The Hip Aesthetic of the Invisible Circus

 

     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]

      Though the Invisible Circus has been the focus here, the contrast between hip concepts and practices between the East and West coasts is, in fact, generally applicable, though hardly predictive in any individual case.  On the Pacific artists dared to defy the age-old artist’s ambition (so evident in Van Gogh’s letters) to be known, to sell.  Among the supporting examples that come first to mind are the scrupulous avoidance of individual celebrity in all Communications Company publications.  Authors are not mentioned, even names like Brautigan’s verging on fame; there is no “star” apart from the collective.  On the international level they had affinities with the Situationists. 

     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.

Art and Life in the Haight Ashbury

     Doubtless the most prominent elements of the artistic legacy of the youth movement of the 1960s are the psychedelic rock music of bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead, the innovating cartoon work from Zap and others, and the graphic design of the concert posters and the underground press, notably the pioneering Oracle.
     The Haight Ashbury itself produced few memorable paintings or sculptures and relatively little of lasting literary value in part because hip artists in the center of the scene sought to make life as a whole into art with street theater, extravagant costumes, community-based music, and a slyly ironic argot. Though the Beat poets had formed the best-known segment of the hip movement during the fifties and several of their principal representatives, born between 1919 and 1935, [1] read at the first Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park Polo Grounds in January of 1967, the culture of the Haight-Ashbury was far less productive of lasting literary monuments than that of North Beach had been.
     The ambition to make everything an objet d’art naturally led to a paucity of distinct objets d’art. The widely shared goals of enlightenment and the transformation of American culture were inconsistent with aesthetic experience as a unique sort of consumption marked off, indeed exalted, by its separation from everyday life and often associated with the privileged. Along with the resistance to limiting art to self-consciously produced objects for a specialized marketplace came a democratic reluctance to glorify a few “geniuses” whose names are a sort of commercial brand and to cultivate anonymous art and art for free in which professional ambitions had no relevance at all. [2]
     Nonetheless the Diggers, the leading formation of the Haight-Ashbury scene, had emerged from earlier literary publications such as Beatitude and Underhound and other specifically artistic formations such as R. G. Davis’ San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Artists Liberation Front. They produced written texts from the beginning. As the Haight neared its crest, The Communication Company, with Claude Hayward and Chester Anderson at its center, assumed the task of publishing for the collective as members of a movement rather than as individual artists or advocates for strictly aesthetic values. Building on the legacy of the Digger Papers that had already appeared, the Communication Company printed hundreds of handbills as well as works of poetry by Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure, and Lew Welch.
     Having acquired “one brand-new Gestetner 366 silk-screen stencil duplicator” and “one absolutely amazing Gestefax electronic stencil cutter,” “Chester & Claude” announced the Communication Company with a manifesto titled “Our Policy.” The document, though printed on new equipment, has a makeshift appearance that reinforces its message. Across the top is inscribed The Communication Company in a hand that betrays nothing of art school polish. Beneath are detailed the group’s goals in a stencil made from a manual typescript, including a section headed “our plans and hopes,” of which only one of the twelve was explicitly (if vaguely) artistic: “to publish literature originating within this new minority.”
     Yet even this ambition is couched in terms associated with radical politics. The use of the term “minority” is surely influenced by the dawning of black consciousness with its demand for the publication and study of African-American writers. The implication can only be that hip writers, like members of ethnic subcultures, have their own experience couched in a unique rhetoric, and that the Communication Company could serve a role in the dissemination of this particular vision parallel to that of, say, the Third World Press of Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti).
     This collectivist emphasis questions the egocentric focus of Romantic theory with its fondness for the “genius” and privileging of individual vision, though it resembles in part such models as IWW culture, Dada, and Situationism and draws from the evolving forms of conceptual and performance art. The first of the “plans and hopes” of the new publisher, however, far from referring g to any of these precedents, is simple: “to provide quick & inexpensive printing service for the hip community.” In the first instance this meant “to print anything the Diggers want printed” and “to do lots of community service printing.” They hope in the way “to function as a Haight/Ashbury propaganda ministry” in the form of a new sort of journal “to supplement The Oracle with a more or less daily paper.” [3] They hoped thereby to counteract the straight press, what they called “The Chronicle’s fantasies.”
     Yet their language suggests that pursuing these goals would require language other than the journalistic norm. Seeking “to compete with the Establishment press for public opinion” would require their being “outrageous pamphleteers,” and “to produce occasional incredibilities out of an unnatural fondness for either outrage or profit, as the case may be.” In the end, the individualist impulse survived with the penultimate ambition “to do what we damn well please,” followed only by a reminder of the reality principle: “to keep the payments up” on the printing equipment.
     Though the authors of “Our Policy” allowed themselves a theoretically unlimited license to fiction and betrayed a fondness for provocation, their aim was congruent with that of the Diggers as a whole: to contribute toward defining, fostering, and protecting the hip youth movement as a whole. Anything less would have struck them as “Art as a fantasy pacifier,” in the words of the handout “Trip Without A Ticket.” This manifesto may be fairly taken to represent the most fully formed statement of the artistic ideology of the Haight, having been originally printed by the Diggers as a whole and then in part revised and later reprinted by the Communication Company.
     “Trip Without A Ticket” compares Americans to psychiatric patients, stupefied by tranquilizing drugs, sleepwalking through the horror of modern life, in desperate need of awakening, of “the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with critical reality.” Without “the cushioned distance of media” people would cease to be the programmed “normals” required by the status quo and would be transformed into “life-actors” capable of seeing through the culture’s “consumer circuses” and feeling real rapport with the victims of American imperialism.
     The central form through which such eye-opening may occur is theatrical. To create “a space for existing outside padded walls” entails the elimination of the conventional theater building as well as the psychiatric unit. Art becomes an escape plan, with dramatic actions enacted in the everyday world rather than plays behind a proscenium arch, actions that function as “glass cutters for empire windows,” depending on the “universal pardon for imagination” that underlies “the intrinsic freedom of theater.” Only such a new “guerilla” theater can create “life-actors” and generate “a cast of freed beings.” In sum they aimed at establishing a “theater of an underground that wants out” aiming “to liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish territory without walls.”
     In this way any location “that is free becomes a social art form. “Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.” Several vignettes illustrate precisely what this might look like in practice. “A sign: If Someone Asks to See the Manager Tell Him He's the Manager.”
     “Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75 cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone. "Who wants 75 cents?" A girl who had just walked in came over and took it.”
     Not only is there no ticket; there is as well no script and no barrier between audience and performer. Clearly calling for participatory improvisatory theater set on the stage of the world, this is art without artifacts, beauty carved from the circumstances of everyday life, symbolic action that implies a new world view. With this vision the flotsam of unwanted surplus goods in the Free Store and in the world is transmuted into the tools by which liberation becomes available. “Fire helmets, riding pants, shower curtains, surgical gowns and World War I Army boots are parts for costumes. Nightsticks, sample cases, water pipes, toy guns and weather balloons are taken for props.” The magic appears when the cash nexus is removed. “When materials are free, imagination becomes currency for spirit.”
     Citing Gary Snyder on the necessity to “pin down what's wrong with the West,” the “Trip” finds models for such community-based ritual not so very distant from California. The specific mythic meaning of the original ritual is less important than the involvement in the moment and attentiveness to the constant stream of sensory detail.
     
