J. Hoberman — Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde

845 published claims from this book.

• 1960 protest art explicitly compared nuclear war to Nazi crematoriums
• 1960s topical folk songs would have been blacklisted during the McCarthy era
• 1968 eros effect was immediately commodified into pornographic tabloids
• 1968 juxtaposed calm minimalist art against unprecedented political violence
• 2600 square feet of Manhattan loft space rented for 35 dollars monthly in 1962
• A $1,200 film won a Venice Film Festival prize
• A $250 promotional budget produced a front-page New York Times event.
• A 15-cent pizza slice marked cheap entry into the new scene.
• A 1959 manifesto framed police harassment of Beats as political persecution
• A banned obscene film could screen at the White House in 1962
• A beat poet’s life mixed acid-planned euphoria with chronic homelessness
• A censored avant-garde film found defenders in the alternative press and a church venue.
• A church basement hosted the earliest junk-environment installations.
• A collective concert series gained mainstream press despite modest attendance.
• A counterculture scene visibly degraded within roughly one year.
• A critic’s disappointment with a recut film triggered his turn to making art
• A crowd assault on an artist erased her address to the audience.
• A defunct labor party’s mimeograph enabled a protest-song magazine.
• A downtown avant-garde show outgrew its gallery space within weeks
• A Federal grant subsidized the downtown filmmakers’ infrastructure that incubated the avant-garde
• A festival protest could stage a film on an official’s face as performance
• A film about Harlem race riots was still screening downtown when Harlem erupted.
• A filmmaker collective arose because participants rejected network TV news footage
• A formal Destruction Art Symposium predated and possibly inspired Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
• A Gurdjieff-inspired Ukrainian bar became a hub jazz club, drug scene and neighborhood institution
• A historic obscenity trial went unremembered even by contemporary witnesses
• A hostile New York Times critic mocked Stockhausen’s Originale as pretentious
• A housing-project kid became a radical artist through Lower East Side institutions
• A jazz piece dramatized lynching through wordless screams of horror and rage.
• A junkyard beneath the Throgs Neck Bridge stood in for a field of goldenrod.
• A landmark nude body-painting event happened with its own audience unaware of its novelty
• A major museum mounted a show attacking the idea of museumized art
• A music festival’s physical proximity converted an audience member into a record-label founder.
• A new downtown-party crowd coalesced around the Upper East Side in spring 1965
• A New York avant-garde film screening devolved into violent conflict with narcotics agents
• A noise complaint in Tompkins Square triggered a bloody riot
• A protest art collective’s call preceded a coordinated multi-bomb attack on Rockefeller-linked skyscrapers
• A rock star directly translated Living Theatre stage tactics into his own performance
• A sanitation strike transformed New York’s richest streets into slums in days
• A schoolteacher’s anthology cover repackaged the scene’s images as marketable rebellion
• A segment of early-Sixties assemblage art was deliberately distressing, evoking horror and nuclear dread
• A shabby former department store housed multiple overlapping avant-garde enterprises
• A shared ethos of junk and rubble united Lower East Side artists
• A single janitor could sustain an entire one-man counterculture in 1960
• A single New School class seeded the entire Fluxus network
• A single open screening venue incubated multiple future film careers
• A single year 1964 concentrated obscenity busts, censorship, and avant-garde breakthroughs in New York
• A staged film’s fictional violence spilled into real assault during production.
• A sympathetic psychiatrist re-edited Rice’s film for its era
• A threatened protest achieved disruption without anyone actually blocking traffic
• A venue’s organic neighborhood origins distinguished it from invasive commercial spectacles.
• A white-authored drama about Blackness established a lasting Black theater institution
• A young MBA manager shaped the underground festival’s programming and branding
• Adversarial rehearsal methods risked losing key cast and composers.
• Amateur filmmakers entered New York’s avant-garde through day jobs and cheap equipment
• Amateur filmmaking relied on borrowed cameras and donated studio space
• Amateur improvisational casting produced a socially daring film
• Amateur, seemingly unorganized footage can reveal a filmmaker’s worldview
• An 1830s row house hosted the Beat poetry scene and later Sun Ra’s commune
• An arriviste could self-invent into the New York scene through proximity and hustle
• An art performance could be experienced as the funeral of capitalist civilization
• An avant-garde coinage diffused into mainstream pop culture within four years
• An avant-garde film sustained near-continuous Manhattan screenings for eight straight months.
• An avant-garde formal experiment turned hostile then sparked imitation in followers
• An avant-garde marathon astonished the press by sustaining absurdity for nineteen hours
• An avant-garde pageant commandeered a 2,100-seat opera house in 1969.
• An avant-garde performance could persist with no real audience at all
• An avant-garde performance troupe proposed staging real violence on audiences
• An avant-garde scene can run for a full year before mainstream critics discover it.
• An East Village anti-war theatre piece burned the American flag in April 1966.
• An emergent alternative press championed works establishment critics rejected
• An entire Manhattan building cost 72000 dollars in 1968
• An estimated 7,000 artists illegally lived in downtown lofts by 1962
• An underground film’s canonical version could exist only in its maker’s live presence
• An urban-renewal construction site shaped the gallery that validated large-scale art
• Anarchist art groups radicalized into armed gangs through urban insurrections
• Anarchist provocateurs clashed openly with pacifists in early sixties coffeehouses
• Angry Arts Week deployed mass artistic protest but produced few enduring works
• Anonymous government-funded researchers fed the Times a fabricated Black revolutionary threat
• Anti-art action-events made non-events the point of the piece
• Anti-drug enforcement specifically targeted counterculture leaders like Ginsberg
• Anti-war artists used flag desecration as organized political provocation
• Anti-war performance art ranged from ambiguous ritual to explicit allegory
• Anti-war splinter groups radicalized into theatrical protest tactics via factional chain
• Antiwar art’s least admired work drew the largest audience
• Antonioni cast a real commune member as Zabriskie Point’s lead
• Antonioni sought an authentic counterculture figure as his American Che
• Appropriative action yearns to leave behind no trace of itself
• Arrestable minor offenses could destroy a bohemian’s life
• Art provocation in 1969 charged admission to view a blank statement wall
• Art-school and college poetry training directly seeded the Velvet Underground’s songwriting
• Art-world rebellion and municipal disorder were simultaneous in New York 1968-69
• Arthouse sex film topped US box office in 1969, a first for foreign-language cinema
• Artificial scarcity turned avant-garde theater into a premium black-market commodity
• Artist cooperatives were financed through a pyramid scheme using new tenants’ deposits
• Artist-made junk art emerged from the rubble and refuse of industrial SoHo streets
• Artistic provocation decades later collides with changed moral standards
• Artists acted as unwitting advance guard for neighborhood gentrification
• Artists and engineers collaborated formally through E.A.T. beginning in 1966.
• Artists bypassed state censorship by screening banned films in churches
• Artists may produce deliberately alienating work as a defense against overwhelming fan attention
• Artists sabotaged Timothy Leary’s psychedelic lectures with Artaud recordings
• Artists strategically withheld productions to protect simultaneous premieres
• Artists translated Land Art entropy concepts into urban building interventions
• Artists’ presence in SoHo triggered the real estate price surge that displaced them
• Audience disruption literally entered and redirected performance art works
• Audience members treated avant-garde ritual performance as an endurance test
• Audience members upstaged the Living Theatre’s taboo-breaking performance
• Audience participation in living theater escalated into mass nudity and sex
• Audience-participatory theater scandalized European festivals and got performances banned.
