Sontag discovered the Happenings as a critical subject through the Reuben Gallery scene

Evidence

The affinity went two ways. Oldenburg’s expressive use of junk dragged off the street foreshadowed Smith’s subsequent loft theater, as did his use of slow motion, which was characterized by the young critic Susan Sontag, in an early description of Oldenburg’s theater, as a mixture of ceremoniousness and ineffectuality. Smith may or may not have visited The Store but Ken Jacobs did. So did Sontag, brought by her friend, the painter Martha Edelheit, herself a Reuben Gallery artist. Attending Ray Gun productions in the company of her eleven-year-old son, David Rieff, Sontag found a subject. Her subsequent essay on these “esoteric” spectacles, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” was one of the first serious appreciations of the mode. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 236

Categorization

• XREF: The social-proximity mechanism — Sontag attending because a painter friend brought her — is a small instance of the same dense face-to-face scene dynamics the chapter and book argue was the enabling condition for the avant-garde.