"The Mexican Day of the Dead is celebrated in cemeteries. Yellow flowers falling petal by petal on graves. In moonlight. Favorite songs of the deceased and everybody gets loaded. Children suck deaths-head candy engraved with their names in icing."

     A parallel imagistic flow follows with the scene translated into the terms familiar to the Haight.


"A Digger event. Flowers, mirrors, penny-whistles, girls in costumes of themselves, Hell's Angels, street people, Mime Troupe.
Angels ride up Haight with girls holding Now! signs. Flowers and penny-whistles passed out to everyone.
A chorus on both sides of the street chanting Uhh!--Ahh!--Shh be cool! Mirrors held up to reflect faces of passersby."


     The hip community was influenced by a number of modern trends in art including improvisation, chance, collaboration, found objects, and street art, yet the most characteristic work that arose from the Haight-Ashbury eschewed the pretty in favor of the illuminating. The Haight Ashbury ethos favored the collective expression of the neighborhood and the movement as a whole to the promotion of individual art egos. The very fact that we have few works of poetry or fiction that fully embody the spirit of the age itself embodies the Haight Ashbury ethos. In order to recover some sense of what art meant in that time and place it is necessary to study the ephemera, and central to any such understanding must be the publications of the Diggers and the Communication Company.



1. Ferlinghetti (born in 1919), Ginsberg (1926), Gary Snyder (1930), Kandel (1932), McClure (1932), and Brautigan (1935) all read. The younger generation was represented by rock musicians.

2. The Cockettes founded by Hibiscus in 1969 insisted that one needed no talent whatsoever to perform. The associated Kaliflower Commune was exceptionally long-lived with related individual and groups active today.

2. Anderson was born in 1932, Hayward was younger, born in 1945.

3. Comparable to the daily publications from the Sorbonne’s École des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1968 and the Occupy Wall Street Journal in 2011.