Claes Oldenburg and Film: Moveyhouse

ttner nadj Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse: Performing a Cinema without Film Nadja Rottner Copy Edited by: A.K. Language used: UK/ise Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse: Performing a Cinema without Film 5 Nadja Rottner Q1 10 1. Claes Oldenburg, Interview by Barbara Rose, 1968, Transcription of cassette tape C-88, Track 01, 18 April 1968, Barbara Rose Papers, 1940– 1993, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Transcription mine. (Abbreviated BRP hereafter.) 15 20 25 2. Moveyhouse was staged on 1, 2, 3, 16, and 17 December, as part of the New Cinema Festival I, New York, 1965. Claes Oldenburg, Raw Notes: Documents and Scripts of the Performances: Stars, Moveyhouse, Massage, The Typewriter, with Annotations by the Author (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design: Halifax, 1972), p. 68. 3. The notation for the piano piece was found in a garbage barrel outside of a Fourth Avenue store in Lower Manhattan. Oldenburg is taken by the simplicity of the rhythm and its allusion to a children’s rhyme: it is ‘tangible – it brought to mind these things, Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley’. Oldenburg, in Richard Kostelanetz, The Theater of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances (Dial Press: New York, 1965), p. 152. 30 35 40 45 There is one true generalization about my work: it is highly physical. I chose materials in my work that excite you (touch: even if you just look). Everything has to do with contact. They are all projections of my own body (tangible). They express the physicalness of my own vision (taking away the voyeuristic).1 – Claes Oldenburg, 1968 Viewers walking into the dark Wurlitzer theatre in midtown Manhattan on an early night in December 1965 expected to see an experimental film. Instead, Claes Oldenburg greeted them at the door, and ushered the audience to one of the side aisles, where they remained for the whole duration of his twenty-minute performance Moveyhouse. 2 As they stood at a right angle to the seating of the auditorium, they saw a group of eight performers act as ushers and spectators laughing, eating, and smoking. The now displaced viewer watched an enactment of the cinema ‘audience’s’ physical behaviour. Their visual experience of the performance was characterised by distraction, a constant switching between multiple centres of activity in the room, all of which were simultaneously competing for attention. The theatre’s 16-mm projector ran empty. The film-less cone of white light hung low over the seats and the smoke-filled air gave it a sculptural dimension. Performers were instructed to interfere with the beam so that their shadows were cast onto the otherwise blank screen and the back of the space (Fig. 1). The performance broke with the theatrical Q2 tradition of the proscenium: frontality was abolished in order to bring audience and performers into a new relationship of proximity, enhancing the physical aspects of visual experience. Dispensing with directional conventions of cinematic viewing, Moveyhouse fully utilised the space of the theatre to create an immersive experience of shadow play. In the tradition of a 1930s movie palace, the setting of the (now destroyed) Wurlitzer theatre was richly ornamented, adding to the overall experience of multifocality; theatrical immersion (live experience of the theatrical space) replaced cinematic absorption (the experience of viewing a film on a screen). As a tribute to silent cinema, live piano music accompanied the events.3 Oldenburg’s performances, commonly referred to as ‘Happenings’, seek to re-imagine, and to re-make, viewers’ ordinary perception of urban reality’s everyday spaces such as the street, the store, the home, or the cinema. He attempts to restore to viewers’ quotidian experience physical, imaginative, and somatic properties that have been lost in the mechanised and technologically mediated reality of the modern city. Moveyhouse makes a bold and modern claim for the role of art in society; by structurally mirroring and defamiliarising perceptive patterns of everyday life, Oldenburg attempts to effect lasting change in viewers’ experience of their urban, consumerist # The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcs006 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 1–18 Nadja Rottner 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 Fig. 1. Claes Oldenburg, Moveyhouse, 1965, performance. Wurlitzer theatre, New York. (Photo # Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.) environment. Anchored in the avant-garde belief that there need be no difference between ordinary perception and aesthetic experience, Oldenburg’s art of physical proximity is intended as an antidote to viewers’ daily experience of distance and alienation. This essay explores what critics of Oldenburg’s art have often overlooked: a belief in embodied vision as remedial for an alienated modern public. Past readings of Oldenburg’s art have largely turned on his affinity with Pop culture and his supposedly affirmative and playfully indulgent embrace of products of consumerism and their visual double in advertisement. Moveyhouse, however, suggests an alternative interpretation, as the work partakes in a utopian post-war avant-garde tradition guided by an idealistic belief in art’s ability to ‘change’ the way the viewer experiences reality. To begin to understand Oldenburg’s notion of physical vision as ameliorative, it is helpful to compare Moveyhouse with contemporary works by composer and theatre maker John Cage and experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, both of whom suggested related ways of targeting the faculty of perception in their work in an attempt to ‘re-educate’ the viewer. Moveyhouse is the culmination of Oldenburg’s long-standing, but largely overlooked, preoccupation with the medium of film.4 As a meta-critique of normative cinematic experience, Moveyhouse enacts a clash of two different notions of theatrical and cinematic realism before the audience’s eyes. Sensations of immediacy are enhanced by the performance’s exhibition of the conventions of cinematic experience; the performance 4 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 4. Oldenburg made 8- and 16-mm films and wrote film scenarios. His shorts consisted mainly of close examinations of objects and people in everyday settings – such as a couple smoking a cigarette in their living room, or receiving a phone call – seen from many angles and distances simultaneously. Oldenburg, in BRP, C-88, Track 01, 18 April 1968. He later destroyed these films, indicating, perhaps, that he believed this project to be a failure. Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse 100 105 110 5. Oldenburg, Raw Notes (1972), p. 68. Oldenburg confirmed in an email with the author on 21 May 2007, that this segment on the Moveyhouse script stems from 1965, written ‘probably during preparation’ for the performance. 6. For an excellent discussion of Yvonne Rainer and the problem of vision in art, see Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2008). The influence of Judson Dance on Oldenburg’s performance art warrants its own in-depth discussion. 7. Email interview with the author, 21 May 2007. 