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Jill Johnston
Claes Oldenburg has been converting his "store" at 1107 East 2nd Street, the Ray Gun Mfg. Co., a space of four small narrow rooms, into a theatre for happenings, the Ray Gun Theatre. Some of the coats, cakes, candy, dresses, etc., that he made when it was only a Mfg. Co. still hang heavy and colorful in the front part of the store as you enter, before squashing in at the back where the events take place.
There were four events on four successive weekends to begin with. Then there was a break of four weeks, and now four more are again in progress. On the first two weekends he gave "Store (Version I)" and "Store (Version II)." In the first he laid out a "scene" in each of the three rooms and mobilized only one room at a time, lighting it and darkening the others so the audience was directed to look only at the lighted one. I couldn't see what transpired in one room, but it had something to do with a man on a bed and someone overhead in a drooping black cloud of a hammock. The middle room was a mess. Kitchen scene with man and woman. The larger room contained several people doing different things. I submit a few notes chosen at random, taken during the performance:
bride with gun ... thoughtful ... girl talking on telephone holding fake dog ... Gloria throws pie Lebel's face ... bride shoots ... Gloria wiping dishes ... girl clipping nails ... girl on phone tries to give man dog ... Gloria girl bloody hand laughs ... man breaks dog with hammer while she keeps talking on phone ... Billie removes clothes, poses ... she dumps mud out of pail ... Pat overhead making love (sound effects) ... corps ... Lebel sick on soup ... mail rifles pockets of corpse ... Lebel shaving ... chopping wood ... girl in red removes dress ... throws wardrobe on floor ... Lebel chops ... Gloria sleeps ... girl, red, cane, exquisite racket.
"Store (Version II)" was overloaded in one room. I didn't enjoy it as much as Version I and was by that time a bit tired of the girls half dressed or undressing.
For the third week Oldenburg rearranged the space and altered the whole presentation. "Nekropolis I." In four parts, each scene a unified incident, "Nekropolis II " was in four parts too, but the parts merged to become one total incident, thus more like a conventional drama.
Yet it remained visual, the handiwork of a painter, a picture set ill motion. In "Nekropolis I" Lucas Samaras (Samaras, who has been in almost every happening by everyone thus far, generates remarkable excitement while doing very little) started proceedings with a bit of homicide. After establishing himself as a suspicious character by furtive glances, constrained shuffling, pouring water from a pail in a bathtub, and adding numbers with chalk on a door (the numbers of dead?), he suffocates another depraved figure, Pat Mushinski in crumpled male black, ties her up like a sack (in a slow methodical ritual that has a history), and puts her in the bathtub where she eventually slumps in water up to the chin. The remaining three incidents "War," "Freaks," "Mice" are like all expression of this perversion in simple animal terms, a return to savagery, or direct self-preservative activities prior to the development of the forebrain. In any case it all seemed pretty healthy to me, and I enjoyed the heavy slow clamor of these bulky creatures crawling and messing around in that bulky "environment" of burlap, paper, paint, and other assembled junk. Oldenburg himself made wonderful nondescript jungle sounds and heaved his considerable weight from mound to mound like a natural denizen.
A MEAL FOR THREE
The central attraction of "Nekropolis II " was a meal for three. The scene started off white and clean. The three customers, faces whitened, all jabbered at once in various languages and did incredible things to the fake food that never stopped arriving. A violinist would stand up now and then to play a nostalgic refrain. A "monster" stumbled in; went to sleep, was kicked out by the proprietor. A "bride" was ushered in; undressed, laid out, carried off. Then a long poetic interlude when the three customers and the waiter donned tinfoil masks ("The Relatives") and rigor mortis set in gradually so that by the time the two "bears" entered they had stopped moving altogether and were knocked over in a slop of food, table, chairs, and masks by the two boxing bears.
Social message? Yes and no. Oldenburg may have social conditions on his mind, who doesn't, but he is primarily making moving pictures, real or fantastic, employing people as chunks of environment as well as themselves in everyday affairs. This is immediate, elemental theatre, the more so perhaps because Oldenburg is an authentic slob.
The Village Voice, April 26, 1962: 10; reprinted by permission of the author and The Village Voice.
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