Cheap basement gallery spaces housed deliberately disturbing assemblage spectacles in 1960

Evidence

Out in Coney Island and even more radical, the twenty-seven-year-old abstract painter Ralph Ortiz had begun ripping apart and reordering mattresses and chairs—what he called “Archeological Finds”—and spraying their remains with a clear fixative. Back on the Lower East Side, Boris Lurie and Claes Oldenburg were preparing major exhibitions. The Doom Show, which Lurie organized at the March Gallery along with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, filled the cramped cellar with dismembered dolls and defaced, paint-splashed dummies. Detritus hung from the tin ceiling. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 224