115 120 125 130 135 critically enacts the distance between the liveliness of movie-going (feeling Q3 the plush seats, smelling the popcorn, looking at the stucco of the theatre ceiling), and the mediated reality of movie-watching (the disembodied representation of a movie). Oldenburg employs the theatrical exposition of the performed ‘audience’s’ movements and activities to convey a fresh perspective on film-going. He presents his viewers with an alternative aesthetic of the cinema as ‘a sculpture in light, time, and space using actual materials’.5 A theatrical insistence on the empirical here and now of experience is combined with allusions not only to the conventions of film, but also to theatre and sculpture. Oldenburg’s intermedia aesthetic is live and discursive, instead of predetermined and medium-specific. From this vantage point, two historical lineages of the post-war period merge into a single intellectual trajectory in Oldenburg’s theatre: the modern ‘objective’ and non-expressionistic art of John Cage and the romantic ‘subjective’ and expressionistic practice of Stan Brakhage. Though these artists both emphasised physicality in order to combat distance in the viewer’s experience and interpretation of art, they proposed very different models of embodied, performative visuality.6 Cage’s cerebral aesthetic of indeterminacy, which allows for a lessening of authorial control as the work centres on an unplanned experience of environmental noise, initiated one of the most influential paradigms of anti-interpretive and content-less post-war art. Brakhage’s visionary practice, in contrast, was conceived in opposite terms as the creation of an auteur – extending the legacy of Abstract Expressionism in which art was seen as a direct and immediate trace of the artistic persona. Despite their differences, however, both Cage and Brakhage challenged the conventions of their chosen mediums, and confronted the viewer with embodied perceptual experiences in order to instigate a situation of perceptual renewal. Like Brakhage and Cage, Oldenburg relies on perceptual estrangement. Central to his practice is the perceptual process itself; in the tradition of nineteenth-century art and poetry, he believes that the artist has privileged access to reality, and his responsibility is to teach the viewer to see reality though the eyes of the artist. Predicated upon Charles Baudelaire’s romantic doctrine of the supremacy of the imagination in art, Oldenburg’s work – rejecting false antinomies such as objective and subjective – presents a creatively enriched view of modern consumerism. Placing Oldenburg’s art in the larger artistic and intellectual context of artists such as Cage and Brakhage reveals his understanding of the function of art within society to be simultaneously modern and romantic. The Question of Legacy: Oldenburg and Experimental Film 140 145 As early as 1961 – four years before Moveyhouse – Oldenburg confidently announced himself to be ‘reinventing the medium’ of film. Asked to clarify his ambition, he responded with a critique of filmic realism very similar to what Moveyhouse would later enact: My problem with film is that its images are flat and intangible. Also that they don’t exist in reality. I wanted to remove the images from films, place them back in real space. That is why there is nothing in the projected light frame – it’s all in the space of the theater. This is what I meant by ‘re-inventing movies’ – reversing the process of making images.7 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 5 Nadja Rottner 150 155 160 165 170 175 180 185 190 195 In Moveyhouse, Oldenburg physicalised the ‘empty’ projector beam and dispensed with the celluloid material of film. Thus, he breaks with the traditional filmic triad of camera–projector – screen and replaces it with the artistic triad of viewer –object –space. Oldenburg ‘reverses the process of making images’ by replacing film with shadow play. Physicalising the experience of film and breaking with the black box of cinematic experience (its normative frontality and environmental neutrality) were shared objectives of an emerging expanded cinema scene in New York in the mid-1960s (whose techniques included the expansion of film into the space of the auditorium through multiple projections, live projector-based performance, and alternative imaging technologies such as slide shows). In a play on language in the script to the performance, Oldenburg demonstrated, with an undeniable sense of humour, his interdisciplinary take on the notion of ‘expanded cinema’ itself: he named the Moveyhouse ‘a black and white expandsymaganza’, and called for a ‘lecture on Expanded Cinema. Usherettes blow up balloons to bursting. Wear bands saying Miss Expanded Cinema’. Oldenburg envisioned ‘balloons or someone fat labeled Expanded Cinema’.8 As was his standard practice, he treats an object (in this case, an object of discourse) as a human subject (Miss Expanded Cinema, someone fat), and objects (balloons) become subject-like in a grotesque enlargement of scale. The cinematic notion of expansion itself is treated as if it were part of a conventional artistic vocabulary of scale, mass, and volume. Moveyhouse has not yet found its place in the history of 1960s art; art historians have neglected the performance. The performance has met with a warmer reception in European and American film scholarship about the expanded cinema movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Acknowledging the influence of New York-based ‘Happenings’ (by artists including Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Al Hansen, Robert Whitman, and Carolee Schneemann) on a newly emerging interdisciplinary art cinema, Jonas Mekas employed the term ‘film happenings’ as a synonym for expanded cinema9 (Fig. 2a and b). Mekas spearheaded the new genre, and invited Oldenburg to participate in the New Cinema Festival I, considered the institutional beginning of expanded cinema in the USA. Film critics at the time, such as Mekas, Sheldon Renan, and Birgit Hein, looked for a way to situate expanded cinema historically within the realm of experimental film’s disputed history. Constructing an analogy to Clement Greenberg’s modernist discourse on painting, these critics ascribed to film a self-reflexive logic internal to the medium. A modernist model of historical progression for film hypostatises that all non-medium-specific features are to be rejected. Hence, for these critics, sub-genres of expanded cinema such as ‘light-motion art’, ‘cinema of effect’, or ‘actions without film’10 are the logical endpoint of film’s reduction to its essence: the movement of light over time in space. To take a case in point, for Hein, Moveyhouse, as an ‘action without film’, showcases a self-reflexive exposition of the film viewer in the act of cinematic viewing.11 Indeed, Oldenburg highlights often overlooked features of the cinematic apparatus, such as the projector and the cone of light. And he makes the viewer aware of the behavioural norms of cinematic experience. However, he addresses these aspects of cinematic experience by means of performance, and not through film. His model of reflexivity is trans-theatrical,12 and not medium-specific or an exercise in a medium reflecting on itself. As a meta-theatrical theatre about theatre, Moveyhouse refers to another tradition in cinema’s past: the experience of shadow play as cinema’s phantasmal 6 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 8. Oldenburg, Raw Notes (1972), pp. 54, 61. 9. See Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of New American Cinema, 1959 –1971 (Collier Books: New York, 1972), p. 215. 10. For ‘light-motion art’, see Jonas Mekas, ‘Expanded Arts’, Film Culture, vol. 43, special issue, Winter 1966, p. 1. For Sheldon Renan’s ‘cinema of effect’, see An Introduction to the American Underground Film (E.P. Dutton: New York, 1987), p. 205. For a ‘cinema of actions without film’, see Birgit Hein, in Birgit Hein and Wulf Herzogenrath (eds), Film als Film: 1910 bis heute: Vom Animationsfilm der zwanziger bis zum Filmenvironment der siebziger Jahre (Kölnischer Kunstverein: Cologne, 1977), p. 255. Translation mine. 11. Hein, Film als Film (1977), p. 255. 12. For use of the term ‘trans-theatricality’ in theatre studies, see Silvija Jestrovic, ‘Theatricality as Estrangement of Art and Life in the Russian Avant-garde’, Substance, vol. 31, no. 2/3, iss. 98/ 99, 2002, pp. 42 –56. Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse 200 205 210 Fig. 2. (a and b) Claes Oldenburg, Notebook pages for Moveyhouse, 1965, performance. Left: ‘This ticket admits nothing’. Right: ‘Notebook page: Sketch for an Announcement of Moveyhouse’. (# Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio.) 215 220 13. Susan Sontag, ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’ in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and other Essays (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, 1962), p. 295. pre-history. Instead of traditional filmic or artistic realism, Moveyhouse sets in place a complex type of relational realism that is anchored in a multisensory and environmentalist aesthetic beyond disciplinary boundaries where art is found in the viewer’s response to moving images, light, sound, and bodies in everyday life. 14. Sontag, One Culture (1962), p. 300. 