the poor of lower Manhattan, those perhaps most adversely affected by luxury renewal projects and increased traffic. On one level, (his is certainly correct. But the performance clearly had other commitments as well. The dirty bandages, for example, not wrapped as if for a specific wound but rather winding around much of Oldenburgs upper body, evoke Egyptian mummification, and Muschinskis African-style mask is clearly intended as a manifestation of the "contemporary primitivism" that Oldenburg had mentioned in 1959 as one of his aspirations as an artist.01 Michael Leja has observed that the primitivism in Abstract Expressionism served as an instance of Barthesian "inoculation": an injection of a small amount of disorder within the "Modern Man discourse," functioning to make contemporary American society seem all the more ordered and secure.62 The primitivism of "Snapshots from the City" does not offer itself as a prophylactic of this kind. On the contrary, the primitivism here-which runs alongside pervasive filth and moaning, general darkness, and overall inscrutability-is anything but contained or sanitized. This is part of the show, remember, that one Villager thought might be perceived as putting "civilization . . . in peril."63 It was the work of a group of artists "determined to be offbeat, off-Broadway, and off their rockers."64 For the occasion of the "Ray Gun Spex," Oldenburg also minted a special Ray Gun currency (Fig. 14). Members of the audience, each given $1 million, used the money to buy junk that was gathered from surrounding streets and sold from carts at intermission.65 The words and images on the bills epitomize both the violence and the nonsense of Ray Gun: traffic swarms menacingly, a man is seen licking or kissing a form that seems at once "ice crym kon" and woman, and a jet is emblazoned with the words "Kill Miss Newest." The buying of trash with counterfeit money was itself-as Robert E. Haywood has pointed out-a Dada-like parody of consumption.66 That Oldenburg was reading aloud something "incomprehensible" during the sale must only have furthered the sense of Ray Guns attack on civilized sensibilities.67 In part, The Street-along with the performances and printed ephemera made with it-was an attack on sense and order; in place of logic and legibility, it offered a kind of passionate insanity. In discussing this work recently, Oldenburg described it, affirmatively and respectfully, as "my ravings."68 In an earlier comment the artist emphasized the serious representational project running through his works absurdism: "It sounds too crazy when you speak the truth. The truth is too crazy."69 In a notation probably made in 1961, Oldenburg suggested that this crazy truth might have been intended as a quixotic attack on mainstream culture, including even the received notion of art itself: "[T]his country is all bourgeois down to the last death tail [sic] and most of the criticism is an exhortation to observe art and justice and good sense and humanity, which are also bourgeois values, so there is no escaping bourgeois values in America. The enemy is bourgeois culture nevertheless."70 Of course, Oldenburg was not alone in aiming Dada-like nonsense at Elsenhower culture. The Beats-whom Oldenburg disdained as themselves bourgeois, partly because "They would never think f. ex. of making the city a value of good"-had also lauded irrationality and even insanity in the face of a conformist mainstream.71 The figure of the madman prophet appears repeatedly in Jack Kerouacs novel On lhe Road, for example, and Dean Moriarity (the stand-in for Kerouacs friend Neal Cassady) is praised as "the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the Lot. . . the HOLY GOOF."72 This rejection of the logic, of the "good sense" as Oldenburg had it, of mainstream culture was endemic to Greenwich Village around 1960. A 1959 Village Voice advertisement soliciting subscriptions pictured a figure holding a sign reading: "Help to Stamp Out Mental Health!"7* When the judson Gallery launched Exodus, ajournai edited by the churchs associate minister, Bud Scott, the Voice ran a warm news piece about the publication, citing its inclusion of entries called "The Insanity Bit" and "Poem of Holy Madness," as well as Scotts description of it as "a way-out magazine."74 The struggle over the Washington Square roadway and the shape of Greenwich Village was itself cast as a struggle between logic and nonsense. In a statement about the expressway plans published both in the New York Times and the Village Voice, Robert Moses twice invoked "common sense" in defense of the project, saying that the result of not building it would be a "mess" and an "absurdity."75 An essay in the Voice satirically urged support for Moses and every "right thinker" under him.76 Another piece run in the same publication argued against the new campaign of issuing tickets for littering: "It seems to take us all one giant step nearer to that ideal society envisaged by the prophets of pure order."77 The value of Greenwich Village itself was said to depend on the illogic of its landscape. An essay about the character of the neighborhood linked "a magic in Greenwich Village" to the fact that "West 11th Street crosses West 4th."78 A prominent New York politician remarked in a similar vein, "City planners who would probably straighten out Morton and Gay Streets or widen MacDougal Alley . . . have shown no appreciation for what a community is."79 And a letter in the Voice argued that the Villages "community" and the fact of its housing "the most creative theatre in the country" depended on its being a "holdout from the nineteenth century," a "crazy patchwork of streets and buildings."80 It would be easy, then, to see Ray Guns celebration of illogic as a volley in a war between the reason of