• Audiences expected transgressive art to be violent rather than pleasant
• Audiences rioted at screenings of static minimalist films
• Audiences were polarized and disoriented by the flag-burning performance.
• Avalanche magazine modeled its format directly on Artforum’s design
• Avant-garde art requires cheap, marginal space to form
• Avant-garde art shows operated out of tenement cellars beneath critical respectability.
• Avant-garde artists framed their work as needed for an impending new era
• Avant-garde artists in 1964 protested European high culture as imperialist.
• Avant-garde artists revised their work based on audience feedback
• Avant-garde cinema was shot on cheap, decaying Lower East Side building rooftops
• Avant-garde collectives lived and worked in cluttered communal spaces as creative hives.
• Avant-garde destruction art flowed directly into mainstream rock performance
• Avant-garde destruction theater coincided with the 1968 electoral challenge.
• Avant-garde directors of the sixties trained in spectacle-driven transgressive theater circuits
• Avant-garde drone music transferred directly into a pop novelty band through one-note tuning
• Avant-garde events explicitly rejected entertainment as their purpose
• Avant-garde fame traveled across the Atlantic faster than reputations spread within New York
• Avant-garde film projects were financed by wealthy dilettante backers who could withdraw abruptly
• Avant-garde film scenes coalesced around charismatic figures running open crash-pad lofts
• Avant-garde films function as unintended documents of pre-gentrification neighborhoods
• Avant-garde films premiered in coffee shops with borrowed equipment and no audience
• Avant-garde form compels even critical content to endorse the counterculture.
• Avant-garde movements operated from cramped borrowed studios above established venues
• Avant-garde musicians circulated fluidly across Manhattan’s separate venues and scenes.
• Avant-garde performance festivals combined drone music, incense, and slow projection into hypnotic total theater
• Avant-garde performance spaces blurred boundaries between performers and audience with marathon sets.
• Avant-garde productions can fail when they lose their original infrastructural and class conditions.
• Avant-garde scene organizers depended on patronage and promotion that often failed
• Avant-garde success instantly rewarded performers with superstar pay and fan worship.
• Avant-garde techniques could be mistaken for documentary realism by mainstream critics
• Avant-garde theater audiences could turn violently hostile and assault performers
• Avant-garde theater concepts reached mass audiences through political street action
• Avant-garde theater functioned as a hub uniting radical political factions in 1968.
• Avant-garde theater matched minimalist art’s material reduction
• Avant-garde theater performances drew police surveillance in 1968
• Avant-garde theater turned IRS tax hearings into staged performances
• Avant-garde theatre forced audiences to accept complicity in violence to continue
• Ayler’s New Grass pioneered soul-rock fusion before Bitches Brew
• Band defiance against club owners could be provoked by outright threats
• Barbara Rubin arrived at the cooperative as a fragile, silenced eighteen-year-old runaway
• Be-In invited visitors to lie in a tie-dye cave and contemplate mandalas
• Beat and Zen aesthetics signaled American culture regaining humor
• Beat poets performed at Columbia and East Third Street venues in 1959
• Beatles hiding anonymously at the poetry event symbolically fused pop and underground scenes
• Beatnik identity had become a rentable commodity by 1960
• Being banned and dropped actually boosted the MC5’s reputation
• Bill Graham bought a dilapidated movie palace to open the Fillmore East
• Black Mask disrupted art events toward destroying bourgeois culture
• Black Mask united a transatlantic protest-art tendency under a Dada banner
• Black Mask’s MoMA shutdown pioneered conceptual art as political theater
• Black nationalist critics ridiculed jazz musicians borrowing from white rock acts
• Black revolutionary theater dramatized the murder of King’s nonviolent gospel
• Black separatist theater rejected white inclusion as an artistic and political aim
• Black theater casts demanded all-Black crews as a condition of performance in 1968.
• Blacklisted performers and their children anchored the downtown avant-garde
• Bohemian venues paid performers by audience-donation baskets pitched at the door
• Both masterworks were incubated in the same hotel of the New York bohemian scene.
• Bottomless access to street life made avant-garde films possible
• Bringing It All Back Home fused beat poetry with rock into folk rock
• Broadway ran Lorraine Hansberry’s Village-critique play for only 101 performances
• Burroughs pioneered mixed-media sound collage performances in 1965
• By 1961 downtown experimental films had legitimated into commercial runs
• By 1966 MacDougal Street had become a ceaseless mass tourist spectacle.
• By 1970 even radical European films seemed tame to New York critics
• Cabaret card suspensions pushed acclaimed black musicians toward avant-garde venues
• Cage’s randomness ideas directly seeded early performance art
• Camp art valorizes bad acting as truer than polished naturalism
• Canonical exclusion inside the avant-garde turned on who did the fabrication
• Canonization of a film can proceed directly from grassroots self-promotion
• Celebrity charisma trumped craft in early Warhol productions
• Censorship battles can outlast the cultural moment that made them urgent.
• Censorship drove protest magazines onto cheap mimeograph production.
• Chance of history timing determined which experimental film became canonical
• Cheap admission and open participation drew overflowing crowds to jazz avant-garde.
• Cheap basement gallery spaces housed deliberately disturbing assemblage spectacles in 1960
• Cheap derelict loft space physically enabled Jack Smith’s maximalist set design and performances.
• Cheap marginal housing in Harlem sustained the Anthology’s creator
• Cheap rent and a piano made a marginal bar into a scene’s seedbed
• Cheap rent of $100 a month enabled artist cooperatives to form in Lower Manhattan
• Cheap rented studios on the Lower East Side became instant art environments
• Cheap rents and relaxed mores drew the Beat avant-garde to the South Village
• Cheap rents were perhaps the greatest facilitator of 1960s artistic innovation
• Cheap storefront coffeehouses anchored Beat community life
• Cheap storefronts on the far side of Second Avenue hosted the new poetry scene
• Children’s song and frontier myth were repurposed into images of murder and mourning
• City license officials moved to shut down underground venues on obscenity grounds.
• Civic institutions recruited avant-garde artists for official display in 1963
• Civil rights protestors weaponized Moses’s own road network against his Fair
• Coffeehouse owners organized an eighty-person protest against fire-code closures
• Cold War civil defense mandates intruded into every building including basements
• Cold War Manhattanites lived with constant expectation of nuclear annihilation
• Coleman and Dylan converged on the Village scene in the same season
• Coleman’s breakthrough provoked jealousy because he bypassed jazz’s apprenticeship hierarchy
• Coleman’s radicality forced Coltrane and Rollins to rethink their music
• Commercial exploiters quickly packaged the Beat as a commodity
• Commercial hippie shows near St. Mark’s Place felt pointless to scene insiders
• Commercial recutting of Godard’s film provoked him to assault a producer onstage.
