EVERYTHING IS NOW: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde — Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop, by J. Hoberman
Yayoi Kusama. Andy Warhol. Amiri Baraka. Allen Ginsberg. Jack Smith. The Velvet Underground. Edie Sedgwick. The Last Poets. Ornette Coleman. Abbie Hoffman. Rip Torn. Judith Malina. Richard Foreman. Taylor Mead. Lenny Bruce. Jackie Curtis. Barbara Rubin. Charlotte Moorman. A dizzying roll call of sometimes famous, often infamous characters populates “Everything Is Now,” a completist guide to arguably the most inventive scene of a tumultuous decade. Its densely packed pages offer vivid and timely anecdotal lessons on the impact, suppression and self-obliteration of radical art.
The book unfolds chronologically, starting in the late 1950s with the popularization of Beat poetry and folk music, the rise of underground movies and the birth of happenings, and ending in the early ’70s with Weathermen detonations, underground porn and Yoko Ono (the author praises her album “Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band” as “the past decade’s quintessential artwork”). A child of the ’60s himself, J. Hoberman writes authoritatively on harmolodic jazz, censored comedians, the Fluxus art movement, experimental film, immersive theater, political protest and the birth of rap. Some of these stories — the emergence of Bob Dylan, for instance — are oft told. But our guide through this subterranean blues knows all the craziest, twisted tales, and where the bodies are buried: The underground newspaper taken over by its female staffers. The midnight screenings shut down by the police. The jazz pioneer found drowned in a river.
“Everything Is Now” draws on published accounts in the press of the time, both underground and mainstream — particularly from The Village Voice, and its writers Jill Johnston and Jonas Mekas (themselves also creative characters). Hoberman himself began writing about movies for The Voice in 1972 and continued until 2012, a stunning run that made him one of the most important critics of the time. (I worked at The Voice as a contributor and editor from 1988 to 1996. I knew the author then as a colleague but not socially.) Along with the interviews he conducted for this book he draws extensively on memoirs, biographies and other books, including his own: He has previously written about the filmmaker Jack Smith, performance art and underground cinema.
“Everything” has everyone — Hoberman is encyclopedic in his recounting of the breakthroughs, breakdowns and bombings. It’s a performer- and performance-driven narrative, vividly told. Kenneth Bernard’s play “The Moke-Eater,” the author informs us, was a “malicious spectacle of an obnoxious all-American glad-hander trapped in a nightmare all-American town, tortured by a gibbering band of garishly made-up cannibal ghouls led by a mercurial dominatrix.” Ah, the ’60s!
But one key figure is elusive. Every now and then Hoberman breaks the fourth wall with a wry parenthetical or a confessional memory, but overall the author remains doggedly offstage: a historian who was occasionally a witness. It’s a strangely objective, master-narrator stance for a milieu that was about dismantling barriers, prosceniums and structures, and centering collaboration. When he does interject, Hoberman conveys paragraphs in just a few words. Quoting a Sun Ra Arkestra review wherein the critic Michael Zwerin describes the “polka-dot shirts,” “African robes” and “air of raunchiness,” then observes, “They stared at us without enthusiasm,” Hoberman deadpans, “One wonders why.”
Unfortunately, though, the forest often gets lost for the trees. Without a strong narrative providing critical context, it’s hard to keep track of all the players and their acts. As compelling as the tales are, sometimes I reeled from information overload. The wildly visual subjects also beg for photos, which are minimal. Actually, “Everything Is Now” begs for a multimedia exhibition, where you could watch the films, view the artwork, hear the music and maybe even participate in the bacchanalia of “Paradise Now,” a Living Theater production where the cast and audience mixed in “an orgy of animal madness.”
Documenting the artistic response to the oppressions of McCarthyism and the violence of the Vietnam War, “Everything Is Now” also offers instructional examples for today’s divisive world. A 1968 quote from the filmmaker Robert Kramer captures the times: “Changing minds, altering consciousness, seems to us to come through confrontations, not out of sweet/reasonable conversations.” Artists and activists put their bodies on the line for causes including racial integration, gay rights, anticapitalism and feminism. They were arrested, fined, beaten and even killed. They also turned against one another and alienated the public with their own acts of violence.
As a teenager and young adult growing up in this world, Hoberman was obviously profoundly affected by it: It’s the pool he keeps returning to for nourishment. Some of his passages are love letters to the city, such as this one about a Ken Jacobs film: “‘The Sky Socialist’ is a movie about the beauty of things as they are. The artist casts a glance; the sparse narrative is put on hold so the camera can ponder the grandeur of the bridge, the proximity of the East River, the caverns created by the arched municipal buildings, the top of the Tombs, the clerks spending their lunch hour on park benches. All action is digression; everything is now.”
The book ends, finally and charmingly, with the story of how Hoberman himself entered the narrative: the dazzled bystander who became a participant in, and then a chronicler of, and now the authoritative historian of a brilliant and disturbed place and time.
EVERYTHING IS NOW: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde — Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop | By J. Hoberman | Verso | 456 pp. | $34.95
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