Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde w/Jim Hoberman

East End Books Ptown Presents: Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde--Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop w/Jim Hoberman 8/28 - 6pm at Provincetown Public Library

J. Hoberman was for over three decades a film and culture critic for The Village Voice. His previous books have explored the subculture of midnight movies, the rise and fall of Yiddish-language cinema, the international Communist avantgarde, SoHo performance art, and the underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His "found illusions" trilogy--which includes The Dream Life, Make My Day, and An Army of Phantoms--used Hollywood to refract the history of the Cold War.

A groundbreaking cultural history of 1960s New York, from the legendary writer on art and film

The book also has specific material on Ptown during the summer of 1961, focusing mainly on the filmmakers Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs, but also citing the events around the obscenity trial of the Provincetown Review. Crucially, my presentation includes the two short films that Jacobs showed at the Sun Gallery in September 1961, Little Stabs at Happiness and The Death of P’town. Both feature Smith and The Death of P’Town was shot in the Winthrop Street cemetery.

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.

Reviews

Art in America,

The Artsfuse

Counterpunch

The Art Newspaper

Forward

Village Voice

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