Oldenburg's Moveyhouse: Performing a Cinema without Film

Abstract

There is one true generalization about my work: it is highly physical. I chose materials in my work that excite you (touch: even if you just look). Everything has to do with contact. They are all projections of my own body (tangible). They express the physicalness of my own vision (taking away the voyeuristic).1 Viewers walking into the dark Wurlitzer theatre in midtown Manhattan on an early night in December 1965 expected to see an experimental film. Instead, Claes Oldenburg greeted them at the door, and ushered the audience to one of the side aisles, where they remained for the whole duration of his twenty-minute performance Moveyhouse.2 As they stood at a right angle to the seating of the auditorium, they saw a group of eight performers act as ushers and spectators laughing, eating, and smoking. The now displaced viewer watched an enactment of the cinema ‘audience's’ physical behaviour (Fig. 1). Their visual experience of the performance was characterised by distraction, a constant switching between multiple centres of activity in the room, all of which were simultaneously competing for attention. The theatre's 16-mm projector ran empty. The film-less cone of white light hung low over the seats and the smoke-filled air gave it a sculptural dimension. Performers were instructed to interfere with the beam so that their shadows were cast onto the otherwise blank screen and the back of the space (Fig. 1). The performance broke with the theatrical tradition of the proscenium: frontality was abolished in order to bring audience and performers into a new relationship of proximity, enhancing the physical aspects of visual experience. Dispensing with directional conventions of cinematic viewing, Moveyhouse fully utilised the space of the theatre to create an immersive experience of shadow play. In the tradition of a 1930s movie palace, the setting of the (now destroyed) Wurlitzer theatre was richly ornamented, adding to the overall experience of multifocality; theatrical immersion (live experience of the theatrical space) replaced cinematic absorption (the experience of viewing a film on a screen). As a tribute to silent cinema, live piano music accompanied the events.3