Brutal Aesthetics by Hal Foster

Author:Hal Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

5.2 Installation view of Claes Oldenburg, The Street, 1960. Judson Gallery, Judson Memorial Church, New York.

If the city at large is the setting of “everyday agony” for Oldenburg, “the street is death.”17 Here the new realism of The Street shades into “a winter allegory,” which he acted out at Judson Church in a series of performances titled Ray Gun Spex in late February and early March 1960 (94).18 The first of these happenings was Snapshots from the City, which Oldenburg termed a “psychasthenic spectacle.”19 “Psychasthenia” is a technical word for a neurotic breakdown, but it can also signify a dissolution of the subject, and this is what Snapshots seemed to stage.20 As captured on film by Stan van der Beek, the performance included Samaras, Patty Mucha (whom Oldenburg married in April), and Oldenburg strewn with rags. Mucha as “the Street Chick” wore a primitivist-Dadaist mask, and Oldenburg as “the Beggar” danced wildly, convulsively, a combination of psychotic and shaman. As Oldenburg described it, audience members saw only “fragments of action, immobilized by instantaneous illuminations,” and these flashes (“the snapshots” of the title) were intended to make them convulse as well (230). There were moans, cries, and howls, as if Oldenburg were possessed and exorcist in one; at the end, as a siren wailed, he collapsed amid the debris.21 (fig. 5.5)

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