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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PDF (83 MB)

Tadeusz Kantor: Panoramic Sea Happening (1967) [PL/EN]

The Panoramic Sea Happening was the most spectacular and complex of all of Kantor’s happenings. It took place on 23 August 1967, during the 5th Koszalin Plein-Air convention in Łazy, a small seaside town near Osiek. Prepared for only a couple of participants (mostly for members and friends of the Foksal Gallery), it had an enormous audience among the plein-air’s guests and tourists on the beach. The happening consisted of four parts: ‘Sea Concert’ [Koncert morski], ‘Medusa Raft’ [Tratwa Meduzy], ‘Erotic Barbuyage’ [Barbujaż erotyczny] and ‘Agrarian Culture on the Sand’ [Kultura agrarna na piasku]. (Source)

Simultaneously with the happening, Submergence took place – an event organized by artists and critics associated with the Foksal Gallery. It lasted for two hours. The overall number of participants was 1600 (the actors and the audience). (Source)

On the fifth page of a booklet that followed the event, Eustachy Kossakowski‘s photograph of the ‘Sea Concert’ is reproduced. In this image, the painter Edward Krasiński stands on a platform a few yards into the surf, ‘conducting’ the sea while a group of people sitting in beach chairs in the foreground constitute an audience. This image has become iconic documentation of the artists, scholars, and performers surrounding the Foksal Gallery. (Source)

Page 14/15 of the booklet contains written reflections by Tadeusz Kantor, Wieslaw Borowski, and Hanna Ptaszkowska, in both Polish and English.

Publisher Koszalińskie Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne, [1967]
[16] pages, 16 x 58 cm
via Digitizing Ideas

Commentary: Karolina Czerska (Culture.pl, 2014, EN/PL/RU), Jerzy Hanusek (Estetyka i Krytyka, 2014, PL), Post/MoMA (David Senior, 2015, EN), Wikipedia (PL).
Worldcat

Booklet (PL/EN, PDF, 2 MB)
Script (PL/EN, PDF, 10 MB)
JPGs

131 photographs from the event, by Eustachy Kossakowski (at ArtMuseum.pl), some in higher resolution (Digitizing Ideas), some in color (#8-13, Culture.pl).

Film Culture, 43: Expanded Arts (1966)

This special issue of 1960s New York’s avant-garde film quarterly is an all Fluxus tabloid newsprint issue featuring George Maciunas, Jonas Mekas, Henry Flynt, Ken Dewey, Gerd Stern, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Whitman, et al.

From the Introduction: “The purpose of this Special Issue of Film Culture, EXPANDED ARTS, is twofold: a) to give to our readers and idea about what’s going on in the avantgarde arts today, and b) to serve as a sort of catalogue or index to the work of some of the artists involved.

This issue started as an index to the artists working in the area of Expanded Cinema. Only as we went along, our original conception changed and we decided to include all the other arts. EXPANDED ARTS – we intend to come out with other issues–will eventually include all areas of expanded performing arts. This issue, however, is dominated by the Expanded Cinema, Expanded Music, Expanded Gags and Readymades, and some Happenings. And not all of the artists working in those areas are represented. Some of them were simply too bnusy to get the necessary information in time. Many are missing; such as Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham, Ken Dewey, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Ben Van Meter, Robert Whitman etc.”

Contents:
Introduction … 1
Expanded Cinema: A Symposium N.Y. Film Festival 1966, panel members: Ken Dewey, Henry Geldzahler, John Gruen, Stan VanDerBeek & Robert Whitman” … 1
Interview with Ken Dewey by Fred Wellington … 2
USCO. Interview with Gerd Stern by Jonas Mekas … 3
The Blue Mouse and the Movie Experience by Sheldon Renan … 4
To Be Alive! and the Multi-Screen Film by Maxine Haleff … 4
Notions on a New Dance Program by Gregory Battcock … 4
Triptape: An Interview with Richard Aldcroft by Gordon Ball … 4
Mock Risk Games – A Psychological Exploration (June 1961-1966) by Henry Flynt … 5
The Images of Robert Whitman by Toby Mussman … 5
Expanded Arts Bourse … 5
Fluxfest … 6
Expanded Arts Diagram by George Maciunas … 7
Movie Journals by Jonas Mekas … 10

Edited by Jonas Mekas
Publisher Film Culture, New York, Winter 1966
Design George Maciunas
ISSN 0015-1211
12 pages, 56 x 43 cm
via Walker Art Center

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PDF (24 MB)
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