Delicate and Dirty

Ben Arthur revisits a transformative moment in American culture through the lens of J. Hoberman’s “Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop.”

By Ben ArthurAugust 7, 2025

• History

• Cultural Studies

SIDE ONE, TRACK ONE, Bringing It All Back Home, “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The strum of an acoustic, rudely interrupted by the high-pitched whines of a Stratocaster. It’s a story we know well: Bob Dylan goes electric, city riots, et cetera. Dylan’s voice rambles, swelling and falling, warning those in New York’s Greenwich Village of what’s to come. The story continues like this: Johnny’s mixing cocaine in the basement, but undercover cops pilfer around, ready to jump at a moment’s notice. The cops wear trench coats, they wear coonskin caps, they wear anything to fit in. They tap your phones, they throw you in jail, they turn the fire hose toward you. There are the “straights,” those living within society’s confines—get born, learn to dance, go to school, get married, have kids, and die. And there are the Beats, those who refuse to conform to society’s standards. Rejecting vapid consumerism, they oppose linearity and order and embrace free love and free acid. “I accept chaos,” Dylan writes in the liner notes to his 1965 album. “I am not sure whether it accepts me.”

In the second verse, Dylan makes a warning. With a sibylline glint to his voice, he opines: “They must bust in early May, orders from the DA / Look out kid, don’t matter what you did.” Was this a prophecy? Admonition? Apparition? The cops had been cracking down on possession for a while, arresting folk singers and artists in the Village, but more were sure to come.

A few months before “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released, Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders of the Fugs formed LeMar, short for Legalize Marijuana. The organization formed to push for the active use of marijuana, as well as to combat police oversight. On July 29, 1965, the New York Police Department took in two LeMar members (Jack William Martin III and Dale Wilbourne), but the man they really wanted was Ginsberg. When offered a lighter sentence in exchange for information on the poet, Martin declined to rat. His bail jumped from $5,000 to $100,000.

On August 11, LeMar had planned a benefit for their two fallen comrades at the Broadway Central, a sprawling hotel between the East and West Village. On the program was Jack Smith’s glamorous, experimental drag film Normal Love, and Barbara Rubin’s Allen for Allen, a tribute to her muse/lover. The Fugs were to play, along with the Falling Spikes, a garage rock band featuring John Cale, Lou Reed, and at one point Tony Conrad. Allen Ginsberg had poems to read, along with William S. Burroughs, Piero Heliczer, and Andrei Voznesensky.

The event never took place: the Great Bust finally happened. Dylan was a few months off, but who’s keeping track anyways? Heliczer, the benefit’s emcee, had just begun introducing the night’s proceedings when a group of plainclothes officers stormed in. They weren’t wearing trench coats, and they weren’t wearing coonskin caps; they wore Hawaiian shirts that Smith likened to the “moldy 1940’s saloon-rioting waterfront scum of Flatulandia.” Five cops lunged toward Martin, their former detainee, and dragged him out of the room. All hell broke loose. Cops shoved, punched, and kicked. The attendees returned the aggression, making it an all-out brawl. Outside, people were thrown into police cars, only to escape and keep fighting. Smith sucker punched an officer from behind. He was slammed onto the sidewalk and tossed into a cop car. The entire group, now outside on the street, turned into a so-called “mob,” refusing to let the NYPD leave. Once the officers took off, a full detail flanking them, they beat Smith and threw him in the Manhattan House of Detention, colloquially known as “the Tombs.” Just a few nights later, the narcotics division raided Ed Sanders’s apartment, searching for drugs. Instead, they took two of his films, Amphetamine Head: A Study of Power in America and Mongolian Cluster Fuck.

These raids were all too common in Manhattan’s underground: bookstores, studios, offices, apartments, theaters, churches, and gallery spaces were all targeted. Locally, the NYPD would press charges of obscenity, distribution of pornography, or drug possession, flying in blatant opposition to artists’ civil liberties. It seems that nearly everyone in an alternative scene was targeted. Nationally, FBI surveillance zeroed in on Bob Dylan, his manager John Hammond, and Broadside, a magazine that published Dylan’s lyrics alongside political satire. Cranking a cheap mimeograph machine, they published early Dylan protest songs, like “Talking John Birch,” a Guthrie-esque satire of communism. The jokey song, published in 1962, was a far cry from the deep, interwoven “Subterranean Homesick Blues” of 1965, which captures an intense surrealism that defined the decade.

