Claes Oldenburg's The Street and urban renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960

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 Village's "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 Gun's 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 show's 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 century's most conspicuous painting of misery, even noting that his subject was "everyday agony." (81)

The double-edged aspect of disorder in The Street is no-where 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 Street's 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 show's advertisement in the Voice (Fig. 15), the Judson Gallery's spring calendar, and Oldenburg's own notebooks, among other spots. (84) The phrase bespeaks The Street's two-sided nature as a city of both fecundity and destruction.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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.