Claes Oldenburg: Store Days: Documents from The Store, 1961, and Ray Gun Theater, 1962 (1967)

““I’d like to get away from the notion of a work of art as something outside of experience, something that is located in museums, something that is terribly precious,” Oldenburg declared. In 1961 he presented a new body of work whose subject matter he had culled from the clothing stores, delis, and bric-a-brac shops that crowded the Lower East Side. The earliest Store sculptures, which debuted in spring 1961 at the Martha Jackson Gallery, at 32 East Sixty-Ninth Street, are wall-mounted reliefs depicting everyday items like shirts, dresses, cigarettes, sausages, and slices of pie. Oldenburg made them from armatures of chicken wire overlaid with plaster-soaked canvas, using enamel paint straight from the can to give them a bright color finish. At the gallery, the reliefs hung cheek by jowl, emulating displays in low-end markets.

In December 1961, Oldenburg opened The Store in the rented storefront at 107 East Second Street that served as his studio, which he called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company. A fully elaborated manifestation of the project that he had begun months earlier, The Store conflated two disparate types of commerce: the sale of cheap merchandise and the sale of serious art. Oldenburg packed more than one hundred objects into the modestly sized room, setting previously exhibited reliefs alongside new, primarily freestanding sculptures. Everything was available for purchase, with prices starting at $21.79 up to $499.99. After The Store closed, on January 31, 1962, Oldenburg used the space to stage a series of performances collectively titled Ray Gun Theater.” (Source)

Selected by Claes Oldenburg and Emmett Williams
Photographs by Robert R. McElroy
Publisher Something Else Press, New York, 1967
152 pages
via penfold

2013 exhibition at MoMA

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Oliver Jahraus: Die Aktion des Wiener Aktionismus. Subversion der Kultur und Dispositionierung des Bewußtseins (2001) [German]

“Die konsequente Aufhebung jeglicher Grenzen zwischen Kunst und Leben zu diesem Zweck wird die Aktion von den Wiener Aktionisten als avantgardistisches Instrument realisiert. Gewalt und Zerstörung mit und am Körper als Material der Aktion sind die Mittel, mit denen sie inszeniert und soweit radikalisiert wird, daß das Publikum sie nicht mehr als ein ästhetisches Geschehen im Rahmen der Kunst verarbeiten kann. Das Publikum wird überfordert und somit dispositioniert. Damit soll das Bewußtsein des einzelnen aus seinen konstitutiven Ordnungen, wie sie von der Gesellschaft, ihren Zeichensystemen, ihrer staatlichen Macht und ihrer Kultur vorgegeben sind, herausgelöst und diese Ordnungen selbst aufgelöst werden, auch wenn die Aktionen häufig eine Stabilisierung dieser Ordnungen nach sich gezogen haben.”

Publisher Wilhelm Fink, Munich, 2001
Das Problempotential der Nachkriegsavantgarden series, 2
ISBN 3770534514, 9783770534517
505 pages

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Thomas Dreher: Performance Art nach 1945. Aktionstheater und Intermedia (2001) [German]

This book explores a spectrum of types and definitions of performance, from action painting, Gutai, Viennese Action art, and destruction in art to body and transgressive art, and from closed-circuit video to computer and telecommunications in performance. Sections of the book also address solo, as well as collective, performance, multifunctionalism and conceptual performance, the role of the spectator, and other neglected aspects of the range of performance.

Publisher Wilhelm Fink, Munich, 2001
Das Problempotential der Nachkriegsavantgarden series, 3
ISBN 3770534522, 9783770534524
543 pages

Reviews: Michael Hauffen (Kunstforum, 2001, DE), Holger Schulze (IASL, 2002, DE).

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Academia.edu