225 230 235 240 245 15. Richard Schechner, ‘Six Axioms for Environmental Theater’ in Richard Schechner, Public Domain: Essays on the Theater (Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1969), p. 160. John Cage, or Vision as ‘Unprejudiced’ In 1965, the year that Moveyhouse premiered, Susan Sontag famously surmised that artists of the post-war period favoured a ‘content-less’ art serving as an ‘instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility’.13 Her conception of experimental art’s ability to induce ‘new modes of vivacity’14 points to the post-war growth of an idealistic belief in art’s ability to redeem reality by ‘changing’ viewers’ perception. Sontag argued that the new relational realism took its cues from the work’s structural appearance and the viewer’s active contribution to ‘fill’ the otherwise empty artwork with meaning. Art should be defined through its relationship with its audience rather than through what the artist aimed to represent. Or, in Cage’s words, ‘one must seek a relational definition’ of art as opposed to a representational one.15 Organised as three ‘silent’ time-brackets interrupted by the opening and closing of the lid of the piano, Cage’s 4 ′ 33 ′ uses the absence of piano music to enhance the listener’s awareness of urban noise and, hence, rewrites the definition of music. Simultaneously, the visual qualities of the music performance are foregounded. Redirecting the viewer’s attention to the otherwise overlooked environmental aspects (both visual and acoustic) of a recital is a strategy comparable with Moveyhouse’s dispensation with film and the ensuing awareness of the architectural surroundings, the various noises before and during a screening, including the sound of the 16-mm projector itself. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 7 Q5 Nadja Rottner 250 255 260 265 270 275 280 285 290 In Oldenburg’s theatre, not only position, but also orientation determines what one sees. Oldenburg explains that in all of his theatre work he was drawn ‘to put the responsibility upon the individual eye. You see whatever you choose to see. People are always saying: “Look over there”, while someone else is looking somewhere else’.16 This experience of multifocality and simultaneity, as opposed to the single, centred viewing point of traditional cinema, exploits viewers’ perceptual limitations. Oldenburg extends an avant-garde preference for fragmentation over completion and narrative cohesion: ‘One action has neither more importance than another, nor a longer duration. I am trying to create a sense of simultaneous activity’.17 Grounded in an emphasis on the phenomenological reality of sensory experience, the reversal of positions between viewers and performers in Moveyhouse was not only intended to make viewers aware of their bodies, but, in the manner of Cage, exploited and explored the relationship between expectation and experience in human perception. Like Cage, Oldenburg had modelled his experience of the theatre after his experience of buzzing city life and the presence of simultaneous multisensory stimulants competing for attention. Cage instigated a renewal of the perceptual experience of music by expanding the production of sound from the stage into the auditorium and beyond, inviting the multi-directionality of everyday noise during a concert to become noticed. Similarly, Oldenburg imported Cagean multifocality and simultaneity into the context of the cinema to direct attention away from the stage and to launch an alternative multisensory and environmentalist aesthetic of cinema. Oldenburg’s encounter with Cage, however, was not an uncomplicated one. Cagean chance-structures, he believed at first, eliminate the position of the author and his subjectivity from the artwork altogether. Hence, relational artwork is understood not primarily as the relation between the artist and his work, but as a communication between the work and the audience, with the viewer taking a lion’s share in the open-ended process of creating meaning. In 1962, Oldenburg read Silence, Cage’s seminal anthology of writings (published the previous year), and commented that Cage was more ‘romantic’ than himself in the attempt to rewrite the viewer’s relationship to art and everyday reality.18 (This was the year in which Oldenburg’s production of soft objects began, relying on the chance-based sagging, hanging, and bulging nature of the chosen materials to create shape, rather than on the formative hand of the artist alone.) Once Oldenburg had shifted his focus away from the author to the viewer, his philosophy of art evolved as he realised the larger ideological implications of indeterminacy and chance in art and the role it plays in the ‘activation’ of the viewer.19 Decidedly Oldenburg’s most Cagean performance, Moveyhouse employed a system of five time brackets; each was three minutes long during which Liz Stevens, an amateur pianist, repeatedly played the same simple tune. The five segments were separated by one-minute breaks filled with fanfare sounds.20 Oldenburg asserted that ‘it was primarily through music, the rhythm of simple, repeated sounds, and only secondarily through imagery, that an experience of time would creep into the work’.21 In addition to this imposed time scheme, Oldenburg relied on another Cagean method of shuffled instruction cards, popular in performance art of the early 1960s22 (Fig. 3). Employed by Cage in his theatre performances since the early 1950s, these cards both prescribe the performance in Moveyhouse, and allow for accidental and unplanned occurrences.23 A time count on each of the cards determined the duration of the tasks. Each task also had a prescribed length of five, ten, or twenty 8 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 16. Oldenburg, in Kostelanetz, Theater of Mixed Means (1965), pp. 152 –3. 17. Kostelanetz, Theater of Mixed Means (1965), p. 154. 18. Oldenburg, in BRP, C-83, Track 02, 18 January (1968?). He says, ‘I think they [Cage and Kaprow] are even more romantic than I am’. 19. This positive return to Cage and his theatrical strategies might also have been mediated by the performance work of fellow artist George Brecht, whose Cagean performance Motor Vehicle Sundown Event in 1963 provided an important model for Oldenburg on how to use instruction cards first in Autobodys (1963) and then in Moveyhouse. 20. Oldenburg, Raw Notes (1972), p. 66. 21. Oldenburg’s interest in creating a durational work, with an emphasis on providing a subjectively altered experience of time, surfaced first Blackouts, an earlier performance from 1961. 22. Elizabeth W. Kotz, ‘Words on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Read as Art: Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warhol’ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2002), pp. 33–4. 23. For an in-depth discussion of selected performances from the 1950s, see William Fetterman, John Cage’s Theater Pieces: Notations and Performances (Overseas Publishers Association: Amsterdam, 1996). Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse 295 300 305 310 315 Fig. 3. Set of instruction cards for Moveyhouse from a prop bag owned by Letty-Lou Eisenhauer. (Photo: Nadja Rottner.) 320 24. Oldenburg, Raw Notes (1972), pp. 74–5. 