ABSTRACT
Oldenburg is a deeply analogical and metaphorical thinker. From analogy and metaphor to homology, metonymy, and etymology, the rhetorical and generative logic of Oldenburg’s art production, irrespective of format, is modeled after operations of language. Ray Gun vision, snapshot vision, rips out of reality, the camera eye, and seeing as shooting images inform the artist’s large-scale metaphorical bundle of art as a theater of vision. What does it mean to conceive of poetry, sculpture, or performance metaphorically as a gestural translation of seeing? The introduction provides an answer by presenting selected artistic case studies that demonstrate the persistent role of machine vision in his art. It lays the groundwork for the use of terms such as “intermediality,” “conceptual metaphor theory,” and “art as a gesture of seeing.” Intermediality itself, as the introduction explains, is a metaphorical construct. Oldenburg’s practice is situated historically at the intersection of two strands of American postwar art conventionally seen as separate trajectories: between the body in post-Cagean performance art and the recycling of mass media images in pop art.
