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New York Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When the New York Avant-Garde Started a Revolution
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.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Everything Is Now' Review: When Downtown Was Happening
In the astonishing 'Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop,' J. Hoberman assumes the roles of Google Earth satellite, Leica Rangefinder and time machine. The subject is, admittedly, more modest than a planet, but more elusive than a comet: An eruption of art that occurred over the course of a decade within an area of 20 square blocks in downtown Manhattan. What Mr. Hoberman has rendered is a blueprint to an explosion, the schematic to a zeitgeist. The characters wandering through the portraitist's uber-Breughelian picture—sometimes drunkenly, often beatifically—include predictable personalities (Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol); second-tier celebrities and first-class provocateurs (the mad visionary Barbara Rubin, the archivist Harry Smith, the musician LaMonte Young); and some whom Mr. Hoberman regularly cited as essentials during his 40-odd years as a film and culture critic at the Village Voice, among them the filmmaker-academic Ken Jacobs, the filmmaker-impresario Jonas Mekas, the video artist Nam June Paik and the singular Jack Smith. (How does Mr. Hoberman know that Smith's unhinged landmark 1963 film, 'Flaming Creatures,' was shot on 'the leaky, tar-paper roof of the Windsor Theater at 412 Grand Street'? He wrote a book on it. But still.) While many film critics (and readers) of a certain age fetishized the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, a younger contingent found their critical mentor in Mr. Hoberman, whose interest was (and is) not only film but the intersection of movies, politics, literature and social movements. This is less a work of criticism than history, journalism, detective work and interrogation. Many of the people described have died, but the more obscure among the living often provide the best stories. Each chapter opens with a forecast ('In which strobe lights proliferate as, conquering St. Mark's Place, Multi-Media goes Pop. Warhol and Dylan create their masterpieces. Jimi Hendrix wows MacDougal Street and Sun Ra settles in the East Village, where Timothy Leary puts on a show.'). The author then mischievously connects his stories about a future being born to literary legacies of an inescapable past. This is a unique book for a critic, the criticism being implicit in the chronicle. But Mr. Hoberman himself describes it as 'a memoir, although not mine.' Which might have been the title, it explains so much.
Telegraph
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Rubber phalluses and leaking breasts take over the Courtauld
What's that hanging near the start of this risqué exhibition of abstract sculpture from the 1960s? A leg of yellowing jamón? No, it's – splutter! – a rubber phallus. Nearby, a plaster object with conical swellings like a mutant potato is titled, simply, Tits (1967). With Abstract Erotic, the Courtauld Gallery – that bastion of Post-Impressionism – unexpectedly serves up a dollop of raunch. The result is less pulse-quickening than this might suggest. Co-curated by Jo Applin, a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the show pays homage to Eccentric Abstraction, a 'groundbreaking exhibition' organised by the critic and curator Lucy R Lippard in 1966. This grouped together avant-garde work then resisting Minimalism's prevailing hard-edged rigour, including sensuous sculptures by the three women who are Abstract Erotic's stars, all of whom lived and worked in New York City: Eva Hesse, a German-born prodigy, who died of cancer aged 34 in 1970; Alice Adams (b. 1930), who's still alive; and Louise Bourgeois, a French-American with a thing for spiders, who passed away in 2010, and is now considered one of the 20th century's most significant artists. Downstairs, the Courtauld simultaneously shows a selection of Bourgeois's drawings, which she called 'thought feathers'. Often suggestive – or downright explicit in the case of Bourgeois's phallic Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968-99) – and with rough surfaces reminiscent of blotchy skin, the experimental work of all three artists, which Lippard described as 'offbeat', rapidly expanded sculpture's possibilities by manipulating surprising, industrial materials such as latex, foam, and chain-link fencing. At the Courtauld, almost 30 pieces – some tiny, others massive – demonstrate this willingness to take risks. Various bulging, misshapen sculptures, suspended like Fillette, resemble wasps' nests. A couple with boulder-like or gelatinous elements enclosed within nets dangle and droop. In Hesse's Addendum (1967), grey cords, pooling on the floor, emerge from 17 breast-like forms arranged irregularly along a bar slathered with papier-mâché and positioned at eye level. It appears to be leaking. Mostly, the sculptures are powerful, summoning a sense of inescapable psychological compulsions and biological drives, but – be warned – they're not pretty. Le Regard (1963), a gaping blob of latex-covered fabric by Bourgeois (who's responsible, here, for two turd-like forms), has the grace of a belching toad. Although the artists deliberately sought ugliness (or 'uckiness', as Hesse put it), there may be a limit to your tolerance for their monochrome monstrosities. A few sculptures haven't aged well. Over time, latex darkens and becomes brittle. Adams's Expanded Cylinder (1970), a large, bobbly roll of latex-covered foam, like a gigantic ear of sweetcorn or plait of hair, looks tatty and deflated. Apart from Sheath (1964), a frisky little form like an upturned, fraying basket, with a scuttling, creaturely quality, as if it were a naughty beetle, the sculptures by Adams – the least familiar member of the show's triumvirate – feel less accomplished than those of her companions. The ideas behind these splodgy sculptures are inventive and courageous, even electrifying. Several of the finished pieces, though, now appear dated, bedraggled, and unresolved.