• Commercial tax motivations can subsidize radical avant-garde film
• Commercial TV networks struggled to assimilate the avant-garde’s participatory performance
• Commercialization denatured folk music even as it created new entertainers
• Conceptual art made performers follow absurd instructions in public
• Conceptual art shifted artistic value from objects to ephemeral processes and ideas
• Conceptual art subverted the market system that promoted avant-garde objects
• Confrontational interview films thrived on subjects who resisted and insulted the camera
• Congressmen screened a banned underground film to sink a nominee.
• Corporate capital co-opted the counterculture’s rebellion as marketing almost instantly.
• Countercultural rock venues instantly became commercialized, class-segregated spectacles.
• Counterculture audiences rejected Godard’s avant-garde film as boring and hypocritical.
• Counterculture icon deaths in 1970 generated conspiratorial interpretations.
• Counterculture pranks deliberately baited police into violent response.
• Coverage of the avant-garde coexisted with civil rights crises in 1965
• Critics experienced Happenings as opaque objects rather than narrative theater
• Critics framed Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl as the culmination of Direct Cinema
• Critics misidentified Dylan’s mediocre New Morning as a great comeback.
• Critics projected collective unity onto a mediocre Dylan album.
• Critics read unstructured Fluxus performance as an assault on rational order
• Critics rejected antiwar art its audience embraced as communal anger, not craft
• Critics saw New Left revolutionary films as self-defeatingly elitist
• Cross-dressing public performers embodied a revolution that street-level Maoist radicals rejected with violence.
• Cultural innovation is collective and originates on the margins, not from isolated genius
• Cutting footage without knowledge of the play produced a prizewinning documentary
• Czech citizens refused to cooperate with Godard’s planned Prague film
• Dalí’s 1967 happening showed the avant-garde form already become a packaged cliché.
• Dan Flavin smuggled Vietnam War politics into Minimalist sculpture
• Destruction art incurred actual legal prosecution in late-sixties London
• Destruction art was received as thoughtful rather than shocking in 1968
• Distribution conflicts directly catalyzed the creation of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative
• Documenting avant-garde performances required physically intrusive underground filming techniques
• Downtown and uptown avant-gardes fused in a single 1965 summer
• Downtown art audiences received early performances with mixed boredom and arousal
• Downtown artists scavenged construction waste and urban detritus as raw material.
• Downtown artists were slow to produce anti-war art despite signing petitions
• Downtown happenings provoked establishment editorial condemnation
• Downtown hippie audiences had become so saturated with spectacle that nude body-painting barely registered
• Downtown Manhattan avant-gardists shared a dense overlapping scene crossing poetry, film, and music
• Downtown media praised Jones partly by romanticizing his transgressive poses
• Downtown performers played with physically punishing intensity
• Downtown rents pulled the avant-garde’s center of gravity south
• Downtown scenes grew in cheap, transitional spaces between neighborhoods
• Downtown theater costumes were improvised on tiny budgets from found materials.
• Downtown theater pushed explicit and outrageous staging of political subject matter.
• Drug culture suffused 1966 popular music and underground cinema.
• Durational avant-garde performance culture directly inspired Warhol’s early films
• Dutchman framed Black artistic expression as sublimated violence
• Dylan wrote anti-McCarthy satire while under actual FBI surveillance
• Dylan’s Self Portrait deliberately flaunted mediocrity as a break from his own icon status
• Early 1960s independent films mixed white-light noise blasts, Ginsberg poetry, and folk songs
• Early anti-war marches gained media attention only through police violence
• Early avant-garde artists subsisted on menial minimum-wage seasonal jobs
• Early avant-garde jazz debates hinged on who could claim ownership of the music
• Early avant-garde performances had tiny, erratic audiences of fellow artists
• Early East Village collectives collapsed within a year of founding.
• Early happenings deliberately rejected repeatable meaningful action
• Early Happenings mixed mundane tasks with unsettling racialized imagery
• Early happenings were cheap, casual, jerrybuilt productions thriving on physical proximity.
• Early minimalist music grew directly out of civil-rights political activism
• Early off-off-Broadway directors moved fluidly across overlapping downtown scenes
• Early paying audiences had no framework for understanding Warhol’s static films
• Early performance art was improvised street theater policed by local authorities
• Early performance work deliberately blurred the boundary between art and real life
• Early SoHo loft dwellers could obtain utilities illegally for free
• Early underground film audiences were tiny and mostly uncomprehending
• Early-Sixties junk sculptors lived and slept inside their own salvaged-material work
• Easy Rider’s commercial success directly inspired the Warhol Factory’s Trash parody
• Edie Sedgwick is widely thought to be Dylan’s song subject
• Edie Sedgwick’s arrival pulled Warhol into club and youth culture scenes
• El Topo created a religious cult following from midnight screenings
• El Topo offered the counterculture collective solace amid cascading trauma
• El Topo’s midnight run served as collective solace amid death and violence
• El Topo’s spectacle blurred the line between performance and real transgression
• Environmental and Artaudian theater practices were transplanted into Black nationalist drama
• Environmental theater erased the performer-audience boundary through shared staging.
• Established celebrities flocked to Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows.
• Established critics read the Doom Show as neo-dada protest art
• Established critics validated midnight cult cinema for mainstream audiences
• Established jazz musicians violently resented Ornette Coleman’s arrival
• Establishment critics dismissed Yoko Ono’s avant-garde music as unserious.
• European auteurs moved in on the American counterculture by 1970.
• European avant-garde acclaim amplified a banned underground film’s fame
• Even established intellectuals were hostile to the underground film scene.
• Even iconic counterculture figures felt theater was powerless in 1960s New York.
• Even the counterculture itself produced critics of El Topo’s political pretensions
• Eviction and losing his possessions drove a filmmaker to move into the film cooperative
• Exhibitions directly recruited new members into downtown art collectives
• Experimental violinist John Cale first gigged with Tony Conrad on a novelty dance single
• Factional disputes over commercial cuts split the New American Cinema
• Factory speed-use was so pervasive it was treated as a norm by insiders
• Factory-aesthetic film locations were already slated for urban redevelopment in 1960
• Famous artists circulated anonymously in the East Village counterculture
• Famous figures could force free entry into sixties events
• Federal narcotics agents recruited informants to entrap Ginsberg
• Fifty playgoers fainted watching a staged heroin injection over three years.
• Film collectives framed high culture as a pacification tool serving elite interests.
• Film commissions and underground scene access jointly shaped avant-garde projects
• Film gained cult status through midnight screenings
• Film labs policed obscenity by seizing and reporting footage to police
• Filming itself could serve as a social ritual independent of capturing footage
• Finger-snap applause began as a practical noise ordinance
• Fire code enforcement singled out non-Italian coffeehouses to target minority clienteles
• First-hand experience gave Barbara Rubin authority over the art-world men
• First-wave underground scenes interpenetrated through mutual favors and overlapping venues
• Flaming Creatures was shot in a controlled but drug-saturated and makeshift environment
• Fluxus feuds turned a robot artwork into a mascot
• Fluxus infighting turned avant-garde figures against each other
• Folk music’s rise triggered an open critic feud between rival publications
• Forced audience participation in avant-garde theatre could physically humiliate critics
• Foreman theorized theater as landscape of impenetrable objects generating awe
• Fortas’s pornography rulings were used to attack the Warren court.