modernist planning and a culturally motivated refusal of order. Certainly this is part of what was going on. But to simplify the exhibition as an attack on the modernist vision of urban order would mean covering up the violence and destitution everywhere bound to the shows chaos. The Street, after all, does not picture the delightfully quirky city of Jane Jacobs. It continually emphasizes dirt, poverty, and violence. Note, for example, the patina of soot covering the figure slumped behind the shoe-shine stand, as well as the unhappy ploy for respectability signaled by his anachronistic facial hair and top hat (Fig. 4). As Barbara Rose has noted, Oldenburg associated The Street with Guernica, the centurys most conspicuous painting of misery, even noting that his subject was "everyday agony."81 The double-edged aspect of disorder in The Street is nowhere more apparent than in its ambiguous evocation of gun violence. In addition to the gun carried by Oldenburg in Snapshots of the City, there are the guns in the hands of two of the figures on and near The Streets back wall (Fig. 5). The name of the exhibition, however, suggests that these guns, like those of science fiction, might not be purely deadly. As Oldenburg has said recently, "The idea was Ray Gun was shooting something other than a lethal blast."82 At the time, Oldenburg wrote in his notebook, "When Ray Gun shoots, noone [sic] dies."83 Oldenburg and Dine had also written that the "slogan" for the Ray Gun exhibition was "Annihilate-Illuminate," a phrase that appeared in the shows advertisement in the Voice (Fig. 15), the fudson Gallerys spring calendar, and Oldenburgs own notebooks, among other spots.84 The phrase bespeaks The Streets two-sided nature as a city of both fecundity and destruction. The modernist planners envisioned an open, airy, and peaceful city-a clean and ordered system of smooth, white walls and seamlessly flowing traffic.85 The Street, by contrast, is a hyperbolic representation of the city as it had been (and-despite the incursions of modernist renewal-as it continued to be); it exaggerates not only the exciting disorder and density of the existing city but also its dirt, desperation, and confusion. Above all, The Street offers an image of the city as a place of unruly matter, of obdurate stuff refusing to be abstracted into order or legibility. It is these qualities we need to understand if we are to make sense of this conflicted representation of New York. The chaos of The Street made it very difficult to "read" in any conventional sense. Consider the visual and interpretative opacity that marks our first experiences of the work, as on the wall to the right of the doorway (Fig. 6). Although we can be fairly certain that we see two human figures here, we cannot be sure what that form might be against the ceiling in the far corner, or what is on the floor below it. Also, it is difficult to ascertain if the long horizontal forms extending from the head of the large figure on the right are ears, hair, speech bubbles, or perhaps, somehow all three. Even where a speech bubble is clearly visible-attached to the figure at left-it contains only a dripping squiggle of paint. The unclear identities of the triangular form in this figures hand and of the odd stick at its side further underline this illegibility in The Street, this blockage of interpretation. A similar ambiguity pervades the biggest nonfigurative element in the installation, that freestanding sculpture of the scorched traffic barricade (Fig. 16). Much of The Streets account of urban experience is condensed into this one apparently senseless tool of blockage. An ordinary barricade depends for its utility on the legibility of its bright colors, bold lettering, and deliberate placement, but Oldenburgs version is dark and sooty, without any clear history or institutional authority. It seems pointlessly dense with renegade and overlapping wood slats, all cracked and sullied. Its awkward placement at the center of this odd streetscape leaves even its very purpose ambiguous: Is it meant to stop the flow of automobile traffic, or-by blocking pedestrians-to foster it? Then there is also the ambiguity of the sooty finish. Has this barricade been darkened by the dirt of the old city? By the fires of renewal? All these difficulties of interpretation cue us to what these boards do insist on-namely, their identity as trash, as materiality beyond or at the fringes of representation. What is blocked by the particular material excess here, therefore, is not simply physical movements but also meaning.86 The rhetoric in the "Battle of Washington Square" had explicitly pitted "flow" against a kind of blockage. One activist attacked the notion that "we must accommodate everything else to easing [traffics] flow."87 An architectural critic, too, had said that Greenwich Village was "inhabitable" only because of "its jaywalkers, who slow up a confused and intermittent traffic,"88 and Washington Square Park Committee Chair Shirley Hayes had argued that the neighborhood depended on the fact that traffic "winds" around the square-emphasizing that "winding is a good word for it."89 The barricade does a lot to make The Street a place where traffic (both corporeal and intellectual) must do a lot of "winding." There is no easy flow here; our experience and understanding of this work might well be characterized as "confused and intermittent." The sense it gives of diversion, blockage, and fracture (of viewers paths in the space, of our interpretations of the work) imitates very closely the ways traffic might be diverted, blocked, or fractured at a barricade line or around a city park. Oldenburg viewed a blockage of meaning as a central aim of his work. he typed a note about this effect a few years later: " [M]y art is the constant enemy of