325 330 335 340 seconds.24 Twenty-five instruction cards regulated the behaviour of the performers acting as ‘spectators’ and five additional cards were provided to the so-called ‘ushers’ and ‘usherettes’. The ‘ushers’ and ‘usherettes’ handed out cards to the ‘spectator’ performers at the beginning of the performance to set the work in motion. Throughout the twenty-minute performance, the ‘spectators’ performed the actions prescribed by their cards in the order in which the cards were dealt. In this design, the order in which performers received the cards could not be foreseen; it was different every night the work performed. Also, the same card could occur several times. Moveyhouse was chance-based because of the built in indeterminacy of the shuffled cards. Human fallibility added to the indeterminacy of the events, as it was not impossible for a performer to execute a task twice in exactly the same way. The instruction card method guaranteed a constant flow of acoustic and visual ‘noise’. On nine out of a total of twenty-five instruction cards, performers were told to use props in order to create interferences with either the sound or the light texture of the space. For example, props such as a can of soda and a cup create noise as card 17 instructs the usher/usherette to ‘open coke, pour in cup + drop can’ (Fig. 4). While these cards are scripted to create acoustic and visual noise with the aid of props, the remaining cards prescribe interferences to be executed without props. Using only the body, seven cards call for a disruption of the projector beam, casting in the process shadows on the screen and the walls of the room: for example, ‘stand up + look behind’, ‘move to person nearest you and put arm around him/her’, ‘stretch hands in air + yawn’, ‘move three seats to left’, and ‘get up and go to OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 9 Nadja Rottner 345 350 355 360 365 370 Fig. 4. Contents of Moveyhouse prop bag owned by Letty-Lou Eisenhauer. (Photo: Nadja Rottner.) 375 380 385 390 washroom’. The remaining nine cards lead to acoustic irritations, be it through bodily sounds or human language, such as ‘cough’, ‘laugh out loud’, ‘snore’, ‘applaud’, ‘scream’, or ‘stand up + say: “I”ve seen this picture!’. Sound in Moveyhouse gained an unprecedented importance in Oldenburg’s art as both a constructive and disruptive device – as a sensation of steady rhythm (the piano and the sound of the projector) and the repeated sounding of isolated noise (the dropping of a cup etc.) Parallel to the ‘freeing’ of sound from its illustrative role in narrative film, cinematic images are ‘freed’ from film itself. For Cage, the content of his time brackets is a ‘co-existence of dissimilars’ – sequences of random events outside of his control.25 By contrast, Oldenburg determined the content of each bracket, and it was only their order that was random: he not only scripted the actions, but meticulously rehearsed them. Yet, compared to traditional theatre, his ‘physical images’ (there are few, if any, spoken words in Oldenburg’s performances) are primarily associative and evocative, rather than descriptive, finite, and predetermined. ‘Waking up to the very life we are living’26 is Cage’s slogan for an intensification of experience through an art of heightened perceptual awareness. As Noël Carroll has pointed out in his critique of the ‘plasticity of vision’ and its ability to ‘change’,27 the least art can do is to make us 10 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 25. John Cage, Silence (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1966), p. 13. 26. Cage, Silence (1966), p. 12. 27. Recent scholarship in cinema studies has pointed out successfully that the rhetoric of changing perception is misguided since art’s ability is only to alter visual conventions, but not the biological faculty of vision. Noël Carroll, ‘Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 59, Winter 2001, p. 11. Carroll chiefly opposes Jonathan Crary’s view that modernity had formed a new perceptual model. See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and the Modern Culture (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999). Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse 395 400 405 410 415 420 28. Branden W. Joseph, ‘“A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers”: The Development of John Cage’s Early Avant-Garde Aesthetic Position’ in David W. Paterson (ed.), John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950 (Routledge: New York, 2002), pp. 141 –2. Providing an avant-garde legacy for Cages aesthetic, Joseph explained that Cage’s notion of ‘therapy’ rests on ‘the updating of habitual perception so as to render it capable of countering perceptual shocks’. Joseph, John Cage: Music (2002), p. 144. The purpose of this therapy is to ‘accommodate the modern subject to his or her social environmental condition’. Joseph, John Cage: Music (2002), p. 136. 29. Painter Mark Tobey took Cage on walks through the city, pointing out easily overlooked elements of the city landscape. Joseph, John Cage: Music (2002), pp. 135–7. Eliza E. Rathbone argues that Tobey’s ‘paintings became abstractions of natural forces. . . Toby did not find a dichotomy between the natural and urban worlds . . .’. See Eliza E. Rathborne, ‘Mark Tobey, City Paintings’ in Eliza E. Rathbone (ed.), Mark Tobey, City Paintings (National Gallery of Art: Washington, D.C., 1984), p. 17. 30. Oldenburg spent 1955 –1957 in Chicago. Both the Institute of Design, commonly known as the Chicago Bauhaus, and the Art Institute of Chicago were important influences on his art. Cage taught at that time at the Bauhaus. Paul Cummings, ‘Tape-recorded Interview with Claes Oldenburg’, unpublished manuscript (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Washington, D.C., 1973–1974), p. 62 (abbreviated PC hereafter). 31. PC, ‘Tape-recorded Interview’ (1973– 1974), p. 62 425 32. György Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944), p. 19. 33. For more information on this relationship, see Branden W. Joseph, ‘John Cage and the Architecture of Silence’, October, vol. 81, Summer 1997, p. 87. 430 435 440 notice – a true perception of reality rather than an unthinking view. For Cage, outdated musical preconceptions inhibit the perception of the modern world. It is our knowledge of cultural conventions that shapes hearing and seeing and creates relationships between things, rather than hearing/seeing each for its own acoustic and visual potential.28 A belief in the dichotomy of perception and cognition was artistically generative in the arts of the 1950s. Cage’s notion of an ‘unprejudiced’ perception of sounds is anchored in his visual experience of walking the streets of New York.29 Oldenburg received his inspiration and themes from Lower Manhattan as he saw the landscape of billboards, stored displays and garbage heaps, a city flooded with testimonials to the pervasiveness of consumerism. In both cases, the post-industrial landscape of the modern city was the starting point for an ideology of an art of renewal. Oldenburg, who studied in the mid-1950s at the Art Institute of Chicago, specifically recalled having been taught the idea that the artist needs to go out into the streets of the city to find inspiration for a new art of contemporary appeal, one which allows the viewer to see reality in a new light; this was a key concept of Bauhaus teaching at the Institute of Design.30 Bauhaus-affiliated critics in the post-war period proclaimed the power of vision to reformulate art, claiming that, as the urban reality of a constantly progressing technological society is in constant flux, art needed to reflect these changes. György Kepes called for a new ‘standard of vision’ in Language of Vision (1944) that allowed the viewer to ‘re-orient himself in reality’.31 His is arguably one of the most influential post-war conceptions of vision as ameliorative; Oldenburg read this book and acknowledged its influence on his art.32 In Kepes’s opinion, a mid-century paradigm shift had taken place in the way people experienced urban space. An obsolete model of perspectival monofocality that guaranteed a fixed position in space needed to give way to a time-based multifocal and dynamic conception of space – a vision of reality already supported by Futurism and Cubism. Built on Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy’s ideas for ‘a new vision’ in art, which was also influential for Cage,33 Kepes called for a language of modern art and design that elicited those sensory experiences that escape determination (and hence regulation) through verbal language. (That is, a new language was necessary to describe