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In 1966, less than a year after the Broadway Central melee, the Falling Spikes were performing under a new name. Now under the guidance of the enigmatic Andy Warhol, the band morphed into the Velvet Underground. At the corner of Park and 59th stood the Hotel Delmonico, where the Velvets were attempting to attack the senses and minds of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. This incarnation was called “The Chic Mystique of Andy Warhol,” and it combined the films of Warhol, the drone rock of the Velvets, and the transgressive interrogations of filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Jonas Mekas. Apparently, the event was a chance for the shrinks to understand the inner workings of the “creative mind.”

Cocktail hour began with two Warhol films: the first being 1964’s Harlot, in which Jack Smith’s prima donna Mario Montez sensually eats a banana. Next, the group was subjected to Henry Geldzahler, a 97-minute silent film in which the former curator of the Met smokes a cigar, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the camera placed before him. One could connect this film, with Geldzahler’s literati status, to this group of psychiatrists: growing ever more disconcerted and fearful of the sights before them.

After nearly two hours of films, dinner was served, and the Velvets took the stage, accompanied by poet Gerard Malanga and superstars Edie Sedgwick, Mary Woronov, and Ingrid Superstar all fervently whip-dancing to the music. As these unsettling disturbances occurred on stage, Rubin and Mekas catechized the black-tied psychiatrists: “What does her vagina feel like?” “Is his penis big enough?” Shoving disorienting lights into the shrinks’ faces, Rubin insisted they would be stars in an upcoming Factory film. Grace Glueck, in a New York Times article the next day, documented the reactions of the doctors attending, who, of course, psychoanalyzed the night’s proceedings: “‘I suppose you could call this gathering a spontaneous eruption of the id,’ said Dr. Alfred Lilienthal. ‘Warhol’s message is one of super-reality.’ said another. […] “You want to do something for mental health?" asked another psychiatrist. “Kill the story.”

Over time, the one-off event morphed into something of a regular institution. At first, it was called “Andy Warhol, Up-tight,” but it would later become the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” an anti-hippie version of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead. “The auditorium, every aspect of it—singers, light throwers, strobe operators, dancers—at all times are screaming with screeching, piercing personality pain,” Mekas wrote in The Village Voice. “I say pain; it could also be called desperation. In any case, it is the last stand of the ego, before it either breaks down or goes to the other side.” The EPI snaked up and down the East Coast, assaulting the minds of those who attended with a sensory deluge.

From the late 1950s on, artists in New York created exhibition-performances that sought to uproot the preexisting gallery and museum structures. Although they weren’t strung together by concept or subject matter, these performances held the same free-for-all ethos: “Happenings,” they were called. They took place in many forms, such as music and theater, and in many places, including in galleries and out on the street. Happenings broke down the rigid divide between audience and artist, merging the two into an inseparable, coterminous being. Art was no longer static, sitting silently in a gallery wall, but was instead free-form, ever-changing, and ephemeral, with no two performances ever the same.

A typical formula for Happenings, which merged film, music, strobe lights, and the occasional passing-around of LSD, was nothing new. Tony Conrad, the drone musician, structural filmmaker, and honorary Velvets member, messed around with strobes, tearing apart projectors to create flashes of light. His film The Flicker returned to the basics of filmmaking—a short introduction before two frames of white and black flash in alternating ratios for thirty minutes. Decades before, in the 1940s, Harry Everett Smith experimented with oils, projectors, and mirrors, creating the psychoactive light show that would later come to define Bill Graham’s Fillmore. Smith was one of those characters who seems indefinable: an archivist, collector, occultist, ethnographer, and animator, among many other attributes. Smith’s most known achievement was his Anthology of American Folk Music. Transcending beyond a sheer cultural document, it became a sprawling epic of folk 45s without any one focus, jumping from murder ballads to train songs and fishing odes. Released on Smithsonian Folkways in 1952, the three-volume compendium would ripple through the Village just some years later, giving Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk their earliest arrangements.

In 1965, 13 years after gifting his collection to Moses Asch, Smith came back to Folkways with a group he wanted to record: the Fugs, a New York jug band whacked-out on peyote and acid. In exchange for one bottle of rum, Smith produced their debut record, a stumbling effort with circular poems-as-lyrics. On the album’s final track, the members chant, whine, and grumble: “Oh, Village Voice, nothing / New Yorker, nothing / Sing Out and Folkways, nothing / Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg / Nothing, nothing, nothing // Poetry nothing.” The Fugs would participate in the “Trips Festival” over on St. Marks, performing under the flashing haze of media art collective USCO’s strobe lights and Rudi Stern’s projections.

