Pat’s Birthday (1962) by Robert Breer
Saturday, September 29, 1984, 8:00 pm
Claes Oldenburg
Storefront Happenings. Filmed and edited by Raymond Saroff
Early in 1962 Claes Oldenburg offered a series of “Happenings” in his store on East 2nd St. in New York, the Ray-Gun Mfg. Co. The Ray Gun Theater Co. included Claes and Pat Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras and Gloria Graves. It was a theater of events, of actions and of things, in which there were sequences of events without plots or conventional narrative. Saroff compressed the rich and sprawling imagery of each evening-length work to the essential, reassembling a visual realization of what seemingly was consigned to the memories of a few dozen spectators.
Also, Pat’s Birthday, Robert Breer’s “home movie” of a day in the country with the Ray Gun Theater Players