The three-day event produced by the Diggers and the Artists Liberation Front in Glide Church during February of 1967 titled Invisible Circus is significant in the evolution of performance art, but rarely discussed in histories that stress the New York City scene. While East Coast artists like Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman were making a stir in locations like the Rueben and Smolin Galleries, hip San Francisco artists were devising events that embodied distinctly West Coast artistic values. Among these were a distaste for celebrity and a democratic vision quite at odds with the ambitions of most artists, avant-garde or mainstream. Through the Artists Liberation Front and the Diggers’ Communications Company, Chester Anderson, Claude Hayward, and others produced truly novel and radical works of art. The fact that the artists’ names and their most significant works are virtually forgotten in art history is perhaps appropriate.
The New York
performance art scene developed first, its roots in the European trends of
Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism. From Ubu
Roi through Artaud and the Theater of the Absurd, modern plays remained
conventional in the most fundamental ways with scripts, actors, and
spectators. While the evenings at the
Cabaret Voltaire may have seemed altogether chaotic to the audiences, they were
planned in detail apart from spontaneous eruptions from the audience and the
occasional police raid. Artists and
viewers might become boisterous with cat-calls, boos, and shouted challenges,
but the evening, however far out, remained recognizably theater.
Likewise, for a
show often cited as the first “happening,” Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6
Parts (1959) at the Rueben Gallery those who attended received detailed
instructions on what they should do, when they should move, and the like. A bell punctuated the movement from each of six sets of three simultaneous happenings. The following year the same
gallery presented Robert Whitman’s American Moon for which viewers
entered an immersive environment and viewed the event from partial tunnels
while performers, including Whitman and Simone Forti flashed lights, produced
loud noises, and projected films. At the
conclusion Lucas Samaras sat in a swing above the spectators. The entire proceeding was “carefully
conceived and tightly scripted” to create “an interactive environment that
manipulated the audience to a degree virtually unprecedented in 20th century
art.” [1] The limits of innovation in these early happenings are
clear.
A more radical
program is explicit in the Fluxus group.
The 1963 manifesto by George Maciunas proclaims itself “REVOLUTIONARY”
and advocates “living art, anti-art,” “NON ART REALITY, to be fully grasped by
all people, not only critics, dilettantes, and professionals.” Fluxus demands a fusion of “the cadres of
political, social, & cultural revolutionaries into united front and action.”
What this might
mean in practice is suggested by Maciunas in his “Manifesto on Art / Fluxus Art
Amusement” (1965). He stresses a
democratic theme, insisting that, “art-amusement must be simple, amusing, unpretentious,
concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have
no commodity or institutional value. The
value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced,
obtainable by all and eventually produced by all. Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard
without any pretention or urge to participate in the competition of
‘oneupmanship’ with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and
nontheatrical qualities of simple natural event, a game or a gag. It is the
fusion of Spikes Jones Vaudeville, gag, children's games and Duchamp.”
While this program
sounds quite revolutionary, it is largely imaginary. Fluxus was in reality, of course, anything
but unpretentious, simple, or natural, and its audience was anything but a
general one. Still, for all that, the events associated
with its members remained in many ways highly conventional. The 1961 Chambers Street loft concerts
produced by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young in 1961 observed ordinary concert
proprieties, with a clear distinction between onlookers and participants,
credited composers, and intermissions, though some involved mixed media and
some aleatory elements. The 1963 Yam
Festival devised by George Brecht and Robert Watts was novel in its locations,
outside of art galleries, in its element of absurdity, and in its use of mail
art, but retained the distinction between creators and consumers. Never did the group stir outside these boundaries.
On the other hand,
in San Francisco, the epicenter of the ‘sixties youth rebellion, certain
events, such as the Invisible Circus were produced that challenged
expectations anew and constituted a revolution within the avant-garde
itself. Several activities had indeed
been planned, often designed more to stimulate reactions than as an end in
themselves. For instance, the
Communications Company brought the Gestetner printer they used for their
broadsheets in an activity Richard Brautigan called the “John Dillinger
Computer,” but its use was unforeseeable -- they were prepared to print
anything for anybody. Even the projects
of insiders were improvisatory. Chester
Anderson went next door to a tavern where he overheard an animated discussion
whereupon hie returned to the church, transcribed some of their remarks,
printed a few pages and returned to show the bemused drinkers their words on
paper.