art which could not be captured in language.) Critiques of language as a restriction upon the fullness of experience were very popular in the 1950s, including pragmatic thinking by John Dewey, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the wide reception of Antonin Artaud’s theories on a new theatre; all of these writers allot importance to embodied experience beyond the descriptive grasp of language. Kepes’s re-envisioning of reality through art is predicated upon a notion of vision that improves itself towards an idealised state at the expense of the corporeal and the material; his conception of art stressed the idea that abstractions and laws are more fundamental to reality than sensory experiences. This formulation of vision as disembodied and idealised stands in strong contrast to both Cage’s basic phenomenology of embodied vision and Oldenburg’s quest for a haptic vision of redemption, but all of these thinkers drew similar distinctions between culturally constructed and embodied vision. The writings of Moholy-Nagy in the 1930s (especially his book The New Vision) are the historical and intellectual link between pre-war thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, and the post-war arts’ insistence on an art of embodied perceptual renewal. Benjamin believed in the ability of art to create a conscious or unconscious awareness of somatic reality that might otherwise OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 11 Nadja Rottner 445 450 455 460 465 470 475 480 485 490 go unnoticed. His understanding of art as a tool to combat what he believed to be an increasing alienation from everyday life is most famously incorporated into his theory of Surrealist photography.34 According to Benjamin, the mobile photographer can offer a view of urban reality with his camera that is more ‘real’ than what can be seen with the naked eye; techniques specific to the camera, such as superimposition of two images and zooming in, allow perception of a previously unnoticed aspect of reality. What throws us into ‘noticing’ is an experience of ‘perceptual shock’, which opens up a rift between reality and the unconscious, and allows the repressed dimension of the physical, the somatic, and the unconscious to enter everyday life. His great insight was to note that film contained the potential to shock the viewer, and to open up vision’s physiological grounding to the forces of the unconscious. Benjamin’s conception of tactile vision as immediate, violent, and affectual is anchored in the medium specificity of cinema and its structure of dialectical montage. While Benjamin believed that the technology of film could transcend mimetic experience and access the viewer’s unconscious, Oldenburg rejected this view. His ultimate dissatisfaction with both photography and film opposes Benjamin’s belief in the epistemic potential of technological media to make us see ‘differently’. In Moveyhouse, it is not the technical specificity of film or medium-specific techniques that hold a remedial potential, but an understanding of cinema as a cultural apparatus with a history whose conventions are constantly up for change. Building on his own distracted experience of the cinema, in Moveyhouse, Oldenburg responded to the evident historical character of the dilapidated theatre as an outdated movie palace from the silent film era: On first visit to theater find it a real place, a charming obsolete silly little theater . . . walls done up with scenes from Europe, pillars along the side, that stuff – gives identity . . . The (Wurlitzer) auditorium is something like the late Paramount; there’s enough to look at, if you don’t want to look at the screen or stage.35 Oldenburg’s attack on the conventions of cinema was paralleled and presaged by his attraction to the historical and site-specific quality of the place. Building on Benjamin’s ideas, Siegfried Kracauer argued that in the 1930s (the decade of the blossoming of movie palace culture), the only form of shock that mattered occurred in film, and cinema’s perceptual distractions such as the ushers should be avoided.36 If Kracauer, and by extension Benjamin, saw a radical potential situated in the film’s constant emission of perceptual shocks to the viewer, Oldenburg dismissed this possibility, as he believed that the effects of narrative film on human sensorium were always dulling any form of awareness.37 However, to suggest that Oldenburg is anti-film is to overlook his interest in contemporary experimental film and alternative approaches to montage. Experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage developed a new model of montage in the 1950s that moved away from employing antithetical contrasts in montage; ‘plastic cutting’38 deviated from traditional story-telling structures in mainstream film since the viewer now focused on gleaning purely formal relations (cutting from one movement to another, using colour or shape connections) between otherwise unconnected image sequences. These visual connections are associative and so plentiful that each viewer responds to the film differently, establishing different sets of plastic relations. 12 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 34. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) in Hannah Arendt, (ed.), Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217– 42. 35. Oldenburg, Raw Notes (1972), p. 80. 36. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces’, New German Critique, Vol 40, special issue: ‘Weimar Film Theory’, Winter 1987, pp. 91–6. 37. More recent theoreticians of space such as Guy Debord or Michel de Certeau come to mind when discussing spectatorial experience in the city and the formation of the modern viewer as a critical individual. However, Moyehouse’s relationship with silent cinema and the belief in redemptive vision links up more directly with modernist legacies of plastic vision and the role of technology in art developed in the teachings of the Bauhaus in the post-war period, and the persistent intellectual influence of Benjamin and Kracauer on Kepes and Moholy-Nagy. 38. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 157. In an unpublished interview from the 1970s, Oldenburg acknowledged that he admired Stan Brakhage. PC, ‘Tape-recorded Interview’ (1973 – 1974), p. 62. Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse 495 500 39. Stan Brakhage, ‘Metaphors on Vision’ in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Avant-Garde Film, (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), p. 54. 40. For an excellent analysis of Brakhage’s rhetoric of the ‘untutored eye’ and its intellectual history within nineteenth and twentieth-century art and perceptual theory, see William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 41. Oldenburg, Raw Notes (1972), p. 64. 505 42. Blank film is more commonly referred to as clear leader. It is exposed and developed film the clarity of which is the result of the removal of the emulsion. 43. Oldenburg, Raw Notes (1972), pp. 54, 58, 62. 44. Oldenburg, Raw Notes (1972), p. 64. 