• Found-footage artists rendered commercial films strange by stripping plot, speed, color, and sound.
• Free Jazz linked improvised music to abstract expressionist painting
• Free Jazz’s radicalism consisted of group improvisation without stated head or tune
• Funding shortfalls prevented a landmark underground film from being completed.
• Gallery art moved directly into the social bar scene as a marker of currency
• Gallery concerts deliberately fused art, technology, and audience to provoke altered states
• George Wallace’s 1968 New York rally drew fascist groups and violent street clashes.
• Godard scandalized critics by calling American cinema a form of invasion.
• Godard’s American documentary shoot coincided with the Fillmore riot in November 1968
• Godard’s La Chinoise reportedly inspired the Columbia occupations of 1968
• Graham publicly invited confrontation with his counterculture critics
• Grassroots protest killed a proposed expressway through Lower Manhattan
• Greensboro sit-ins functioned as a Political Happening for artists
• Grove Press imported West Coast avant-garde theater into the East Village
• Grove Press paid Godard to distribute radical films on university campuses.
• Guerrilla theater converted the Kent State massacre into participatory street art within days
• Gurin’s decentralization plan saw subcultures franchised into every neighborhood by 1977.
• Hand-held cameras enabled a new autobiographical cinema of live lovemaking
• Happenings audiences reacted to emotional work with nervous or inappropriate laughter.
• Happenings converted raw industrial spaces into participatory performance venues
• Happenings deliberately assembled absurdist inventories of participants
• Hard Rain predates the Cuban Missile Crisis apogee
• Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic parodied Enlightenment views of God as clockmaker
• Hendrix’s breakthrough came from cheap Village club gigs and scene contacts
• Hippies stayed because rents were cheap and the area felt unclaimed
• Hollywood’s LSD films emerged from direct contact with the underground scene
• Illegal live-work lofts enabled experimental performance art genres in SoHo
• Immersive multimedia events transformed ordinary auditoriums into new kinds of spaces
• Immersive staging physically reoriented spectators into a clambering, exposed position
• In 1960s New York, cheap lofts enabled artists to host avant-garde musicians
• In one autumn week bombings, museum actions, and counterculture events coexisted.
• Institutional commission of Tinguely coincided with and amplified mainstream press coverage of happenings
• Intellectual symposia in 1968 routinely degenerated into physical confrontation within minutes
• Italian caffes transforming into coffeehouses drew bohemians to south Washington Square tenements
• Izzy Young attacked Dylan’s electric turn as draining protest from rock
• Jack Smith delivered spaced dialogue with intervals of up to twenty minutes between lines
• Jack Smith’s Normal Love was financed by railway-heir patron Jerome Hill
• Jack Smith’s performances were radically unrehearsed improvisations privileging process over spectacle.
• Jackie Curtis announced nonbinary identity to the Times in 1969-70.
• Jackie Curtis’s production flooded the stage with anarchic cross-dressed bodily chaos.
• Jacobs rallied a crowd to disrupt a public hearing by leading them onstage
• Jail time in Oklahoma connected a filmmaker to Kiowa peyote rituals he recorded
• Jane Jacobs organized the fight that killed the Lower Manhattan Expressway
• Jazz and theater scenes overlapped within two blocks of each other.
• Jazz avant-garde formed a union-like collective modeled on artist-run galleries.
• Jazz credibility debates were framed as a contest of hipness
• Jazz musicians staged direct protest inside the United Nations Security Council.
• Jazz protest art was dismissed as madman behavior in the early sixties.
• Jazz was imagined as a literal revolutionary weapon
• Jewish refugee artists linked their anti-art to beat poetry and Castro.
• Jodorowsky’s Fando y Lis premiered amid the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre
• John and Yoko’s war-is-over billboards spanned a dozen global cities in 1969.
• John Cage’s teaching seeded an avant-garde network in New York
• Jones beat the obscenity charge by testifying that the work did not arouse jurors
• Jones’s apparent violence plays mask sentimental core plots
• Ken Jacobs ranked Myra Breckinridge with The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane.
• Kerouac was packaged and marketed as a jazz poet
• Kerouac was performing a role before an audience
• Kerouac’s term for the Beat circle named a Black woman’s love affair
• Kerouac’s three-take voiceover actually directed Pull My Daisy.
• Kramer abandoned filmmaking for a Vermont commune before Ice even opened
• Kramer’s Ice blurred the line between revolutionary role-play and actual revolutionary action
• Kramer’s Ice staged the revolution’s violence as collective fantasy
• Kramer’s Ice was a thought experiment built around how radicals organize internally
• Kuchar twins made early films on tenement rooftops with neighbor actors
• Kusama engineered her own media persona through self-staged spectacle and press releases
• Kusama staged a competing sacramental orgy a week after Woodstock
• Kusama staged naked street happenings against capitalist landmarks in 1968.
• Kusama staged nude protest performances against the 1968 presidential candidates.
• Kusama turned nude protest into a recurring political-performance form.
• Kusama’s body-painting events were embedded in regular weekly dance parties at marginal venues
• Kusama’s polka-dot nudity performances drew poor box office
• Lack of institutional support and illegality fueled taboo-breaking 1960s art
• Late-1960s performance venues were improvised from converted raw garage spaces
• Leftist critics turned against hipster politics after an organizing failure
• Legal harassment of unlicensed coffeehouses continued for years
• Legal-near-miss performance stunts could generate national front-page press coverage.
• Lenny Bruce’s best work was achieved by improvising rather than rehearsing
• Lenny Bruce’s comedy insisted on present-tense cultural immediacy, while Burroughs fled into fantasy
• Lenny Bruce’s prosecutions were driven by audiences’ repressed fantasies
• Licensing laws forced avant-garde film to fight censorship even in its own space
• Licensing pressure from the city reshaped avant-garde film’s public events
• Lincoln Center’s site required obliterating the Black and Puerto Rican San Juan Hill neighborhood
• Living Theatre faced felony prosecutions and eviction as avant-garde venues were shut down
• Living Theatre performances could dissolve the boundary between actors and audience into chaos
• Living Theatre performances polarised critics and counterculture audiences
• Living Theatre performers deliberately disrupted liberal intellectual symposia to provoke confrontation
• Local stars emerged through a circuit of small coffeehouse clubs.
• Loft apartments doubled as rehearsal spaces for off-off-Broadway productions
• Lord Buckley’s police bust and death made him the 1960s’ first show-business martyr
• Low-budget 16mm political cinema embodied both world-changing idealism and solitary estrangement
• Lower East Side clearance created a literally bombed-out landscape inspiring artists
• Lower East Side residents two-thirds nonwhite lived separately from white ethnics
• Lower Manhattan’s art-network personnel organized the Be-In with rent-free bohemian housing.
• Lower Manhattan’s textile district decayed as that industry relocated South
• LSD apostles directly staged light and slide events in New York
• LSD criminalization in 1966 coincided with a radical Los Angeles band influx
• Lurie’s collages equated news of suffering with advertising triviality.
• Machine politics collapsed in Greenwich Village as reform insurgents defeated Tammany’s last boss
• Mailer’s 1969 mayoral run fused radical novelty with absurdist provocation.
