Early Happenings mixed mundane tasks with unsettling racialized imagery

Evidence

Among the activities, Livingston observed were two men bending over a board and playing a game of blocks, a woman squeezing oranges into a glass and drinking the juice and two painters separated by a rectangular canvas that they painted simultaneously. A man wandered around wearing a sandwich board, another lit matches. Not all the performers were human. A phonograph was encased in a robot figure and, more disturbingly, a windup Black Sambo children’s toy executed a tap dance. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 68