The same month he recorded the Fugs, Smith would show his animated film Heaven and Earth Magic at the City Hall Cinema. A slow, meandering, surrealist effort, the film weaves bygone Victorian imagery into a loose, jumbled plot, in which a woman, attempting to fix a toothache, ascends to heaven, where she encounters a bricolage of turning cogs, Rube Goldberg machinations, and a gangly homunculus. The film seems to evoke Smith’s occult beliefs: a gestalt of tarot, hermeticism, and shamanistic rituals building into a hallucinogenic iteration of the afterlife. In a confusing timeline, when showing an early version of the film, Smith had planned to play his Fugs tape as accompaniment. But when the projectionist accidentally played the wrong music, Smith became irate, throwing his projector, tape deck, and tapes out onto the street—a spontaneous Happening, one might say. Future iterations of Heaven and Earth Magic would be accompanied by Meet the Beatles.

Five blocks downtown, Sun Ra was busy creating his own mythology. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Herman Poole Blount abandoned his name and his past, forming a mystical personal philosophy. Blount contended that he visited Saturn in 1936, where an overlord told him to quit college and commit himself fully to music. In 1961, after a few years in Chicago, he relocated to Third Street, Lower Manhattan. When Ra found himself among Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, and Cecil Taylor, who all lived in the neighborhood, it seemed to him that the former epicenter of jazz, Harlem, had moved some 122 blocks downtown. Ra took over two floors of a three-story walk-up, which he called the “Sun Palace.”

The Sun Palace acted as a practice space and communal home for his band; the spray-painted walls held a jumble of old instruments, costumes, broken figurines, microphones, and phonographs. Around Sun Ra, the Arkestra began to assemble itself, pulled together as if it were a solar system. They played Monday night gigs at Slugs’, a run-down saloon in the East Village. They played all night, from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. nonstop. Lights flashed on and off, with Sun Ra occasionally shrouded in darkness. The band would spill off the cramped stage, crowding into the corner while huddling over their instruments. Around the stage, dancers held totems and percussionists beat on drums. LeRoi Jones, the sardonic yet unashamed poet, wrote that Sun Ra “introduced the light-show concept that white rock groups later found out about and got rich from.”

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“It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty,” Mekas wrote in his Village Voice column in 1963, describing the city he now called home. After moving from Lithuania in 1944, Mekas quickly became a seminal figure in New York cinema. Each week, he wrote about a barrage of films (and occasionally his own run-ins with obscenity charges) for the Voice. In part due to his column, the newspaper gained a reputation for championing dissidents, those on the fringes of the art world. The Voice was diametrically opposed to the vision of The New York Times. While the paper of record was limited in scope and dependent on mass appeal, the Voice stayed ahead of the curve: events were often “consecrated with page-one coverage,” as J. Hoberman describes it.

In addition to writing for the Voice, Mekas also created films of his own and screened others from his collaborators. In 1964, Mekas, alongside Shirley Clarke and others, opened the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. They screened the films of Ken Jacobs and Jack Smith, who made up what Mekas termed “Baudelairean cinema.” In a similar way to Warhol, who captured the chaos of consumerism and mass media, Smith and Jacobs sought to capture the absurd dualities of simply existing in New York. They often used urban detritus as their settings: Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death (2004), for instance, has scenes shot amid the rubble of San Juan Hill, a demolished Puerto Rican neighborhood in Manhattan.

In the 1960s, neighborhoods across New York were in a continual state of disarray. The city tore down low-income neighborhoods in the name of “slum clearance,” rebuilding high-rise public housing or luxury developments in their place (on the site of San Juan Hill now stands Lincoln Center). Because of master builder Robert Moses, beltways and highways encircled the city, and his next project was the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a proposed highway that connected the Holland Tunnel to the outer boroughs, cutting through SoHo and the Village. Amid mass protests, the project shut down, but the sight of rubble was common as rebuilding efforts increased.

Attracted by low rent, artists began to settle in these areas. Many of them were used to the wreckage that surrounded them: during World War II, Yoko Ono saw bombing raids in Japan, intermedia artist Aldo Tambellini saw them in Italy, puppeteer Peter Schumann saw them in Germany. Mekas, too, lived under German oppression in Lithuania. In Latvia, Boris Lurie survived three concentration camps. These artists moved to the United States with staunchly anti-authoritarian, often anti-capitalistic views.