• Mailer’s mayoral campaign was a media performance, not a policy bid
• Mainstream feminist commentators predicted feminism would define the era’s next historical moment.
• Mainstream press framed happenings as trivial beatnik novelty dismissed by serious critics
• Making 1960 avant-garde films meant constant police harassment and public suspicion
• Manson’s cult was framed as the counterculture’s pure evil personification
• March Group artists made brutally primitive anti-art collages.
• Marginalized gay patrons, not activists, launched the Stonewall resistance.
• Max Roach broke with tradition by recording protest jazz before release
• May 1968 saw synchronized cultural and political eruptions in New York and Chicago
• Mayor Lindsay’s on-the-ground presence reduced Harlem riot severity.
• Meat Joy escalated happenings beyond prior Judson pieces
• Meat Joy’s affective reach depended on physically engaging spectators’ senses
• Media coverage made Kusama’s early Happenings real rather than incidental
• Mekas cultivated extreme disciples whose fanaticism matched his own.
• Mekas framed underground film as continuing Baudelaire and Burroughs’ forbidden content
• Mekas marketed underground filmmakers as mythic occult figures
• Mekas saw Pull My Daisy as restarting cinema from its origins.
• Mekas strategically attached himself to rising avant-garde figures.
• Mekas’s defense found almost no support from the artistic establishment.
• Merchants organized against panhandlers even as scene insiders defended them
• Mid-1960s downtown artists turned razed urban sites into poetic film worlds.
• Midnight screening venues created an exhibition circuit for underground film
• Midnight screenings converted a festival’s hippie crowds into a film’s cult audience
• Miles Davis reinvented jazz through studio technology and electric instrumentation
• Minimalism was immediately dubbed a critic-driven form of Dada
• Minimalism’s factory-fabricated work broke the older canon that art must be handmade
• Minimalist artists showed together on West Broadway as early as 1964
• Mob, police, and working-class families allied against the Beats in the Village turf wars
• MoMA’s uptown spectacle made downtown happenings nationally newsworthy
• Moses left monumental works that failed to solve the city’s problems
• Movie premieres in 1970 functioned as gatherings of countercultural protest energy
• Multi-screen collage could produce overwhelming then tender emotional effects
• Multiple avant-garde happenings saturated New York simultaneously in 1968.
• Museum art shows became media events that immediately spawned commercial knockoffs
• Museum protest performance linked Rockefeller art patronage directly to napalm manufacturing
• Museum psychedelic installations drew crowds that regular shows never attracted.
• Museums pivoted from collecting objects to staging artist experiences in 1969-70.
• Musicians resisted the radical demand for free shows
• Myra Breckinridge drew record crowds while earning the most hostile reviews ever
• Narcotics agents raided artist studios under drug pretext and destroyed film work
• New York art emerged from the refuse of its streets and garbage cans
• New York art movements were declared born and dying at once by 1967
• New York authorities criminalized spontaneous public music as an offense
• New York City dominated American urban renewal spending under Robert Moses
• New York controlled jazz clubs through a discretionary cabaret card system lasting decades
• New York lacks plaques commemorating former artist dwellings, unlike Paris
• New York police crushed the emerging avant-garde scene in a coordinated crackdown.
• New York police policed public folk singing as a proxy for other marginalized groups
• New York’s 1960s avant-garde scene was seeded by West Coast emigres.
• New York’s 1968 municipal crisis formed the backdrop for its avant-garde scene
• New York’s art world collapsed under simultaneous market consolidation and radical politicization
• New York’s downtown avant-garde blurred gender and shock value by 1966.
• New York’s garbage strike helped inspire King’s last campaign
• New York’s liberal mayor nearly lost his party primary by a hair.
• New York’s poetry-reading scene began in a tenement basement in 1959.
• New York’s underground scene pooled dozens of artists into one sprawling festival
• Newark’s 1967 uprising targeted white-owned stores specifically.
• Newark’s National Guard occupation killed at least twenty-four Black residents.
• News-media detritus and pinup imagery formed the raw material of early sixties collage art.
• Nitsch’s 1968 New York performance staged raw animal slaughter as avant-garde theater
• Nixon won 1968 with a razor-thin popular-vote plurality but a wide electoral margin.
• No New York film lab would print Flaming Creatures when it was made
• No!art positioned itself as post-apocalyptic, beyond art itself.
• Norman Mailer saw the MC5’s revolutionary rock as an electro-mechanical climax of the age
• Norman Mailer’s mayoral run helped hand New York’s primary to a conservative.
• North Beach Beat scene drew sustained police pressure and media harassment
• NYC’s art world staged public self-analysis as performance spectacle.
• Obscenity laws criminalized avant-garde theater based on staged acts, not content
• Obscenity prosecution for underground comix fell on the news vendor, not the artist.
• Obscenity prosecutions of comedians escalated even as national politics shifted liberal
• Obscenity trials and gallery provocations unfolded simultaneously as one New York spectacle
• October 1966 antiwar march drew vicious counterpicket attacks
• Official suppression of obscenity scattered avant-garde work into new independent venues
• Oldenburg judged his Happening a failure because too many people came.
• One artist’s essay could redefine an entire art movement’s meaning
• One bombing spree triggered hundreds of copycat bomb threats across New York institutions
• One review made Kerouac a bestselling generational spokesperson
• Only forty people ever attended an epochal nineteen-hour avant-garde performance
• Ono’s career crossed from avant-garde loft scene to mass counterculture.
• Op Art’s mass success hinged on its low price and perceived craft
• Open screenings accepted film submissions in place of admission fees
• Open-mic poetry readings moved from North Beach east to Tenth Street galleries
• Park Place gallery hosted early artist-engineer collaborations and minimalist music
• Park Place mounted cross-disciplinary shows fusing painting, sculpture, and sound
• Participatory art’s obligations could alienate even sympathetic critics
• Performance art failures could read as successful participatory theater.
• Performance art’s reputation rests on documentation rather than the event itself
• Personal trauma can become avant-garde art through informal social networks
• Pharoah Sanders joined the Arkestra after waitressing at a Playhouse Café gig
• Physical location inside a walled diplomatic garden shielded nudity from French law
• Play-House repurposed Warhol film material into stage productions after splitting from Tavel
• Police and decency groups surveilled avant-garde performance audiences
• Police arrested the Living Theatre’s nudity-led audiences under indecent-exposure laws.
• Police classified coffeehouses as cabarets to justify closing them
• Police deliberately escalated Yip-In violence and attacked the press.
• Police fired 2,000 rounds of ammunition during the 1964 Harlem uprising
• Police harassed Village clubs until owners paid off the cops.
• Police ordered Harlem residents to leave their own neighborhood during the Powell protest
• Police ringed the Fillmore to exclude poorer hippies from free shows
• Police suppressed avant-garde art regardless of the artist’s international stature
• Police surveillance of avant-garde screenings shows authorities saw culture as a threat
• Police violence against protest organizers turned leadership figures into martyrs
• Policemen could independently initiate obscenity prosecutions against art galleries
• Policing of bohemian culture met organized cross-profession resistance in early 1960s New York
• Political and cultural counterculture events clustered in summer 1962
• Political free jazz was marginalized by both avant-garde and jazz establishments.
