Oldenburg's Moveyhouse: Performing a Cinema without Film

In Moveyhouse (1965), Claes Oldenburg instructed the audience to stand in the aisles of a cinema. While the projector ran empty, performers in the seats enacted typical film-going behaviors, such as laughing, smoking, or eating popcorn. Building on both the experimental cinema of Stan Brakhage and the theatre work of John Cage, Oldenburg's critique of film is part of a much larger twentieth-century intellectual tradition: the belief that art, and, by extension, technology, can lastingly alter the way viewers experience reality. This essay argues that Oldenburg's relationship with film is indicative of an avant-garde aesthetic of ameliorative renewal in the postwar period that seeks to combat feelings of alienation and distance a visionary side of his art long neglected.