In one autumn week bombings, museum actions, and counterculture events coexisted.

Evidence

The Melville group is planning their most dramatic attack, scheduled to underscore the Mobe’s upcoming November 15 March on Washington. Meanwhile, six explosions rock Macy’s Department store over four days; the Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG) stages its first action event at the Museum of Modern Art, replacing Malevich’s White on White with their own manifesto (and thus, Lil Picard thought, “re-revolutionizing” the original painting); the Art Workers’ Coalition organizes a Moratorium of Art to End the War in Vietnam; the perennial last-place New York Mets win the World Series; Rat reviews Godard’s Le Gai savoir; Jack Kerouac dies, age forty-seven; the Village Voice runs a piece on R. Crumb; Kusama licenses her name to a new sex tabloid, Kusama’s Orgy; and No President opens for a midnight run at the Bleecker Street Cinema. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1487

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Hoberman’s compressed simultaneity here is the book’s central technique — the density of overlapping events in a single city interleaves political war, aesthetic acts, and mundane sports, an almost cubist rendering of a moment. This is the kind of passage that resists one-sentence summarization because its point is the juxtaposition itself.
• CANDY: Kusama licensing her name to a sex tabloid to earn money while bombs rock Macy’s is a funny, strange cocktail-party fact.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to both #1 (GAAG’s action at MoMA as art-subverting-infrastructure) and #2 (moral panic/counterculture policing) in adjacent but not direct ways — a general resonance more than a specific supporting point.