In a mud-caked loft with no heat, La Monte Young and Yoko Ono began staging concerts and “instructional pieces.” “Come prepared to sit on the floor,” Young warned, as Ono threw food from her refrigerator onto a canvas and set it on fire. In an old sail factory, Mark di Suvero collected wooden beams to create sculptures. For his 1961 work Lumumba Is Dead (Adieu Amerique), Boris Lurie pasted tabloids, pinup ads, and news stories onto a human-sized canvas, infamously using the detritus as a background for a painted-on swastika.

With Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, Lurie also created The Doom Show (1961). Staged in a tiny cellar with tin ceilings, the artists strewed mangled baby dolls and burned mannequins across the room. The work, using ready-made materials that very possibly came from the city streets, commented on the horrors of war, concentration camps, and the seemingly impending nuclear fallout. In his ongoing Orgies Mysteries series, Hermann Nitsch turned to gore as material. Inducing sadistic fits, the artist doused subjects in the blood of a splayed lamb, a mock crucifixion of sorts. Offal bits were strewn around the gallery space: brains and kidneys and intestines and blood, dripping from the ceiling and pooling on the floor. Nitsch himself jumped onto the mess in one staging of an hours-long deluge. A cacophony of noise accompanied these disturbing rituals: pots and pans banged, the washboard scraped, screams flung across the room.

Claes Oldenburg took a different approach. Transforming his studio on Second Street into a mock delicatessen, the artist began exhibiting fake everyday objects made from plaster, tiny price tags hanging off the corner. A pastry case contains deformed cakes and pies; shelves hold sneakers, watches, and jackets. Entitled The Store, the space allowed viewers who entered to interact directly with the objects or even purchase the exhibited items. Ever a starving artist, Oldenburg operated The Store at a loss—a reported $285—bringing into question the role of the artist when art becomes commodity. He also held “Store Days” at his studio, using the back rooms to stage Happenings.

While some artists captured the current moment in maximal terms, others moved toward the minimal, focusing on the structural elements that make up film, music, or art. In Empire (1965), Andy Warhol trained his camera on the Empire State Building for nearly seven hours. The objective: “to see time go by.” Two years later, Michael Snow aimed his camera at an opposing loft on Canal Street. Aided by an ultra-zoom lens, his film begins with a wide shot of the building. Slowly, as the cast goes about their day, the frame of view creeps in. At the film’s conclusion, the viewer is claustrophobically enclosed in a tiny photograph of waves hanging on the wall. A high-pitched squeal accompanies the last few moments. The camera loses focus, in a way, bringing attention to the unspoken structure that defines the film. Fade to white. Fin.

The Park Place Group formed around a vehement opposition to the pop art of Oldenburg and others. Donald Judd and Mark di Suvero, two mainstays of the group, took influence from Buckminster Fuller and science fiction. In Primary Structures, a 1966 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, the overwhelmingly male group exhibited sleek geometric forms. Their sculptures took the steel beams stacked at a construction site, the chrome bumper of an old De Ville, and the neon sign above a bar, among other objects, and reduced them to their disparate parts. The focus turned toward deconstructed material forms, a return to basics.

The Park Placers bridged gaps between mediums, hosting free jazz and minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Philip Glass. La Monte Young, having graduated from dusty lofts, played at the Park Place studio. ​​Throughout the 1960s, his Theater of Eternal Music, using a series of compositional “rules,” created unflinching drone music. Early on, Young worked alongside John Cale and Tony Conrad. Often, everyone tuned all their strings to the same note. The compositions were unchanging until they were, moving into new territory with a creeping pace. In April 1966, the same month as Primary Structures, Steve Reich would play a benefit concert, with proceeds going toward the Harlem Six, a group of young Black men wrongfully arrested for the murder of a store owner. Reich took seven words—“bruise blood come out to show them”—and stretched them into a 12-minute tape loop, mutating the sentence into percussive jutting syllables. In the original context, Daniel Hamm, one of the boys, used it to express the police brutality against him, but in Reich’s machine, the phrase expresses the long passage of time, the long fight toward freedom. Reich’s piece, titled Come Out, was paired with Gerd Stern’s disklike slide projections.

Except for a few examples, the art world mostly ignored the struggles of African Americans. In the jazz sphere, drummer Max Roach released the monumental We Insist! (subtitled the Freedom Now Suite), a poignant reflection on the Civil Rights Movement. Originally conceived in 1959, Roach planned for an initial performance on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, 1963. But the urgency of the Civil Rights Movement—in particular, the Greensboro sit-ins in North Carolina—accelerated the piece. It was finished one year later, and released in December 1960.

