The Sixties Come Back to Life in “Everything Is Now.”
The film critic and cultural historian J. Hoberman’s new book, “Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop,” is as jubilantly overstuffed as its subtitle. The book is a startlingly slow read—and I say that with unbridled enthusiasm. I can’t remember the last book I’ve read that contained so much information so tightly packed, or in which the distillation of vast research offered such relentless ricochets of association, connection, and allusion. Although its meld of journalistic detective work, insightful analysis, and keen critical judgment might suggest a straightforward nonfiction account, it’s a work of obsession and devotion that finds a distinctive and original form—a hectic informational voracity—for its passionate archivism.
Hoberman, who was born in 1949, grew up in Queens, and frequented Manhattan’s downtown scene as a teen-ager and young adult. In the course of his narrative, he sometimes revisits, as a historian, events that he attended and even one in which he had a hand. The last line of “Everything Is Now”—forgive my spoiler—in which he refers to “this book, which I consider a memoir, although not mine,” is a keenly self-conscious, poetic, and philosophical encapsulation of the paradoxically personal yet impersonal ambition energizing the project. The ideal of collective memory is built into the very nature of Hoberman’s research. A film critic for the Village Voice from 1978 to 2012, he is up-front about the major role that this long-crucial weekly and other downtown publications played in his investigations: “To write this book, I not only interviewed witnesses and participants but read through virtually every copy of the Voice between late 1958 and early 1972, along with much of the East Village Other, Rat, and the New York Free Press.” The result is something of a citational history, bringing to life the wild artistic ferment of the times, along with many of the era’s vital voices.
The characters who inhabit “Everything Is Now” make for an extraordinary cast. After reading the book, it’s as if one had been all over town all decade long, with a dazzling array of companions, and readers are likely to come away from the kaleidoscopic whirl with their own highlights and affinities. The book suggests that what had burst through earlier generations’ veils of decorum in this period was personality, the drive to be oneself in public—or, alternatively, to create a public persona in one’s own self-determined image. Hoberman identifies the downtown of the nineteen-sixties as a world of media: the art scene that emerged was inextricable both from the way that media depicted and amplified it and from the ability of artists and other figures to draw media attention. He chronicles a performative decade in which image confronted reality, converged with reality, became an inseparable part of reality, but still didn’t control it—because metaphors of power weren’t power and images of power weren’t power. Thus “Everything Is Now” is also a political history.
Hoberman’s account tracks how the city’s cultural life was intertwined with leftist politics and such activities as protest, disruption, and even destruction. Hoberman pays due attention to the major national and international events that influenced New York’s avant-garde—civil rights, the Vietnam War, political assassinations—and also to historic doings within the city, such as feminist activism and the Stonewall uprising. But he places particular emphasis on power at the local level and, most of all, on its prime physical manifestation: policing.
Search in the book for the words “police” (more than a hundred mentions) and “arrest” (more than fifty) to get a synoptic measure of the force of law opposing the New York avant-garde. Early on, Hoberman shows the literature of the Beats giving rise to performance, both in film (“Pull My Daisy”) and, crucially, live, in cafés. Because many of these were underground literally (basements) and figuratively (unlicensed), this led to legal trouble, in the form of summonses and inspections. As the art of the avant-garde became more audacious, the law intervened more intensely. Many of the arrests were for obscenity: in 1961, Amiri Baraka (then called LeRoi Jones) was arrested at his home, on Fourteenth Street, for mailing the magazine The Floating Bear, of which he was co-editor; Lenny Bruce, famously, was arrested in 1964 for “indecent performance”; in 1968, a humble newspaper vender in Brooklyn was arrested for selling an underground comic.
Similarly, the charge of obscenity led to Shirley Clarke’s 1961 film, “The Connection,” being denied a license, a prerequisite for commercial release; when it was screened anyway, the projectionist was arrested. In 1963, when Jack Smith’s film “Flaming Creatures” was first shown—following the lives of a group of drag queens, it features extreme closeups of genitals and scenes of orgiastic writhing—screenings were deliberately not advertised. This didn’t stop the police finding them (sometimes attending undercover), interrupting them, and closing the theatres. When, to raise money for the film’s legal defense, the underground filmmaker (and longtime Voice film critic) Jonas Mekas held a screening of Jean Genet’s highly explicit gay film “Un Chant d’Amour,” he, too, was arrested and ultimately convicted of obscenity-related offenses.