meaning . . . or you could say I have aimed at neutralizing meaning (which is unexpungable) . . . To eliminate appearances seems to me impossible and therefore artificial . . . Simply grasp them and show how little they mean."90 The Street shows the city locked in a stunted transformation, where paper, cardboard, wood, and trash are used literally, as street debris, at least as much as they are used in service of representation. The obdurate matter of the city clogs up renewal, traffic, and representation itself. The Reuben Installation Although it opened only a few weeks after the Judson show came down, the Reuben Gallery incarnation of The Street was vastly different (Figs. 17, 18).91 In fact, the whole of the Judson shows chaos seems to have been jettisoned for a quality of finish. The floors are bare, and each piece of the new installation is mounted separately, surrounded with sufficient space for individual contemplation. In this second version of The Street, Oldenburg allowed himself to make several individual characters with their own titles (Lorraine, for example, is visible in the foreground of Figure 17). He hung the figures, here untethered from their backgrounds, in the viewers space, creating a scene in which viewers can imagine a kind of belonging to this streetscape, a correspondence between their own bodies and those of the odd pedestrians around them. This crystallization of The Street into discrete sculptures evolved over a series of sketches the artist apparently made between the two shows. From the first, these drawings suggest a desire to try out more legible units. Oldenburg wrote on one sheet, for example, "FACES against black floor ea. a picture."92 After all the resistance to representation at the Judson, Oldenburg was having a try at making pictures. Oldenburg emphasized the new particularization of The Streets, components in a description quoted in the Reuben Gallery press release: "[T]here will be men and women and heroes and bums and children and drunks and streetchicks . . . and trucks and cars . . . and shadows and cats and doggies . . . cockroaches and mornings and evenings and guns . . . and cops and mamagangers and a lot more."93 By stringing together all of these elements and joining them with the repeated "and," the artist levels their differences; it is as if "shadows" and "mornings" were material pieces of the streetscape, just like "cars," "cockroaches," and even "drunks." Of course, Oldenburg does not really include most of these things. Whatever they might look like, there are no sculptures of shadows or mornings here. Even many of the material things listed are red herrings; there are no cockroaches, not even any guns. In fact, almost all the sculptures we see at the Reuben very clearly represent either human beings or street signs of some sort. In this description, Oldenburg wanted to emphasize the discrete and material qualities of the installations various units, as well as the overall aim-despite the continued inscrutability of such elements as the "mamagangcrs"-to make a legible representation of the city.94 For all its new order, however, the Reuben installation of The Street is still very much an image of the old city, emphasizing its trash and poverty and confusion. Like the Judson version, it is rendered all in brown and black, a reduced color scheme evocative both of city pavement and of aging social documentary photographs. The figures lack of arms and their ragged clothes (Street Chick [Big], for example, wears repaired shoes, Fig. 17, rear) also communicate a general desperation. As at the Judson, all of the works elements at the Reuben were executed in plain materials, including paper, muslin, burlap, and at least two types of cardboard. And here, too, the viewer is confronted with a confusing contrast of scales; the figures vary in height from about sixteen inches (Street Chick [Small]) to over fifteen feet (Big Man [Big Guy]). At the same time, a more definitive flatness-expressive of the unforgiving planarity of the old city, its hard walls and sidewalks-has entered the work, so that even though they share the viewers space, the sculptures are all but two-dimensional. Another quality shared with the Judson installation is the look of singeing on everything: many of the works have sooty washes across them, and all are outlined with a scorched-looking contour line. Oldenburg, as we have seen, was drawn to the destructive force of Ore ("I love soot and scorching"), a force he associated with the "wreckage" of renewal. The singeing throughout the Reuben installation of The Street suggests that the work is a snapshot of renewal just at the moment when it actually adds to the dirt and chaos of the city, just at the moment when the seams and the material excess it aims to eliminate are most visible. This moment in the process of renewal was everywhere manifest in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1960; one example could be seen in the unfinished southern section of Washington Square Village, a photograph of which appeared in the Village Voice, on January 27 (Fig. 19).95 At first appearance, of course, the Reuben Street seems far easier to read than its predecessor. In place of that continuum of chaos, we have newly discrete objects. But one effect of this change is that the work offers neatly framed studies of varying degrees of legibility. Representation nearly evaporates altogether, for example, in works such as the enormous and ambiguous Street Head I ("Big Head"; "Gong") (Fig. 18, against the back wall, and Fig. 20), in which the title underscores the interpretative flexibility of the form. In fact, the childish stick-figure quality of the whole installation might be understood as a careful rendering of the streetscape in a language of reduced symbolism, wh Read More