Roach’s five-part suite chronicles the continual struggle toward African American liberation. The first song, “Driva’ Man,” begins with his future wife Abbey Lincoln, an actress and singer, reciting spoken-word poetry: “Chopping cotton, don’t be slow / Better finish out your row / Keep a-movin’ with that plow.” Behind her voice, a percussive snare hit evokes the crack of a whip, and a tenor saxophone falls into place. The second section, “Freedom Day,” flows seamlessly from the first, chronicling the triumphant, impatient hesitance of the Emancipation. The beginning of “Triptych,” entitled “Prayer,” comprises an interplay between Lincoln’s voice and Roach’s drums, a call-and-response. Then, she breaks out into guttural screams as Roach bangs violently on his kit: this section, called “Protest,” seems to reject the nonviolent tactics employed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The final “Triptych” section, “Peace,” sees Lincoln’s breaths, moans, and vocal runs recorded. A more regular backbeat is played behind her. The last two tracks, “All Africa” and “Tears for Johannesburg,” move toward a Pan-African liberation, featuring the pulse of Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji amid a full band’s free jazz stylings. When performed onstage, initially at a Congress of Racial Equality benefit at the Village Gate, the suite morphed into a theatrical performance, featuring a cast of dancers (one of which was Maya Angelou) and narration from Ruby Dee.

Around the same time, LeRoi Jones shifted from poetry to one-act plays. As time progressed, he ratcheted up the violence. In Dutchman (1964), a Black poet is hypnotized and brought to violence by a white woman. In Toilet (1967), a high school bathroom fight turns bloody. In The Slave (1964), a race war breaks out. But in Slave Ship (1970), Jones, now going by the name Amiri Baraka, reaches a peak. Tearing up the theater floors, Jones has the audience sit on low benches, staring up at a constructed slave ship that looms over them. For the first 20 minutes of the play, chained cast members are thrown onto the ship while a syncopated drumbeat thumps. Across their journey on the Middle Passage, the group retches, moans, gives birth, dies by suicide. Often shrouded in darkness, guttural screams echo across the theater as the cast makes direct pleas to the audience for help. With the strike of a banjo, the ship arrives in America. Families are divided at the auction block, sent to separate plantations. Above them, the voice of a white God booms. The third act finds the slaves revolting against their masters. The cast throws off their chains, roaming through the audience. They chant “Rise, Rise, Rise / Cut these ties, Black Man Rise,” encouraging the seated to join in. The slaves then turn their violence outward, shooting a nonviolent minister evocative of Dr. King, ripping down a cross, and decapitating an Uncle Sam figure. Abruptly, the house lights come on. The cast begins dancing, inviting the audience to join. Then, in lieu of a final bow, the performers walk through the crowd, shaking only the hands of Black onlookers.  

Most often, though, Happenings-as-protest sought to topple the preexisting gallery structure. By staging Happenings at alternate locations, the next wave of artists redirected attention away from traditional museums and galleries. Others sought to upheave the art world through direct action. The Black Mask group rather bluntly called for the dissolution of power and the destruction of museums. Their actions were direct and abrasive, from staging a mock assassination of poet Kenneth Koch to positing threats against the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), forcing them to close their doors. After disappearing for some time, they reemerged as the Motherfuckers, a group that incited chaos across the city. Infamously, founder Ben Morea was friends with Warhol shooter Valerie Solanas and helped her manage SCUM. Morea’s Motherfuckers finished off a sprawling benefit concert at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East with an act of absurdism. After staging plays and panel discussions, hundreds of people jumped on the stage, dancing, jumping, and fucking. Morea’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers: “This theater is returned to the community.” Amid further arguments, the group set up a short-lived, often chaotic “free night” at the Fillmore. With a similarly anarchistic bent, Morea attended Woodstock just to cut the fence, letting hundreds in for free.

The Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG), a collective of artists staged “action events” with a more pragmatic basis. They took grievance with Nelson Rockefeller’s place on MoMA’s board, arguing that his companies profited from the Vietnam War. In 1969, they staged Bloodbath at MoMA, pouring red liquid on the museum’s floors and rolling around. On the museum steps, the group staged a fake battle, in which their members acted out a struggle over the role of the museum. Those playing the trustees pulled up in a limousine, while others threw smoke bombs and held signs emblazoned with “Free Museum.” When the police arrived, someone from MoMA walked over, telling the officers, “They’re play acting.”

