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

(2.) Oldenburg described the work as a mural in one of his sketchbooks. See Rose, 41.

(3.) Oldenburg has confirmed the identity of these forms as a shoe-shine stand and shopwindow (letter to author signed by Oldenburg's studio assistant, Anu Vikram, Nov. 10, 2000).

(4.) It is unclear to what extent and on what occasions viewers were able to walk freely through the installation. Although Oldenburg has recently indicated that the installation was "separated from the viewer" (e-mail letter to the author, July 30, 2003), Suzanne Kiplinger's review in the Village Voice indicates that The Street "surround[ed] the beholder," and the photograph that appeared with her article shows visitors, along with Oldenburg, very much at the heart of things (Kiplinger [as in n. 1], 11).

(5.) Barbara Rose's chapter on The Street, written more than thirty years ago, is still the most comprehensive overview of the work (Rose, 37-50). Robert Haywood's article analyzes Ray Gun (and especially Oldenburg's happening staged there) in the context of the unusual social and religious agenda of the Judson Church. Both of these accounts have been foundational to my own thinking. Two other useful mentions of The Street come in works dedicated to other concerns: Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 320; and Yve-Alain Bois, "Ray Guns," in Formless: A User's Guide, by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 172-79. Of the many catalogue essays that make brief mention of The Street, three of the most useful are the ones by Ellen H. Johnson, Barbara Haskell, and Germano Celant: Johnson, Claes Oldenburg, Penguin New Art Series, ed. Richard Morphet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Haskell, "The Aesthetics of Junk," in Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958-1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984), 15-29; and Celant, "Claes Oldenburg and the Feeling of Things," trans. Stephen Sartorelli, in Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995) 12-31.

(6.) The values of order, negotiability (or "flow"), and legibility--all aspects of the drive to abstraction--were frequently intertwined in renewal, both as it was practiced and as Oldenburg responded to it. The discussion that follows treats them, as necessary, sometimes singly, sometimes as a group.

(7.) These books by Le Corbusier were originally published as Urbanisme (Paris: G. Cres, 1924), which was available in English by 1929, and Quand les cathedrales etaient blanches (Paris: Plon, 1937), available in English by 1947.

(8.) Fritz Malcher, The Steadyflow Traffic System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935). I thank Paul Groth for his helpful discussion with me on this topic.

(9.) Robert Moses's way of putting it: "You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax" (quoted in Caro, 849).