Angry Arts Week deployed mass artistic protest but produced few enduring works

Evidence

Between January 29 and February 4, hundreds of artists protested the Vietnam War with all manner of performances, concerts, readings, panel discussions, and exhibitions. Few were notable in themselves. Voice theater critic Arthur Sainer singled out three: Stan Brakhage’s 23rd Psalm Branch (a feature-length 8mm film that painstakingly annotated footage of Brakhage’s Rocky Mountain refuge with explosive bits of battlefield imagery), Carolee Schneemann’s Snows (a performance piece that encompassed her Viet Flakes, a short film composed of atrocity news photos), and an unnamed show by the Bread and Puppet Theater. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1050

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s test case: protest art generated volume and energy but little lasting value — a data point for why political urgency alone doesn’t produce durable culture.