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Claes Oldenburg's The Street and urban renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2004 by Joshua A. Shannon
Pedestrians walking down Thompson Street off Greenwich Village's 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 neighborhood's 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)
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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 viewer's 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, defining scorched-looking 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 man's 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 floor's 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 Oldenburg's 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 renewal's 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 York's classic period of urban renewal.
