“Have Mary Janes Gone Up?” Participation and Disaffiliation in Oldenburg’s The Store 

Claes Oldenburg's 1961 environment The Store was a display of brightly coloured plaster merchandise in a storefront on New York's Lower East Side. By inviting the viewer to purchase ‘goods’ displayed there as they would in any other shop, Oldenburg created a crossover between art and life which qualifies as an early example of participatory art. My paper will examine this work in the light of a contemporary review by the critic Sidney Tillim, who considered Oldenburg’s work alongside that of Alan Kaprow. For Tillim both artists’ understanding of American culture was rooted in nostalgia for a vision of the nation’s ideal polity. He described Kaprow’s ‘happenings’, theatre-like environmental works in which the viewer collaborated as participant, as “expressions of a longing for a childlike sense of participation in a total social experience – which is merely a corollary of the innocence projected by the phrase ‘The American Dream.’” In discussing Oldenburg’s The Store, however, Tillim drew attention to a mood of melancholy. Viewing The Store as an evocation of the founding myths of modern American culture, Tillim saw Oldenburg’s installation of garish plaster commodities as evoking an innocent fantasy of capitalism in which aesthetic abundance is promised to all. However, as capitalism’s promise has been broken, the visitor to Oldenburg’s environment finds him or herself in a position of disaffiliation: "The Store itself embodied a special emotion, one which had compared the way things were (have Mary Janes gone up?) with the way things are, and found the latter a possibly appalling inevitability.” As I argue in this paper, Oldenburg’s vision of participatory art was not intended as an innocent enfranchisement of the viewer but rather produced a critical reflection on the failure of participation in contemporary political life.

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Dr Anthony White, Lecturer in Art History in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, completed his PhD in 2000 at Harvard University. From 2000 – 2002, as Curator of International Painting and Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia, he curated the exhibitions Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism (2001) and Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (2002). He wrote for and edited the published catalogues for both exhibitions. Several of his articles have appeared in peer-reviewed art history journals such as Grey Room, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, and The Art Bulletin of Victoria. In 2005 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, The Australian National University and in 2006 was appointed Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. From 2004 - 6 he was a co-editor of The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art. In 2007 he was awarded a three-year Linkage Project Grant by the Australian Research Council to research exhibitions of art by people with experience of mental illness. Among his other ongoing research projects are a monograph on the Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899 – 1968) and a history of Italian modernism during the fascist period.