Claes Oldenburg happening 2 c. 1950s

This is Robert Frank's photographic contact sheet, Claes Oldenburg happening 2. The film strip here is a kind of raw document of a performance, maybe even a record of a rehearsal. I’m immediately drawn to the physical nature of this piece. It’s not just an image, but a matrix, a sequence, the artist's selection of frames to give you a peek into a particular moment. Look closely, and you can see the perforations of the film, the numbers marking each frame. It’s like a timeline, guiding your eye across the events. The graininess and the contrast are striking, typical of Frank's style, adding a gritty realism to the scene. There’s one frame surrounded by a red rectangle, like an edit, a way of marking significance. This work reminds me of Warhol's film stills or even the serial imagery of conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt, it is all about breaking down time and space into its constituent parts. It's not just about what you see but how you see, inviting you to piece together the narrative and the essence of this happening, and to consider art as a set of possibilities, rather than one clear thing.