With The Street , for example, there were both performance and gallery incarnations of the project that shared similar objects but which treated them very differently. Claes Oldenburg : Well, the group called The Street are objects that relate to the street and people on the streets. So that was another group of things.
The Street was really grey and black and brown, and The Store is very colorful. Did they have any objects in common? Oldenburg : The one at the Reuben Gallery was more like an art exhibit.
It was a new group, because the ones in the first show at Judson were really, as you say, part of a performance. They were tacked to the wall and they were ripped off the wall and taken away, except for a few. Then I continued in that vein and did several others and that was for the Reuben show. Kitnick : It is striking when looking at this material how much performance you were doing during the sixties, and how key that was to your practice. Oldenburg : Well all the work is, I guess you could say, somewhat theatrical, which fit it into the way things were going.
Kitnick : How do you imagine your performances exist today? In the notes? The films? Some of them have better notes than others, of course. For some of them there was the time to make notes. Kitnick : I noticed that a number of the films are actually authored by other people. Stan VanDerBeek made a film which departs from the way I saw it, but that was okay with me.
It was really much longer. The best sources of images are the stills, the color stills, that Bob McElroy made. Not the films so much as the stills. Oldenburg : It would be interesting if that were true, if what we are talking about here had an influence so long after. You could probably get anything you want out of it. Fifty years ago there were very few artists, and the way they worked was sort of segregated as a certain type of art from another type of art, and so on.