• Political pressure forced Bill Graham to grant the Fillmore free weekly nights.
• Political protest was rare in jazz before 1960
• Political radicalism borrowed its self-presentation directly from cinema
• Political satire took form as bestial presidential dreamscape in 1968
• Political theater groups turned venues into contested ideological territory
• Politically committed critics read Ice as personal fantasy, not politics
• Pop Art emerged directly from America’s self-celebration as trademark culture.
• Pornographic criticism judged films by whether they aroused the viewer
• Post-King-assassination New York felt empty and dangerous on the streets
• Powerful handlers could not manufacture success without market fit
• Pre-war avant-garde teachers linked young artists into generative collaborations.
• Press coverage of a scene attracts the crowds that cause a moral panic.
• Primary Structures in 1966 defined minimalism and was covered first as fashion news
• Private patrons funded underground theater shut down by city fire departments
• Process artists made decay and trash into gallery objects
• Prosecution costs nearly bankrupted the underground film scene in 1964.
• Psychedelic cults sought tax-exempt chartered religion status
• Public spectacle events in the East Village blurred performance, news, and bystander participation
• Publishing experimental literature made small magazines targets for obscenity prosecution
• Radical 1960s artists attacked European art music as imperialist ideology
• Radical 60s artworks fractured the artist’s own scene and friendships
• Radical art moved from galleries into direct street actions against political targets.
• Radical feminist staffers forcibly seized control of the underground paper Rat in January 1971.
• Radical political filmmaking funded by establishment institutions like the AFI
• Radical theater absorbed contemporary political murder directly into its performance structure
• Radical underground papers operated unpaid, in debt, and near collapse
• Radicals attacked MoMA for co-opting Dada and Surrealist politics.
• Radicals saw Woodstock as commodified containment of the counterculture.
• Reform-minded women saw Tammany politicos as instruments for social welfare
• Rented storefront back rooms doubled as experimental performance spaces
• Retail accumulation defined a countercultural neighborhood’s tipping point.
• Ridiculous Theater earned high-culture validation from its former critics.
• Ridiculous Theater mixed Hitler writings with TV ad libs and Vietnam reportage
• Rival avant-garde factions dismissed each other’s psychedelic spectacles as rip-offs
• Robert Moses justified mass displacement of residents as necessary for urban renewal
• Robert Moses threatened farmers with eminent domain when charm failed
• Rock ‘n’ roll became a recognized cultural Thing by late 1964
• Rubin’s casting list reveals avant-garde and pop celebrity were being merged into one scene
• Sacrificial animal-carcass performance art debuted in America through a film programming network
• San Francisco’s beat scene was commercialized by 1959 while New York’s was not yet
• Scene infrastructure failures in one city drove avant-garde organizers to another
• Scene styles succeed each other so fast that middle positions get left behind
• Schneemann’s Eye Body established the woman body artist role
• Scorpio Rising pioneered ironic use of current Top 40 hits in film
• Scorpio Rising shocked audiences by eroticizing fascist imagery
• Secret police recording of live shows was used to prosecute Lenny Bruce.
• Seeing Shadows’ corruption converted Mekas into a committed artist rather than promoter
• Self-immolation by three Americans directly seeded anti-war performance art
• Sensory overload theory entered art jargon from Simmel via 1960s media theory.
• Sensory-overload performance could induce altered consciousness before LSD use
• Shattuck compared the Beat Generation and French avant-garde
• Shirley Clarke and Jack Smith replaced the censored film within one production cycle.
• Sixties avant-garde performance uniformly returned to Greek tragedy as its primal source
• Slave Ship immersed audiences physically within its set design
• Slum clearance and bohemian influx together triggered violent backlash against beatniks
• Smith’s films were shot in friends’ living rooms and nature free of cost.
• Smith’s Flaming Creatures invented an aesthetic that was simultaneously primitive and sophisticated
• Smithson mocked Park Place Group’s fourth-dimensional ambitions as laughable
• Smithson’s early work grew directly from Pop art and literary experiment
• SoHo artist proximity—neighbors borrowing cameras—enabled the making of canonical art
• SoHo avant-garde productions competed for the same audiences
• SoHo lofts were decayed commercial spaces repurposed into art venues
• SoHo’s artist colonization began informally because zoning forbade residence there
• SoHo’s empty cast-iron streets were already being filmed as an art subject by 1963
• SoHo’s founding artist homes were illegal residential occupancies
• Solanas consulted her male ally before attempting Warhol’s assassination
• Solanas’ shooting instantly turned her SCUM Manifesto into a radical publication
• Sontag discovered the Happenings as a critical subject through the Reuben Gallery scene
• Specialized journals and small presses consolidated the happenings pantheon
• Spring 1960 compressed global and local crises into one moment
• Spring 1968 compressed utopian possibility into a half-week window
• Stand-up comic Lenny Bruce’s routines borrowed jazz phrasing and Kerouac’s prose cadences
• Stockhausen’s Originale had avant-garde figures play themselves
• Stonewall directly spawned several new gay liberation organizations and press outlets
• Strobe effects were consciously designed to mimic drug states
• Structural conditions, not formal craft, drove Mekas’s anti-establishment filmmaking
• Sun Ra framed his Arkestra as an educational project preaching discipline, not religion
• Sun Ra pioneered the light-show that white rock groups later monetized
• Sun Ra ran his Arkestra under disciplined, quasi-military house rules.
• Sun Ra’s Arkestra played for two dollars a night plus hamburgers
• Sun Ra’s multimedia East Village show flopped and he left for Philadelphia in 1968
• Technical failure can be recast as the essence of an art form
• The 1960 avant-garde film used Brechtian naming and race-symmetric structure
• The 1961 folk riot directly preceded Bob Dylan’s Village ascent
• The 1964 World’s Fair drove the police crackdown on New York’s avant-garde.
• The 1967 Be-In rapidly multiplied into a much larger anti-war rally
• The 1967 Cheetah club packaged the whole avant-garde as available for consumption.
• The 1968 DIAS ritual shifted from killing chickens to attacking trees
• The Acid Test and Trips Festival evolved within a few months
• The Altamont disaster signaled the end of the counterculture era
• The American public absorbed antiwar protests with bemused tolerance rather than hostility
• The Anthology of American Folk Music was an 84-song narrative
• The apex 1966 works of Dylan and Warhol bracketed the same summer.
• The art collective redirected its disruption from bombings to museum performances
• The art strike gave birth to a new art form called Information-Art
• The assassination attempt became a marketable brand for Warhol films.
• The avant-garde scene’s key figures all lived precariously in the Village
• The avant-garde turned from street film to dematerialized conceptual art in 1967
• The avant-garde’s technical infrastructure was supplied by corporate engineers like Bell’s Klüver
• The Beat scene relocated from San Francisco to lower Manhattan by 1960
• The Beatnik Riot made a folk music dispute into front-page news
• The Bleecker midnight series survived Flaming Creatures and ended only on a miscredited ad
• The bombings were broken by an FBI informant who infiltrated the radical cell
• The boundary between radical art project and violence collapsed in 1968
• The Brig arose from the Becks’ own jail experience of volition stripped
• The censorship crackdown drew other artists’ work into confiscation and prosecution
• The city bulldozed pre-Civil War blocks despite officially renouncing such plans.
