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

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 figure's hand and of the odd stick at its side further underline this illegibility in The Street, this blockage of interpretation.

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A similar ambiguity pervades the biggest nonfigurative element in the installation, that freestanding sculpture of the scorched traffic barricade (Fig. 16). Much of The Street's 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 Oldenburg's 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 [traffic's] 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)

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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.