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

All the untidy abjection at the Ray Gun exhibition made at least some viewers recoil sharply, sensing an attack on order and logic. Perhaps the Village Voice critic stretched slightly in claiming that some people--square uptowners, presumably--"feel that [Ray Gun] must be stamped out or that civilization will be in peril," but the show certainly garnered brisk dismissals in the mainstream publications that deigned to review it. (55) The tiny review in Artnews described Ray Gun as "varied junk," and the reviewer for Time magazine, discussing the happenings, concluded sarcastically, "It was beat, man, though up-beat, and it was, like, existential. Real children might do it better." (56)

These are easy, and empty, cliches. But Time's invocation of children, even in sneering disapproval, speaks to something of Ray Gun's deliberate refusal of logic, its carnivalesque delight in disorder and nonsense. Notice, for example, the hair of that imposing silhouette in the far corner of The Street (Fig. 5): the ambiguous words "YEAH," "WELL," and "TELL" join, in a Dada nursery rhyme, with the nonsense expressions "HYNO" and "GURB." Then there is the careful ambiguity of the form to the left of the silhouette, suspended beside the word "Ray." (57) Here we have the most illegible of objects, representing, we might guess, a human figure, an automobile, or even an airplane. If any art in New York in this period deserved the label neo-Dada, The Street is it--a kind of Merzbau of the sidewalk, rendered in trash.

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Predictably, the happening Oldenburg staged in The Street, "Snapshots from the City," offered no more order or sense. Instead, the medium's potential for narrative seems only to have compelled a further refusal of these terms. "Snapshots" was performed three times for live audiences and separately recorded in 16mm for a film version directed by Stan Vander-beek almost identically entitled Snapshots of the City. Aside from a few documentary photographs (Fig. 13), this film is the only formal record we have of the happening, which was performed by Oldenburg and his partner, Pat Muschinski. (58)

The film, no longer than five minutes, devotes itself chiefly to brief shots of Oldenburg and Muschinski writhing in exaggerated, jerky motions. These are separated by periods of blackness, created by Lucas Samaras, who turned the light on and off "when he felt like it." (59) Meanwhile, sounds of sirens, car horns, and rumbling traffic alternate at random with periods of monosyllabic yelping and apelike grunts. Visually, Oldenburg is tied to The Street by his costume of large sack-cloth boots, white underwear, and a dirtied shirt, open to the chest. Strips of cloth hang from his head, neck, shoulders, and wrists. Muschinski wears a newspaper mask, marked with simple outlines of empty eyes and a frowning face, and a set of bloated braids made of stuffed rags.