Throughout, Hoberman details the breaking of boundaries—of laws and of norms, of habits and of categories, of unquestioned distinctions and rigid hierarchies. The public depiction of what people do in their private lives led to the flouting of obscenity statutes; the defiance of the boundary between actors and spectators, and between artists and viewers, led to an entirely new kind of art—performance art—which turned objects into experiences and observers into participants. Primordial versions of these so-called Happenings, in which spectators walked through a variety of rooms where actors were delivering a variety of performances, sometimes involved ordinary actions, sometimes intense provocations (screams in the dark, displays of violence) intended to discomfit attendees. The artist Ray Johnson accompanied an art show by Yoko Ono, in her Chambers Street loft, Hoberman writes, with “a large, corrugated cardboard box of wooden spools that he emptied down the staircase, creating a hazardous means of egress.”
Hoberman’s descriptions of such events are eminently quotable. In the artist Hermann Nitsch’s “Fifth Action,” he writes, “a lamb carcass dangled from the ceiling” and an actor “stuffed offal into his pants and pulled it out through his fly. A young woman in white lay on her back, staring up as bloody lamb goo dripped over her face and torso. A glistening coil of lamb intestines covered her crotch.” An iteration of Yayoi Kusama’s performance “Self-Obliteration” involved her painting actors “clad in nothing more than American flag togas and then not even that.” When a policeman turned up and started making arrests, some of the actors attacked him, but he, too, was an actor—part of the performance.
Not to be outdone, theatre people also staged extreme events, collapsing the distinction between performers and audiences. For Richard Schechner’s “Dionysus in ’69,” a version of Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” there were no seats, and spectators, sitting around the set, might at any moment be pulled into the performance by the actors. Hoberman writes, “This was most dramatic during the so-called Ecstasy Dance but even more embarrassing when the god commands Pentheus to find a female sexual partner.” Likewise, when Baraka’s “Slave Ship,” staged at BAM, depicted the horrors of the Middle Passage, the cast exhorted spectators “to join in their cries.” The Living Theater, founded by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, created a ritualistic and improvised play, “Paradise Now,” in which performers wandered among the spectators and, Hoberman writes, interacted with them in “a mass embrace (known as ‘The Rite of Universal Intercourse’), instances of possession and exorcism, an orgy of animal madness, and finally a call to leave the theater and go out into the street.”
“Everything Is Now” brings a phantasmagorical roster of personalities to the fore—some unheralded, others coterie famous, and some world-historical famous—and traces connections that proved to have mighty consequences. Among the cast, of course, are Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol. Dylan didn’t just live in the Village but took part in its artistic ferment, publishing songs in 1962 in a mimeographed magazine called Broadside (including one called “Talkin’ John Birch”). The same year, he appeared in concert with the avant-garde jazz musicians Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp. And, as Andy Warhol became a scene of his own with the founding of the Factory, Dylan was uneasily involved in it by way of his relationship with one of its stars, Edie Sedgwick, a wealthy trust-funder who first worked with Warhol in a film called “Poor Little Rich Girl.” The nature of Dylan and Sedgwick’s relationship, Hoberman writes, was unclear, but it nonetheless was a source of unhappiness for Warhol.
The intersection of the glamocracy and the plutocracy was on evidence in Warhol’s circle, in the museums, and even in the East Village, where the rock club the Electric Circus opened with a charity benefit co-sponsored by then Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Hoberman sets the scene:
That confluence of art and money and power was both an engine of fame and a flash point of controversy, because the art world and its sources of financing had themselves become a political issue. In 1962, the artist Aldo Tambellini organized protesters to stand outside MOMA and distribute a handbill titled The Screw and to award the museum a gold-painted screw—“thus symbolically reciprocating the royal screw the museum gave artists,” Hoberman says. A group called Action Against Cultural Imperialism picketed two performances by the German composer Karheinz Stockhausen, on the grounds that he was “a fountainhead of ‘ideas’ to shore up the doctrine of white plutocratic European Art’s supremacy.” A group called Black Mask—one of its leaders, Ben Morea, grew up next to the part of San Juan Hill that was razed to make way for Lincoln Center—sought to close MOMA, and the group’s magazine demanded “the complete ruination of bourgeois culture.” (The group subsequently changed its name to the Motherfuckers.) A writer named Valerie Solanas asked Morea about the consequences of shooting someone; soon after, she shot Andy Warhol. The Art Workers’ Coalition presented MOMA with thirteen demands, including, Hoberman writes, “a gallery for Black artists, the institution of rental fees, free admission to the museum, and an open public hearing on the question of Modern Art.” When the museum dithered in its response, the group held a sit-in there.
