Description
Everything Is Now
The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop
Author/Editor: J. Hoberman
CONTENTS
A groundbreaking cultural history of 1960s New York, from the legendary writer on art and film.
Like Paris in the 1920s, New York City in the 1960s was a cauldron of avant-garde ferment and artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. Drawing on interviews, memoirs and the alternative press, Everything Is Now chronicles this collective drama as it was played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters and, ultimately, the streets.
The principals here are penniless filmmakers, jazz musicians and performing poets, as well as less classifiable artists. Most were outsiders at the time. They include Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and many more. Some were associated with specific movements (Avant Rock, Destruction Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Happenings, Mimeographed Zines, Pop Art, Protest-Folk, Ridiculous Theater, Stand-Up Poetry, Underground Comix and Underground Movies). But there were also movements of one. Their art, rooted in the detritus and excitement of urban life, was taboo-breaking and confrontational.
As J. Hoberman shows in this riveting history, these subcultures coalesced into a counterculture that changed the city, the country and the world.
Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I: SUBCULTURES, 1959-66
The Connections, 1958-60
Primitives of the New Era, 1960-61
The Freedom Jazz, 1961-63
The Camera Shall Know No Shame, 1962-64
New York Unfair, 1964
All Tomorrow’s Parties, 1964-65
Babushkaville Explodes, 1966-67
II: COUNTERCULTURES, 1966-71
Turf Wars: Destroying Lower Manhattan, Inventing Soho, Claiming the East Village, 1965-68
Everything Is Now: Kusama vs. Warhol vs. the Fillmore vs. the Living Theatre and Motherfuckers, 1968-69
No President, Scare City, 1968-69
Withdrawal from Orchid Lagoon, 1970-71
Bibliography
Source Notes
Index
ISBN: 9781804290866
Published: May 27, 2025