Sally Banes: Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (1993)

“The year was 1963 and from Birmingham to Washington, D.C., from Vietnam to the Kremlin to the Berlin Wall, the world was in the throes of political upheaval and historic change. But that same year, in New York’s Greenwich Village, another kind of history and a different sort of politics were being made. This was a political history that had nothing to do with states or governments or armies–and had everything to do with art. And this is the story that Sally Banes tells, a year in the life of American culture, a year that would change American life and culture forever. It was in 1963, as Banes’s book shows us, that the Sixties really began.

Banes draws a vibrant portrait of the artists and performers who gave the 1963 Village its exhilarating force, the avant-garde whose interweaving of public and private life, work and play, art and ordinary experience, began a wholesale reworking of the social and cultural fabric of America. Among these young artists were many who went on to become acknowledged masters in their fields, including Andy Warhol, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Brian de Palma, Harvey Keitel, Kate Millet, and Claes Oldenburg. In live performance–Off-Off Broadway theater, Happenings, Fluxus, and dance–as well as in Pop Art and underground film, we see this generation of artists laying the groundwork for the explosion of the counterculture in the late 1960s and the emergence of postmodernism in the 1970s. Exploring themes of community, freedom, equality, the body, and the absolute, Banes shows us how the Sixties artists, though shaped by a culture of hope and optimism, helped to galvanize a culture of criticism and change. As 1963 came to define the Sixties, so this vivid account of the year will redefine a crucial generation in recent American history.”

Publisher Duke University Press, 1993
ISBN 082231357X, 9780822313571
ix+308 pages

Reviews: Serge Guilbaut (Am Hist Rev, 1995), Marla Carlson (Theatre J, 1996), PublishersWeekly (n.d.).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (100 MB, no OCR)

Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us (2012)

“Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us is a retrospective of the artist’s career, which now spans nearly fifty years. The exhibition includes both early and recent work by the artist that range from annotated scores and books to painting and sculpture. Video documentation from performances and audio files of Patterson’s music will also be featured. As a founding member of Fluxus, a loose and international collective of artists who infused avant-garde practices of the day with humor and anarchic energy, Patterson helped revolutionize the artistic landscape at the advent of the 1960s and usher in an era of new and experimental music.”

With essays by Bertrand Clavez, Charles Gaines, Jon Hendricks, George E. Lewis, Fred Moten, Benjamin Patterson, and Marcia Reed; and chronology by Meredith Goldsmith.

Edited by Valerie Cassel Oliver
Publisher Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 2012.
ISBN 9781933619293, 1933619295
268 pages
via publisher

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (51 MB, no OCR)
Issuu

Richard Kostelanetz: On Innovative Performance(s): Three Decades of Recollections on Alternative Theatre (1994)

This collection of essays and notes focuses on individual performances and performers, providing a unique critical record of their work and of the movement. Vito Acconci, Lenny Bruce, Jean Dupuy, Karen Finley, Timothy Leary, The Living Theater, Robert Watts, Zaj, a.o.

Publisher McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 1994
ISBN 0899504736, 9780899504735
vi+276 pages

Review: Robert J. Hubbard (Text & Performance Quarterly, 1996).

WorldCat

PDF (127 MB, no OCR)