Claes Oldenburg's Theater of Vision

Book excerpt: In four chronologically organized chapters, this study traces the conceptual dependence and deep connectivity among Claes Oldenburg’s poetry, sculpture, films, and performance art between 1956 and 1965. This research-intensive book argues that Oldenburg’s art relies on machine vision and other metaphors to visualize the structure and image content of human thought as an artistic problem. Anchored in new oral history interviews and extensive archival material, it brings together understudied visual and concrete poetry, experimental films, fifteen group performances (commonly referred to as happenings), and a close analysis of his well-known installations of The Street (1960) and The Store (1961–62), effectively setting in place a reexamination of Oldenburg’s pop art from the street, store, home, and cinema years. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, film studies, performance studies, literature, intermedia studies, and media theory.