ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Theater, a series of ten elaborate happenings set in the back of his rented studio on the Lower East Side in the spring of 1962, a few months after the closing of The Store exhibition. In an extension of The Store installation’s metaphorical conception of art as a pseudophotographic theater of vision, the performances are modeled after a conception of the mind as a storehouse. The theater thematizes activities of everyday life beyond the experience of shopping by staging eating, sleeping, traveling, dreaming, swimming, and reading. Rejecting the popular idea of a happening as something that simply occurs as a spontaneous event close to life, Oldenburg practices a philosophical theater of metareflection that builds on his analysis of contemporary happening methods. A detailed discussion of each of the ten Ray Gun Theater performances shows how metaphor turns mutually exclusive opposites in Western thought (subjective and objective, natural and cultural, emotional and phenomenological, conscious and unconscious) into interrelated domains of experience.
