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

(101.) In 1960, Oldenburg lived at 330 East Fourth Street (Rose, 199), and the Empire Burlap Bag Company was located at 231 East Ninth (Manhattan Directory [as in n. 97], 483).

(102.) Rose, 199; Oldenburg, interview by Cummings (as in n. 46), 70-73.

(103.) David B. Sicilia, "Wanamaker's," in The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1235.

(104.) "New Uses of the Human Image" (as in n. 61), 6, 5.

(105.) Ibid., 1.

(106.) Ibid., 7, 4.

(107.) Haywood, noting this lineage, observes that Oldenburg later described himself as a "post-Pollock" artist (Haywood, 197-98).

(108.) Oldenburg recently indicated that he made Lady in 1957 (e-mail letter to author, July 24, 2003). Barbara Rose, 29, notes that the work was both exhibited and destroyed in 1959.

(109.) Clement Greenberg, "Abstract and Representational," Arts Digest, Nov. 1, 1954, 7.

(110.) Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," Artnews, Oct. 1958, 24-26, 55-57. Barbara Rose, 25, notes that Oldenburg was impressed enough by Kaprow's article to seek out the author in person. By 1959, Kaprow and Oldenburg were both associated with the Judson.

(111.) Kaprow (as in n. 110), 26.

(112.) Ibid., 56. Emphasis in the original.

(113.) Ibid., 57.

(114.) Ibid. Several of these materials had already appeared in works of art in New York, prominently in assemblages by Robert Rauschenberg.

(115.) As Kaprow suggests, Oldenburg and his peers inherited from Pollock not only an insistent materiality but also, specifically, a materiality of the ordinary world. Pollock used nails, cigarettes, keys, and coins, for example, in Full Fathom Five (1947). It is important to note here that Pollock's practice as a painter, while "abstract" in respect to its lack of figures or objects, was fundamentally resistant to abstraction, asserting its own materiality over mimesis and legibility.

(116.) Quoted, without source, in Rose, 53.

(117.) Oldenburg's debt to the literalness of Abstract Expressionist painting is what allowed him, even as he was making the semimimetic sculptural reliefs for The Store in 1961, to remark about that previous movement, "[B]y parodying its corn I have (miracle!) come back to its authenticity! I feel as if Pollock is sitting on my shoulder, or rather crouching in my pants!" (Oldenburg and Williams [as in n. 51], 13).

(118.) Oldenburg has admitted an interest in Marcel Duchamp, who, along with Kurt Schwitters, defined the American reception of Dada. Neo-Dada, a label used around 1960 for some of the new art employing ordinary materials, is useful for its immediate evocation of socially invested resistances to legibility.

(119.) Oldenburg mentions his discovery of Dubuffet in his interview with Cummings (as in n. 46), 63-65.

(120.) Village Voice, Feb. 3, 1960, 1.

(121.) J. B. Jackson, "Signs of Life," Landscape 14, no. 2 (winter 1964-65): 1.

(122.) Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Publications of the Joint Center for Urban Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).