Featured White Papers
- Oct. 14th: Simplified IT with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (ZDNet)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- The rise of Web commuting (Citrix Online)
Content provided in partnership with
Claes Oldenburg's The Street and urban renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2004 by Joshua A. Shannon
The Street documents the changes in the city around it, lingering on the moment in which the effort to bring order and legibility to all that material chaos seemed to bring only more particularity and more chaos. This hyperbolic documentation suggests that the fight about the future of New York was fundamentally a fight about the limits and possibilities of abstracting the material city--of making it cohere in an ordered and flowing system. The Street at once begs for that impulse and insists that such an impulse must (and should) allow for the inherent disorder of material fact, for the inevitability of blockage and chaos. If Abstract Expressionism had been animated by a problematic concerning the legibility or abstractability of matter--if, we might say, it had been a negative response to earlier modernists' quests for seamless representation--then Oldenburg brought exactly that problematic to bear on the urban terrain. In The Street, the modernist planner's desire to systematize the city--like the modernist painter's desire to perfect representation--inevitably gives way, at least partially, to failure.
Notes
This article is drawn from parts of my dissertation, "Black Market: Materiality, Abstraction, and the Built Environment in the New York Avant-Garde, 1958-1962," advised by T. J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner. I am grateful and deeply indebted to them both for their ongoing guidance. I owe special thanks also to Christopher Nealon, who has provided important thoughts from the beginning of my work on the dissertation, and to Benjamin Grant, Robert E. Haywood, Rona Marech, Christine Schick, and the historian Michael J. Kramer, all of whom responded deeply and helpfully to drafts of this essay. I also want to thank H. Perry Chapman, editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, as well as the article's anonymous readers for their thoughtful and valuable responses. Audiences at the University of Washington and at the Smithsonian Institution also offered useful remarks in response to related talks. The University of California, Berkeley, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum provided support to make the research and writing of this project possible, and the staffs at several libraries and museums greatly aided my research; in particular, I am indebted to Christine Frohnert at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Finally, I owe thanks also to Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Patty Mucha, and Anita Reuben Simons for being generous with their recollections.
(1.) In addition to The Street, Ray Gun included Jim Dine's environment The House, as well as three nights of happenings, or "Ray Gun Spex." These are discussed below. The term installation, although I use it in this essay, was not yet in circulation among artists or critics in 1960; most critics in fact struggled to find a term for the new form. Suzanne Kiplinger, for example, writing for the Village Voice, called Oldenburg's and Dine's genre "a sort of 3-D world which surrounds the beholder, using elements of sculpture, Surrealism, interior decoration, analysis, and the fun house at an amusement park" (Kiplinger, review of Ray Gun, Village Voice, Feb. 17, 1960, 11). In the Village Voice advertisement for the Ray Gun exhibition, The Street and The House were called "Two Huge Living Constructions" (Ray Gun advertisement, Village Voice, Jan. 27, 1960, 11). The first use of the word environment to refer to Oldenburg's work seems to have been made by Irving Sandler (review of The Street at the Reuben Gallery, Artnews, summer 1960, 16).
