ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the polysemous meaning of the pseudophotographic motto “annihilate-illuminate” organizes and informs two of Oldenburg’s earliest performances: Snapshots from the City (1960; staged inside The Street) and Circus: Ironworks/Fotodeath (1961). The film adaptation Snapshots of the City, shot by experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, indicates that the camera eye is no longer a behavioral alignment of human and camera vision; rather, it leads to an archaeology of the media age, a revelation in which photography, newspaper, and film overlap as information technologies of wonder, astonishment, and terror. This chapter also examines Circus: Ironworks/Fotodeath in light of neo-Freudian literary theories of history as a cataclysmic cycle of repressed desire and guilt and their catastrophic release into violent crime and war. The conceptual networks bridged by metaphor are those of technology, art, magic, life, sex, and death.
