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 cover of J. Hoberman's new book, “Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop.”
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.”
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