• The conditions of these performances absorbed all mishaps and delays into the work
• The Connection marked an early step in commodifying avant-garde cool
• The counterculture identity was named by Theodore Roszak in The Nation
• The downtown avant-garde overlapped temporally with the mass pop culture moment
• The earliest avant-garde audiences were small, all-black, and uninterested in drugs or drink.
• The East Village avant-garde was housed in former immigrant entertainment spaces
• The East Village coffeehouse circuit directly linked literary and pop figures
• The Electric Circus commercialized the light-show experience within a year
• The enormous cultural pressure on major artists distorts how fans judge ordinary work
• The EPI marketed itself as a transformative self-improvement event
• The EPI opened in a filthy space converted in under five hours
• The EPI’s name emerged from borrowed cultural fragments, not original invention
• The era’s most shocking sex film was politically analytical, not merely prurient
• The fabricated Black terror threat contrasted with real white violence against civil rights workers
• The Factory began as a cheap loft repurposed into a film studio
• The Factory’s openness erased boundaries between fame and obscurity within a single scene
• The Fillmore audience turned violently on the MC5 for disavowing revolution
• The Fillmore East’s 10,000-door showing demonstrated enormous counterculture demand
• The Fillmore’s MC5 blow-up was triggered by ticket allocation disputes
• The first happenings ran in abandoned lofts and gyms near artist studios.
• The Floating Bear obscenity case delayed Naked Lunch’s publication
• The folk music riot foreshadowed the rise of two future mayors
• The folk scene’s key figures were under FBI surveillance
• The Folkways Anthology was produced on a $200 advance and peyote
• The Gaslight’s birth was literally illegal cellar excavation
• The Godz’ debut album in September 1966 extended dope-rock free-form jamming
• The Great Blackout exposed racialized policing priorities in Harlem
• The Great Blackout produced euphoria and solidarity rather than panic
• The Greenwich Village folk scene and Broadway pop coexisted five blocks apart
• The Groovy murder ended the East Village’s hippie innocence
• The Gymnasium was a repurposed Czech-Slovak community center that hosted Warhol’s Velvet Underground relaunch
• The happening’s architecture guaranteed no spectator saw the whole work
• The jazz avant-garde migrated a hundred blocks uptown from the Village scene.
• The jazz October Revolution was politically more radical than Stockhausen’s Originale.
• The Last Poets sold best by replacing avant-garde jazz with militant spoken-word
• The lead obscenity defense lawyer did not even know the film’s title.
• The Lenny Bruce playbook crossed over into downtown stage farce
• The Les Événements of May 1968 exploded days after the Columbia occupation
• The Living Theatre exiled itself from New York for four years touring Europe
• The Living Theatre staged I Ching-based chance theater in Village coffeehouses
• The Living Theatre staged scriptless participatory performances built on revolutionary rungs.
• The Living Theatre turned intellectual symposiums into staged provocations
• The Living Theatre’s performance climaxed in a communal OM-chanting embrace
• The Lower East Side scene drew in fifteen-year-old dropouts for filming
• The mirrored ball moved from art-world camp to disco cliché
• The most successful radical action after Stonewall was an office sit-in.
• The Motherfuckers’ garbage stunt ignored the Black janitor whom the mess burdened
• The Motherfuckers’ trash protest prefigured Lincoln Center’s gentrification of the Lower East Side
• The Mothers achieved critical acclaim through parody of past pop idioms
• The nadir of 1964 coincided with Lenny’s imprisonment and Ron Rice’s death
• The New York art world was a dense ecosystem of distinct recognizable character types
• The New York avant-garde’s anti-authoritarianism came from artists who survived WWII trauma
• The New York Times championed the avant-garde production over the counterculture press.
• The New York Times coined the term Beat Generation as an insult
• The New York Times covered the underground scene as a fashion story.
• The obscenity crackdown on avant-garde art was national, not just New York
• The obscenity prosecutor uttered the four-letter words more often than the defendant did.
• The original Shadows film contained compressed, frantic narrative density
• The peace rally clashes generated sustained multi-outlet press coverage for months
• The Performance Group’s public introspection centered on real fears of leader abandonment
• The personal cost of Jones’s radical turn landed on his white wife and children
• The play degraded after previews into literal finger-pointing at an already radical audience
• The political and cultural radicalism of August 1968 peaked simultaneously
• The protestors deliberately staged a media event for television coverage
• The psychedelic light show originated in a San Francisco afterhours club
• The radicalized hip scene ran liberated spaces and self-defense patrols
• The real Mardou Fox panned Kerouac’s Subterraneans as poseur fiction
• The Responsive Eye show turned museum viewing into a participatory physical spectacle
• The Ridiculous Theater recruited middle-aged opera singers willing to abandon careers overnight.
• The same cheap industrial neighborhood drew avant-garde and mainstream imagery makers alike
• The same obscene epithet triggered both Lenny Bruce’s and the Bear editors’ busts
• The same police squad raiding Stonewall also targeted underground comics.
• The same razed neighborhood yielded both apocalyptic and elegiac art.
• The San Remo bar concentrated avant-garde artists of every discipline in one room
• The scene drew curator and press attention within weeks of its start
• The scene’s sensory overload expressed performers’ ego desperation
• The scruffy underground scene was sanitized into a celebrity venue.
• The Sky Socialist tracked demolition into its decades-later urban sequel.
• The SoHo gallery model developed from loft-scaled spaces for outsized sculpture
• The state convicted underground filmmakers under distinct obscenity and licensing statutes in mid-1964.
• The state stacked public hearings to push Lower Manhattan Expressway
• The Stonewall raid was a federal liquor-enforcement operation, not routine local policing.
• The Stonewall uprising was explicitly understood as retaliation for earlier Movement confrontations
• The Store turned art viewing into an inviting shopping experience
• The theater audience physically mixed rival factions of 1960s New York
• The twist dance moved from Black culture into white elite society within two years
• The underground cinema relocated to informal loft screenings after losing its theater
• The underground film scene defined itself against respectable cinema verité
• The underground film world continued working through the day Kennedy was assassinated.
• The underground scene pooled marginal types unemployable by Hollywood
• The underground was immediately co-opted by mainstream media and commerce.
• The underground’s move to higher-rent venues triggered critical backlash
• The uprising’s aftermath employed Black handymen boarding up white-owned storefronts
• The uptown rich discovered East Village nightspots within months of their opening
• The Velvet Underground debuted under Warhol at a psychiatrists’ dinner
• The Velvet Underground’s debut LP received mixed reviews at release
• The Velvet Underground’s first public set emptyed half the audience
• The Venice coffeehouse scene built on a failed desert island utopia project
• The Village scene collectively incubated and subsidized rising unknowns like Dylan
• The Village scene had begun marketing itself grotesquely to tourists by 1960
• The Village Voice’s movie critic arrived from a DP camp in poverty
• The Who’s destructiveness created genuine physical security concerns
• The World discotheque collapsed from repeated liquor fines and partner withdrawal
• The Yippies plagiarized avant-garde happenings for political theater.