A few pranks were
programmed. For instance, what was
presented as a panel discussion on pornography to which a police officer had
been invited was really a set-up. When the
police officer began to speak, he was unaware that, on the wall behind him, a
penis had emerged through a hole and waggled about while the representative of
the straight life was unaware of the cause of the audience’s excited amusement.
Though the Circus
was punctuated by such moments of pre-planned if playful theater and music
including appearances by Pig Pen, Janis Joplin and others, its central
importance lies in what was wholly unplanned, what happened that was utterly
forgotten as it involved no memoirists or big names in general. What happened there is gone, something new is
happening today. The pertinent data’s
having vanished is in fact the evidence for its authenticity. Like sand paintings or archaic ritual, the point
is in the action as it occurs, not in seeking to fix and retain it like a butterfly
specimen in an album.
While
identifiable as a specifically hip aesthetic, the attitude implied by Dave
Hodges’ poster was far from universal during the youth rebellion of the
‘sixties. The “acid tests” of 1965-6 produced
by Ken Kesey and Merry Pranksters such as Lee Quarnstrom and Neal Cassady with
the aid of Owsley Stanley’s refreshments were very like parties featuring bands
such as the pre-Grateful Dead Warlocks and light shows and appearances by Allen
Ginsberg and other celebrities prominently featured on the posters. The same pattern is evident for the Trips
Festival at the Longshoremen’s Hall for
January 21-23, 1966 organized by Bill Graham, Stewart Brand, Ramon Sender, Ken
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
Similarly, publicity for the iconic event of the Haight-Ashbury era, the
Human Be-In in 1967, resembled a routine concert announcement, lacking even
psychedelic graphics. Emmet Grogan
specifically declared the intentions of the producers of the Invisible Circus
to reveal “the feebleness of most public gatherings,” and to transform
participants from “passive listeners” into “active participants.” [2]
The career of the
Cockettes reinforces the point.
Originally an open door, anything-goes troupe founded by Hibiscus
(George Edgerly Harris III) who lived with his company in the Friends of
Perfection Commune, called the KaliFlower Commune. They had welcomed men and women, gay and
straight, gifted and untalented alike, and the shows were largely spontaneous. The Cockettes met their end when their
increasing popularity led to engagements in New York City where they were
panned by critics who did not understand their anti-aesthetic aesthetic. This did not, however, bring about their
demise. Rather, it was the lure of real
celebrity and the financial rewards it implies, resisted by the idealistic
communards that led to the end of the Cockettes and the spawning of the Angels
of Light.
Patty Smith’s Just
Kids details an avant-garde scene just a few years later, illustrating a
thoroughly East Coast goals. The author
and Robert Mapplethorpe were set on fame, always alert for any opening to a
gallery, a dealer, or a wealthy collector.
Her depictions of their regular attendance at Max’s Kansas City, ever
seeking to inch a bit closer to the Warhol table (though the maestro was not
himself there) are richly comic and worlds away from the ethos I myself
experienced reading poetry in the streets of San Francisco around the same
time. My broadsheets, like those of the
Communications Company, had no attribution.
The conventionally over-sized artist’s ego was not considered hip.
The Diggers’ Invisible
Circus broke new ground for the avant-garde by renouncing the illusion of
the artist’s separateness and ownership of the work, embracing those in
attendance as creators of what happens, a fact in any event. Specific occurrences at the Invisible
Circus were quite unpredictable, in a way impermissible even in works
employing the aleatory devices associated with John Cage and Jackson
MacLow. The Diggers not only opened the
door of the gallery; they did away with the gallery altogether, placing art in
the context of everyday life and allowing its motive to be neither more nor
less than fun. While this ethos failed to move the centers of the art world, it did influence the margins, such as the activities at political demonstrations as well as Cloud House events, Burning Man, and Rainbow Gatherings. Much remains to be done to understand the artistic implications of the hip movement in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene.
1. Paul Schimmel,
“Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object,” Out of Actions: between
performance and the object, 1949–1979, MoCA Los Angeles, New York/London, 1998,
pp.61-2.
2. Ringolevio,
282.
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