510 515 520 525 530 535 45. Moveyhouse ‘reflects my preference for the thing rather than the picture of the thing and for uninteresting ordinary activity in preference to organized activity, round vs. flat, etc. It became my attitude or critique of film’. Oldenburg, in Kostelanetz, Theater of Mixed Means (1965), p. 155. For ‘hypnotic,’ see Kostelanetz, Theater of Mixed Means (1965), p. 151. For ‘voyeuristic,’ see Kostelanetz, Theater of Mixed Means (1965), n. 1. By employing these terms – flat, hypnotic, and voyeuristic – the artist prefigured claims we tend to associate with apparatus theory in film studies of the 1970s, namely that the cinema itself is inherently voyeuristic and that it lulls spectators into altered states of consciousness in which their critical faculties are suspended. This rather simplistic and reductive view of viewing experience as spectacular has long since been disputed. However, it appears that it was a common assumption among artists in the 1960s. Brakhage voiced a programmatic break away from monofocality and perspectivism in his 1963 publication Metaphors on Vision, a book reaching back to his writings in the early 1950s. Historically, this paralleled Cage’s introduction of multifocality and simultaneity into the theatre. Brakhage suggested a plethora of strategies to ‘escape the tyranny of the viewing point’, which, as he saw it, is enforced by the camera as the instrument of one-point perspective. These strategies included ‘wrecking the focal attention of the lens’, rapid intercutting of frames leading to a flicker-effect, or simply the use of images in film created by light only, without the aid of a film camera.39 The subjectivity of the filmmaker, at the heart of Brakhage’s liberatory agenda to free the eye, is inscribed into film in an immediate and tangible way as the record of the filmmaker’s physical (and emotional) movement – an idea inspired by readings of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings as traces of the artist and his moving body. Brakhage provided an alternative model of filmic aesthetic predicated upon a multifocal experience that was not random and viewer-based, as in Cage, but resulted in a direct, physical inscription of the subjectivity of the filming subject into the celluloid of film. This dual revelation of how multifocality could structure both the experience of the author and the viewer provided the conceptual and structural basis for Moveyhouse. Stan Brakhage’s ‘Untutored Vision’, or Ripping the Continuity of Film Brakhage’s agenda to liberate the eye of the viewer from the conventions of Western perspectivalism targeted the monolithic and immobile authoritarian point of view that he saw built into the camera lens. He repeatedly spoke of the ‘untutored eye’ – a metaphor for a viewer freed from the restraints of normative, one-point perspectival thinking; almost all camera work for narrative film was suspect from this point of view.40 For Brakhage, to reject filmic imagery was to reject representational illusionism. Oldenburg, as the script to Moveyhouse demonstrates, was aware of many contemporary experimental film techniques.41 He employed an array of experimental film strategies (many first developed in the 1950s by Brakhage) to obstruct and efface the legibility of film: looped film, faded found footage, flicker film, and even blank film, which, reflexively, eventually showed dust motes, scratches, and surface imperfections.42 These techniques were conceived of as acoustic and optical hurdles to an immersive experience of the cinema itself. In the notes to Moveyhouse, he imagined blindfolding the audience in order to prevent their exposure to the image on the screen. Oldenburg also attacked the screen itself as the visible threshold between reel life and real life. He envisioned an event where the ‘film screen is ripped apart in front of them (Audience), things thrown on it, cut into film . . . usherettes (unbutton cut w. scissors. RIP w. blades) the screen (or things are first thrown at it) or it is ripped down’.43 In the end, he cleverly relinquished the use of film altogether – ‘everything in attendance but the actual event Emperor[’]s new clothes no film in camera’.44 Hans Christian Anderson’s fable is to Oldenburg analogous to the viewer’s eager acceptance of film as a physiological distraction from reality. Oldenburg believes film produces a ‘hypnotic image’45 insofar as it attracts the viewer’s unconscious attention. Nothing can be perceived beyond or around it. Moving images, either televised or projected on a cinema screen, transfix the viewer and create a passive state of mind from which any spatio-temporal or physical awareness is excluded. Oldenburg, like Brakhage, OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 13 Nadja Rottner 540 545 550 555 560 565 570 575 580 585 explicitly critiqued the spectacular quality of narrative film, combating passive absorption with a focus on movement. A proclivity for conveying a heightened sense of physicality and immediacy in film attracted Oldenburg to Brakhage’s work and his critique of film’s illusions. For Brakhage, the camera is an extension of the body of the artist, and has the potential not only to capture images from perceptual reality, but also to endow film with a sense of physical and perceptual immediacy. Oldenburg, who has referred to himself as a post-Pollockian artist, valued Brakhage’s Post-Abstract Expressionist attempt to link gesture and bodily movement to vision.46 Oldenburg and Brakhage both direct attention not merely at understanding sensory experience but also towards examining how art might alter or rejuvenate perception. In the Romantic tradition, these artists presented their own (privileged) ways of seeing to the audience in an attempt to make them ‘see’ better. They are connected in their pursuit of an Abstract Expressionist process in which the work is conceived of as a painterly trace of the moving artist. Brakhage believed that the transformation of the viewer’s perception of reality begins with a cinematic transformation of that reality through the ‘magic’ of abstract motion and light. Yet, abstraction in film, for Oldenburg, does not lead to an experience of metaphysical transcendence. In his earlier performances, Oldenburg’s preoccupation with film ran alongside his interest in the medium of photography. In Blackouts (1960), Snapshots from the City (1960), and Fotodeath (1961; originally called Cinema), he performatively exhibited photography as the harbinger of death. Invitations to Fotodeath featured a schematic rendering of a camera on a tripod. The main scene that lent the performance its title consisted of a group of three performers on a bench, lining up to be photographed. Just seconds before the photographer, played by Henry Geldzahler, could release the recording mechanism, the three sitters (in front of a large backdrop of the New York skyline) moved in unison abruptly to the right: they dropped dead. This scene was repeated several times. In Fotodeath, Oldenburg criticised the still image of photography for its inability to capture life ‘alive’. Unlike photography, however, Oldenburg believed that cinema – seen as a ‘light that does not kill, projects life’ – had the potential to reanimate and escape the death trap of representation, as all cinema is ‘shadow play’ where the reality of the image cannot exist without the imagination of the viewer. In Moveyhouse, ‘the [w]hole point is to – like holograms [– ] materialize subject (also like a séance – a key parallel) + materialize the cone of light’.47 For Oldenburg, light in cinema is the material trace and enabler of the filmic image. By extension, in Moveyhouse, shadows are conceived of as animated, representational imagery, caught in the eternal loop between life and death. In Moveyhouse, ‘activated’ perception becomes the basis for rejuvenated spectatorial experience. Looking at cinema from a fresh perspective involves perceptual estrangement48: the removal of the object from its normal empirical field by breaking perceptive expectations and introducing instead a focus on the mechanics of perception. For Cage, Brakhage, and Oldenburg, the goal is to ‘make strange’ the experience of listening and watching by ‘making visible’ the conditions of perception. What Oldenburg referred to as ‘seeing the world suddenly in a new light, in an unforeseen new way’49 links him to a 1950s history of ameliorative vision (and sound), one which, in turn, is an extension and revision of modernist thought on the role of technology in art. What Cage called an ‘unprejudiced vision’, Brakhage referred to as the ‘untutored eye’, and Oldenburg as ‘innocent vision’. The 14 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 46. Claes Oldenburg, ‘Egomessages about Pollock’ in ‘Jackson Pollock: An Artists’ Symposium, Part 2′ , Art News, vol. 66, no. 3, May 1967, p. 27, pp. 66– 7. 47. Oldenburg, Raw Notes (1972), pp. 80–1. The slogan ‘light that doesn’t kill, projects life’ originally appeared in the Programme notes to The Street and Snapshots of the City, a performance that took place inside the installation. 48. Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longmans, 1988), pp. 16–30. 