Living Theatre performers deliberately disrupted liberal intellectual symposia to provoke confrontation

Evidence

The third speaker, Judith Malina, gently chided Brustein for suggesting that she was soft on fascism. This apparently inspired Rufus Collins, another member of the company, to a frontal assault on Western culture. Collins excoriated genocide, technology, and the audience: “Fuck all liberal intellectuals and their fucking discussions.” Ben Israel responded by bellowing a mantra from Artaud popularized by radical psychotherapist R. D. Laing: If I could drive you out of your minds. Malina seemed radiant while her husband, who at one point seized an irate woman’s fur stole and tossed it on the ground, waxed prophetic. “Get used to this. It’s happening all over America, in every meeting house in America. This is what is going to happen from now on.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1425

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader shelf thesis about how avant-garde performance culture fed on cheap New York infrastructure and public confrontation as a staging ground.