ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Oldenburg’s understudied post-1956 visual and concrete poetry during the so-called street period. Writing prepares for and plays a visible role in The Street installation (New York, 1960), with its ripped cardboard images of homeless people, playing children, and mothers pushing strollers among cars and guns pasted on gallery walls. A detailed examination of the overlooked role of writing in his early work brings to the fore how camera-eye and cartoon-eye metaphors operate side by side as text-generating principles of intermediality. Between 1956 and 1961, images in art were conceived of metaphorically as visual and acoustic “rips out of reality.” This chapter demonstrates that intermediality and metaphoricity are connected concepts and explains how different forms of intermedial reference operate in poetry and sculpture.