49. Oldenburg, in PC, ‘Tape-recorded Interview’ (1973–1974), p. 125. Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse 590 50. A discussion of the value of non-Western arts to their different aesthetics is a topic beyond the scope of this essay. 595 600 51. Historically, this didacticism goes back to a rhetoric of the innocent eye first introduced into modern art by John Ruskin; see John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing (Dover Publications: New York, 1971), pp. 27 –8. For an excellent discussion of his concept of vision in the formation of modernism, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994), pp. 1–8. 52. For Cage’s critical relationship to Hollywood, see Joseph, John Cage: Music (2002), pp. 153–5. 53. Claes Oldenburg, Oldenburg: Six Themes (Walker Art Center: Minneapolis, 1975), p. 33. 605 610 615 54. Mickey Mouse made his debut before the general public in a film named ‘Steamboat Willie’, first screened on 19 November 1928, at the Colony Theatre in New York. ‘September 19, 1928 in History,’ Brainy History, retrieved 9 September 2011, ,www.brainyhistory.com/ events/1928/september_19_1928_87792. html.. 55. Asked how important it was that the audience understands references to Hollywood cinema, the artist responded: ‘I prefer silent films, with tangible music; i.e., a musical instrument in actual space’. Interview with the author via email on 21 May 2007. 56. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Gingko Press: Berkeley, CA, 2003). 620 625 630 635 writings of these three men repeatedly employ the trope of the innocent child, the naı̈ve savage and/or the madman as metaphors for vision untouched or outside of civilisation and culture.50 An ‘innocent’ or ‘untutored vision’ seeks a viewing subject (be it the artist or the viewer) void of any preconceptions or thoughts.51 This implies a belief in both the artist’s ability and the viewer’s willingness to, at least momentarily, strip away cultural knowledge and experience art as if, for the first time, abandoning preconceptions of artistic forms/genres/mediums for an untutored aesthetic perception. Innocence of Vision and the Critique of Language Brakhage and Cage were convinced that narrative-based Hollywood cinema, in its reliance on seemingly transparent illusions, created a ‘false’ way of seeing because it only perpetuated the existing notions of filmic ‘realism’ and truth.52 Oldenburg’s dislike for the flat and voyeuristic quality of filmic representation is similar to this view; yet he does not succumb to the temptation of pitching avant-garde art against popular entertainment of the 1950s, which saw the emergence of the anti-hero in film (James Dean), the birth of teen comedies and the Mickey Mouse Club. He critically differed in his relationship to Hollywood cinema from both Brakhage and Cage. One of the most interesting of the shadowy silhouettes in Moveyhouse is the shadow cast by the so-called ‘Mickey Mouse masks’ (Figs 4 and 5). Sown from canvas after Oldenburg’s design, these masks, worn by up to three performers sitting in the seats of the theatre, mimicked from the side (i.e. the perspective of the audience) the silhouette of an old movie projector. The mask conflates the shape of a movie camera, seen in profile, with a frontal impression of Mickey Mouse, as projected on screen. As was customary for the first movie cameras, the apparatus functioned simultaneously as a camera and a projector. The mask can thus be associated, formally and historically, with both the camera and the projector, with the reels acting as the ears and the lens as the nose. (In addition, ‘movie house’ rhymes with Mickey Mouse, and, in Oldenburg’s poetic language, with ‘movie mouse’.53) This symbolic conflation of a fictional character from a film – the cartoon mouse – with the apparatus is representative of Oldenburg’s most programmatic strategy: the playful confusion of subject and object categories in his art. The artist circulated two different spellings of Moveyhouse. Variant one – Moviehouse – foregrounds the work’s belonging to its site; the outdated term movie house replacing the more modern term, ‘cinema’. The second spelling – Moveyhouse – builds on the aforementioned superimposition of the cartoon character Mickey Mouse with its discursive setting of the cinema. The character of Mickey Mouse, which launched Walt Disney’s career in 1928, was originally conceived for the silent cinema screen.54 The characterisation of Oldenburg’s work in the programme notes as a ‘black and white expandysmaganza’, taken together with the live piano music, further facilitated the association of the performance with black and white silent film.55 Oldenburg, like media theorist Marshall McLuhan, believed that the modern world provided a processed experience of reality. In a mediated environment, the content of every new medium is always another medium, which has just been superseded; for example, novels provide the content of movies. This idea is encapsulated in McLuhan’s famous slogan ‘the medium is the message’, coined in 1964.56 If Moveyhouse is an allusion to silent cinema, following McLuhan’s theory that the content of a medium is always another medium, then shadow play reaches back to the beginnings of cinema’s OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 15 Nadja Rottner 640 645 650 655 660 Fig. 5. Claes Oldenburg, Moveyhouse, 1965, performance. (Photo: Ugo Mulas # Photo courtesy Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio.) 665 670 675 680 685 pre-history in the age of the magic lantern. In Oldenburg’s cinema without film, he valued the obsolete ‘technology’ of shadow play for its naı̈ve realism, its direct and immediate relationship with what it represents. As indices of the real, shadows are neither abstract nor representational in nature, defying categorisation. The cinematic nature of these shadows is defined not by their essence as light moving in time, but by their conceptual (and historical) association with the institution of cinema. Oldenburg does not separate between objects and subjects, or culture and nature, but seeks to teach his audience through art how to bring the two together. Driven by a compulsion to conflate products of technology, such as the movie projector/camera, with the organic realm of the human body, he continuously forges connections between nature and industry in his art. The artificial divisions between ordinary human biology and perceptions, and the technical apparatus of mass media should loosen their stronghold on experience. Oldenburg attempts to humanise technology, to make it an integral part of a holistic notion of the human environment. If our culture is to recover a new sense of human potential, it will not be outside the field of technology; rather, people must understand technology as part of modern reality, and make use of this technology to reach new perceptual insights. McLuhan believed that mass media and communication technologies can, in effect, actualise the human potential and overcome an alienation from our own powers. As a ‘technological humanist’57 (a term coined by Arthur Kroker), McLuhan was keen on redeeming technology as a new framework for perceptual experiences, despite his critical stance towards its impact on human 16 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 57. Arthur Kroker, ‘Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan’ in Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, Digital Delirium (Palgrave MacMillan: London, 1997), p. 95. Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse experience. As a technological humanist, Oldenburg never worked from nature, but instead accepted the media reality of modern life as the new ‘nature’: 58. Oldenburg, ‘Raw Notes’ (1972), pp. 80– 1. 690 695 700 705 59. For an analysis of the emergence of soft sculpture in Oldenburg’s art, and how this new prototype is intellectually and artistically related to his performances and the issue of remedial vision, see my forthcoming essay ‘Object Lessons’ in Nadja Rottner (ed.), Claes Oldenburg, An October Files book, vol. 13, Spring 2012, pp. 173–206. 