Hoberman makes clear one crucial factor in the city’s creative energy: “cheap rents.” Some downtown areas were desolate, others were being demolished, and a no man’s land of former industrial buildings downtown, known as “the Valley,” was listed, in a civic report, as one of “the wastelands of New York.” The artist George Maciunas, a founder of the performance-centered Fluxus group (who, Hoberman says, “claimed to oppose all art”), bought up properties there, illegally leased them, and turned himself into a primordial mini-mogul of the area, which is now called SoHo. (One of Hoberman’s most ingenious touches is to emphasize urban specifics: he cites throughout exact street addresses where artists lived and worked, where performances and shows and screenings were held.)
As the avant-garde shifted the cityscape, it shifted the mediascape, too. The mainstream press and even television reported copiously on the artistic and political doings downtown, and the presence of celebrities helped greatly—particularly as rock took the place of folk, and the Village world, with performances by the Rolling Stones and the Doors, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the homegrown stars the Velvet Underground, converged with pop life at large. The political arena developed its own media stars, above all, Abbie Hoffman, who co-founded the Yippies (the Youth International Party) and whom a Times writer likened to Shakespeare in his ‘”genius for reaching a multi-level audience.” A spontaneous “Yip-In” at Grand Central Station, in 1968, provoked what Hoberman calls a “police riot”—the entrapment and beating of protesters and reporters who attended.
Along with the barriers between spectators and performers, the era also effaced the boundary between artists and critics. One of the threads that runs through Hoberman’s book is the key role played by critics in creating audiences for obscure or off-putting work. (Hoberman does the great service of identifying the importance of the late New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s early writings in the Times.) “Everything Is Now” offers a keen vision of the peculiar position of creative criticism, which ranges in its import from the poetic crystallization and the philosophical elucidation of experience to something like gaslighting, where the distance between an art work and the critical repositioning of it nearly requires viewers to obliterate their perceptions. Perhaps the very definition of the avant-garde, in the age of mass media, that emerges from Hoberman’s chronicle is the power of a work to create discourse that’s a more enduring experience, a more enduring emblem of the artist’s thought, than the work itself.
“Everything Is Now” leaps outside the art world to reveal the proliferation, or perhaps the metastases, of avant-garde energies into wider society. It introduces the publisher Al Goldstein, who, in 1968, founded Screw magazine, which featured, in its first issue, a photo of a performance by Yayoi Kusama. The magazine helped to inaugurate, in the late sixties, the open publication of pornography, which quickly took the place of many comics and alternative newspapers. (In the East Village Other, a writer called pornography “as culturally significant as the development of the photo cameras, the Symbolist poets, the Russian Revolution, electricity, atomic power and the Beatles.”) The book also follows the revolutionary Sam Melville via his connections to the newspaper Rat. Melville masterminded a series of bombings in 1969, with targets including Rockefeller Center, the headquarters of Chase Manhattan, a military induction center, and a federal office building. Sentenced to prison in 1970, after pleading guilty to one of the bombings, Melville was shot dead the next year during the Attica prison riot.
Hoberman wonders whether, with these and other turbulent events of 1969, “the sixties had reached their climax.” Of course, by the calendar, the decade simply ended. But, for me, the end had come a year earlier in Hoberman’s narrative—in October, 1968, at the last performance of the Living Theatre’s “Paradise Now,” when, during that segment called “The Rite of Universal Intercourse,” Hoberman writes, “Malina was surrounded, held down, and raped.” Unlike the violence of political terror by an activist who meant to do damage, this violence took place in an autonomous artistic utopia of an unpoliced collective that, suddenly, reverted to the primal rule of power. No paradise, not now, not ever. ♦