• Theater can physically coerce audiences into witnessing simulated atrocity
• Theatre channeled contemporary atrocity into mythic collage rather than documentary
• Theatrical archetypes on stage mirrored actual street confrontations.
• Theatrical rivalries in the underground were shaped by autocratic directors
• Tiny basement coffeehouses seeded avant-garde jazz collaborations in New York
• Tiny monthly grants sustained underground film production
• Tourists and suburban kids followed the bohemian scene and overwhelmed the streets
• Toxic art materials may have contributed to Eva Hesse’s death at thirty-four
• Traffic closure turned St. Mark’s Place into a nightly open-air scene
• Unconventional artists disrupted established parades by commandeering their spectacle.
• Underground 1960s cinema deliberately courted technical failure and raw realness
• Underground art became a target of Senate scrutiny after Flaming Creatures
• Underground artworks circulated and recombined across multiple venues in one season
• Underground cartoonists included post-office workers producing transgressive urban hellscapes
• Underground comic iconography blurred into Motherfucker self-presentation on the Lower East Side.
• Underground comics pioneered adult content with casual racism.
• Underground downtown culture and national historical trauma unfolded simultaneously on the same day
• Underground events drew police undercover agents to the scene
• Underground exhibitions mixed avant-garde comics with Mad magazine artists in storefronts
• Underground film and electoral politics collided in summer 1968.
• Underground film audiences physically and vocally resisted screenings
• Underground film crossed uptown once mainstream press and advertising covered it
• Underground film festivals aggregated an emergent scene by 1962
• Underground film merged celebrity fantasy with real political newsreel footage
• Underground film parodied American political figures as camp spectacle by 1968
• Underground film perfectionism coexisted with slapstick improvisation.
• Underground film premieres were staged as deliberately anti-spectacular brunchtime events
• Underground film rushes served as currency for intimacy in the scene
• Underground film screenings in 1960 drew booing from Provincetown audiences
• Underground film stars hitchhiked and scraped by to work on unreleased movies.
• Underground film thrived in the same weeks as the missile-crisis atmosphere and Project Apollo
• Underground film was improvised and composed directly in the camera
• Underground film’s decline coincided with theater’s rise in respectability.
• Underground filmmakers framed their work as explicitly anti-Hollywood political gestures
• Underground filmmakers in 1968 struggled with rent and chaos.
• Underground filmmaking pushed improvisation to its absolute outer limits
• Underground films celebrated unknown beats rather than aristocrats
• Underground films gained legitimacy as official festival short subjects
• Underground films of the 1960s circulated as mutable, performative events
• Underground films premiered months after first being screened privately
• Underground films recorded an ungentrified New York that no longer exists.
• Underground films recycled broadcast and newsreel footage before appropriation was named
• Underground films reused abandoned footage and collaged found materials
• Underground films were initially understood as extending painterly Happenings, not film tradition
• Underground films were made from castoff stock in squalid cheap rooms
• Underground light-show artists quickly monetized their craft for commercial gigs
• Underground mimeograph mailings were policed through prison mail screening
• Underground newspapers suffered distribution losses because of the bombings
• Underground papers functioned as communications hubs for actual bombers
• Underground papers performed fake police interventions as participatory spectacle
• Underground political cinema blended drug imagery with found-footage collage
• Underground press papers varied sharply in their openness to street gangs
• Underground press positioned museums as market manipulators for collectors
• Underground press reframed museum protest as revolutionary politics
• Underground publishing connected to national racial violence occurring days apart
• Underground scene papers were economically outflanked by sex tabloids riding the same counterculture
• Underground screenings in 1968 were chaotic and sparsely attended.
• Underground theater blurred sacrilege, vaudeville, and improvised chaos
• Underground theater could trigger diplomatic and police suppression across international borders
• Underground theater ran midnight-length shows that critics compared to baroque painting
• Underground theater used actual violence against audiences to provoke reaction
• Unlicensed film exhibition forced free shows funded by voluntary contributions
• Unlicensed filmmaking drew police surveillance in Cold War New York
• Urban redevelopment produced the derelict buildings that cheap avant-garde films documented
• Urban renewal leveled huge Manhattan neighborhoods as new housing after World War II
• US jazz-as-protest discourse emerged only in the 1960s; earlier jazz was state goodwill propaganda.
• USCO valued the World as a paid technology and programming laboratory
• USCO’s Be-In became Life magazine’s cover image for psychedelic art
• Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol in June 1968 at his Factory
• Velvet Underground performers had all been institutionalized as adolescents
• Verve delayed the Velvets’ album nearly a year after the Mothers’ debut
• Village art was collaborative, with performers openly borrowing each other’s material
• Village bohemians and working commuters shared the same public space in 1960.
• Village club-goers imported SNCC sit-in tactics against building inspections.
• Village clubs doubled as fundraising nodes for civil rights groups
• Village clubs opened in low-rent former saloons and stables converted cheaply.
• Village coffeehouses ran unlicensed and were fined for it.
• Village folk clubs repeatedly ran afoul of license and fire regulations.
• Village folk venues were converted stables and subterranean basements.
• Wallace campaigned on police takeover and shooting rioters.
• Wallace staff handed out tickets to protesters to serve as foils.
• War trauma and displacement concentrated among the downtown junk-artists.
• Warhol and Dylan pursued similar self-invention and scene mastery in 1960s New York.
• Warhol copied a rejected club concept and launched his own venue
• Warhol deliberately positioned himself as a rock star rather than a painter
• Warhol deliberately spliced out-of-focus and in-focus footage of Edie Sedgwick
• Warhol invented conceptual porn by asserting aesthetic status onto explicitly sexual material
• Warhol personally managed the Velvet Underground into existence
• Warhol recruited screenwriters for their voices, not their words
• Warhol responded to creative competition by deliberately making bad movies
• Warhol structured Poor Little Rich Girl to shift from blur to focus mid-film
• Warhol treated Sedgwick’s life as raw material for films
• Warhol was paid to attend elite social venues as celebrity bait
• Warhol’s Chelsea Girls ran twelve random-ordered unedited reels two at a time
• Warhol’s circle produced theater that deliberately wrecked theatrical conventions.
• Warhol’s early films crossed high concept with amateur camp production
• Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable borrowed its name from a competitor
• Warhol’s film premieres were collaborative improvisations delegated to projectionists.
• Warhol’s first band rehearsed only three or four times before folding
• Warhol’s independent wealth made him the dominant force in the stalled underground scene.
• Warhol’s influence outlived his own film production through his celebrity-manufacturing methods
• Warhol’s Marilyn portraits exploited her death within days of the event.
• West Coast hippie audiences rejected the Velvet Underground as too dark
• White jazz critics attacked politicized Black musicians as separatists
• Wilson merged professional performers with amateurs and inside jokes in his spectacles
• Winifred Bryan’s underground film career followed an earlier mainstream Montand vehicle
• Worker militancy and avant-garde politics converged in the 1964 Lower East Side scene.
• Zabriskie Point framed America as a police-state surveillance culture
• Zappa’s onstage caricature of Nico originated ‘Call Any Vegetable’.
• Zero-budget filmmaking scavenged locations from friends and abandoned sites.