60. Oldenburg’s interest in linguistic as well as visual analogies was spurred by his study of the workings of language in poetry during his years as an English major at Yale University in the late 1940s and early 1950s; he studied poetry and pre-Elizabethan drama, and even wrote Symbolist and Surrealist-inspired poems in 1956–1968. For a brief introduction to his poetry, see Robert E. Haywood, ‘Claes Oldenburg’ Notre Dame Review, vol. 9, Winter 2000, pp. 1–3. For an overview of his interest in language, see Ellen H. Johnson, ‘Oldenburg’s Poetics: Analogues, Metamorphoses and Sources’, Art International, vol. 14, no. 4, April 1970, pp. 42– 5. 61. Oldenburg, in BRP, C-89, Track 01, 20 April 1968. 710 62. Oldenburg, in PC, ‘Tape-recorded Interview’ (1973–1974), p. 188. 63. Oldenburg, in PC, ‘Tape-recorded Interview’ (1973–1974), p. 188. 64. Oldenburg, in PC, ‘Tape-recorded Interview’ (1973–1974), p. 23. 715 720 To physicalize – by which I mean make material – the cone (Ice Cream – Illinois Central cone) of light. Light comes in cones, like ice cream. To physicalize, realize, actualize . . . this cone, proceeding from projector. Like hoops of a growing diameter. The fan. Also functions as chopping instrument – as with sausage or any meat the basic delineator of three dimensional or material space.58 Oldenburg used an actual fan to create a flicker effect in Moveyhouse by interfering with the projector beam. For Oldenburg, all objects (even commodified objects) can be part of a visual vocabulary once they are reduced to a set of basic geometric forms such as circles, triangles, and rectangles. His soft sculptures partake in the same system. For the iconic Floor Burger (1962), the clichéd image of burger as seen in advertisements provides the starting point. Then, the hamburger is reduced to three large circles with a small one (the pickle) on top. It wins back its physicality in its grossly enlarged final (yet changeable) shape, which appears flaccid, sagging, and fluid.59 All soft works are related to each other Q4 through formal permutation of geometric patterns. The reduction in real consumer items to simple geometric forms – for example, in Moveyhouse the projector becomes a rectangle with two circular extensions on top which then becomes a mouse which, in turn, becomes a geometric mouse – is the starting point for a potentially endless chain of formal substitutions based on visual and/or linguistic analogy.60 The artist’s imaginary vision allowed him to ‘see’ things differently: ‘People just don’t realize how abstract my vision is, as far as things are concerned. I look at a telephone and I see a pure form. My vision is actually very abstract’.61 Severing the connection between objects and their functionality in everyday life required a state Oldenburg termed the ‘innocence of vision’. He attempted to inculcate this innocent vision in his audience, challenging them to perceive the physical shape of objects rather than their conceptual category. Oldenburg wishes to pass an artistic state of ‘innocence’ onto the viewer, who, in turn, can re-imagine his reality imaginatively. He, in the tradition of the Symbolist, visionary artist, believed that: Nobody has an innocent vision except the artist. You know, so that no one can ever really see what the artist sees. Very few people can do that. When you start looking at art, I mean it took me years to look at art to see what I was supposed to – I mean to see what the artist might see.62 The enemy of Oldenburg’s art is language itself: 725 730 735 The trouble is that most people don’t have an innocent vision in the sense that they have names for things. Once you have names for things then your vision is no longer innocent. That’s my way of looking at it. I try to look at the things as if I had never seen them before. As if I were a Martian and didn’t know what they were for, had no idea of the function of things; was only interested in the structure of it and experiencing the structure whether it was – how it felt.63 The remedy is an exercise of seeing ‘as if ’ that builds on the split between perception and cognition in order ‘to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known’.64 Oldenburg’s soft sculptures are remakes of everyday food, clothing, and household objects. Yet, the craft aspect of the work, its degree of abstraction, and the importance of the sensuous tangibility of his material as OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012 17 Nadja Rottner 740 745 750 755 760 765 770 775 780 an expressive force in its own right are partially at odds with Pop art’s popular imagery, mass distribution, and industrial manufacture, which is closer to Marcel Duchamp’s model of the readymade. Situated in the historical interstice between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, this condition of liminality is crucial to understanding Oldenburg’s art. Oldenburg’s work presents a seeming contradiction – such as that between handcrafted, expressive sculpture, and Pop iconography – which is best described as a dual indebtedness to both process and found imagery in a single work of art. This is a tension the artist was pursuing in order to transcend the stronghold of conceptual categories on experience, and to enrich everyday experience. Oldenburg responded to and participated in the revival of an art of perceptual renewal in the performing arts of the post-war period. Jonas Mekas, Susan Sontag, György Kepes, and László Moholy-Nagy were all major participants in the creation of this trend, which was exemplified by the art of John Cage and Stan Brakhage. Cage’s model for expanding acoustic experience in art to include multisensory perception rests on a phenomenological model of viewing experience that reorients the viewer’s attention away from the stage and towards the broader environment. For Brakhage, an embodied experience of film allows for the viewer to access his/her own subjectivity, imaginatively exploring the rift between seeing and thinking, and potentially activating unconscious thoughts and feelings. For Oldenburg, the liberation of the viewer from the constraints of established perspectival conventions not only destabilises the institutions enforcing these conventions (such as Hollywood), but also problematises the workings of language itself. Cage provided a model for structuring visual experience in performance art that leaves enough room for the imagination of both the artist and the viewer, and Brakhage renewed Oldenburg’s faith in the ability of film to capture images of the real world alongside traces of the physicality and psychology of the artist. Traditional dichotomies such as objective and subjective are replaced in this relational art of ameliorative renewal by a state of intersubjectivity, one in which subjectivity is individually formed in the viewer’s personal experience of the work. The very history of post-war process-based arts has been subject to the divisive nature of binary thought that Oldenburg’s art seeks to undermine. This history has traditionally separated the chance-based legacy of Cagean indeterminacy from the expressionistic process art of Jackson Pollock (and Brakhage). However, Moveyhouse demonstrates that these trends could coincide in the work of a single artist. This requires a re-evaluation of art history’s existing typologies, and perhaps suggests that Cage and Brakhage had more in common than has yet been recognised. Connecting Oldenburg to the legacies of ameliorative vision in the post-war period reveals his idealistic, and ultimately utopian, aspirations to improve social relations through art. This essay has been an attempt to link Oldenburg to a larger twentieth-century tradition of art as a tool to extend and expand the human sensorium. The aim of art to ‘expand consciousness’ in the post-war period need not be reduced to the legacy of the Beat movement and psychedelic explorations of the expansion of experience through art after 1966. Looking at Oldenburg, Brakhage, and Cage shows that ideas about the restorative potential of embodied vision were pervasively present in the arts of the 1950s and early to mid-1960s. 18 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2012