The Art Workers’ Coalition also took a hostile stance toward MoMA. When Panayiotis Vassilakis’s work was shown in a MoMA exhibition without his permission, the artist strolled into the museum, took his installation down, and waited in the garden, demanding a meeting with the curator. The group used the event as leverage, holding protests and reading a list of grievances toward the museum. Their proposed changes included free admission, expanded hours that accommodated the working class, and a gallery for Black artists. The New York Times’ Grace Glueck was there reporting. She argued that, as process art and conceptual art took root, art was becoming “more concerned with effects (however ephemeral) than with collectibility.”

Now that art had entered a crisis of faith, one was left asking about the role of the critic. Over at the Voice, Jill Johnston published lengthy diatribes she called “poetry,” unmoving blocks of text without paragraph breaks. When one of her columns was cut, Johnson held a panel discussion on the topic, using the opportunity to psychoanalyze herself. “The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston,” the event was called. At NYU’s Loeb Student Center, intoxicated panelists stumbled in: critics from The East Village Other, Artforum, and Arts Magazine; Warhol stars; and Warhol himself, who didn’t speak, but took Polaroid photos instead. Johnston showed up an hour late, reading her column and declaring art criticism dead.

By and large, most artists were insular. Not many spread their allegiances outward, but some protested the Vietnam War. In the early morning of April 9, 1966, José Rodríguez-Soltero staged LBJ, named after the then-president. Walking down the aisle of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque (a.k.a. “the Tek”), Rodríguez-Soltero took a live chicken and strung it up in the rafters. As the house lights dimmed, the audience took Rodríguez-Soltero’s place in the aisle. A strobe activated and the number one song in the country, “The Ballad of the Green Beret,” crackled across the stereo. Holding an American flag, Rodríguez-Soltero and a group of “soldiers” climbed over the seats of the theater, turning it into a South Vietnamese battlefield. Rodríguez-Soltero, in a final fit of rage, set the American flag ablaze.

The Bread and Puppet Theater, formed in 1963 by Peter and Elka Schumann, was an intensely political endeavor. Like Boris Lurie and Mark di Suvero, the group took from their surroundings: puppets were repurposed and recycled from previous shows. At their march on October 16, 1965, swarms of people held up larger-than-life puppets of “Uncle Fatso” and an ensnared Jesus Christ, labeled “Vietnam.” Counterprotesters held up signs of their own: “Get a Haircut,” “Go Back to Cuba,” “May God Have Pity on Your Souls.”

That month, Schumann also staged Fire, a play in which masked actors move slowly in silence across the stage, a stand-in for a Vietnamese village. The actors pass bread and water among themselves, walking back and forth. Then, the war. Fire ravages the village via a red cloth; caricatures of bureaucrats plot the deaths of its residents. In the final scene, the politicians construct a pen around a lone villager, who wraps herself in red tape. The play was dedicated to Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, and Roger LaPorte, three Americans who self-immolated that year.

Arguably the most famous example of protest performance art at this time was Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece 1964. As she sat on Carnegie Hall’s floor in 1965 for its first US staging, attendees walked up to her with scissors. Unflinchingly, they cut strips of her clothes off. They took their piece, sat back down, repeated until nothing remained. The performance fully relied on audience participation: without them, it could never exist. Their actions, fast or slow, soft or aggressive, would dictate Cut Piece’s outcome. Viewers also constructed their own interpretations of the piece, whether they saw it as a comment on the role of the artist, femininity, sexual violence, or Western aggression in Southeast Asia.

Jump forward three years later to 1968 and everything seemed to be accelerating. In Vietnam, the Tet Offensive caught US troops off guard. In Washington, DC, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he wouldn’t run for a second term. In New York, Columbia students stormed Hamilton Hall to protest the war. In Paris, students and workers took to the streets, nearly disbanding the French government via guerrilla warfare. In Los Angeles, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was killed. In Memphis, Dr. King was assassinated. In Chicago, the police pushed back against Democratic National Convention protesters and Mayor Richard J. Daley brought in the National Guard. In Alabama, George Wallace joined the American Independent Party for his presidential run. In Tlatelolco, Mexico City, the military put down a student protest, killing hundreds.

At the tail end of the decade, violence reached the skyscrapers of New York City. Sam Melville made bombs in his basement, targeting corporations including the United Fruit Company, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Standard Oil, and government agencies such as the Army Induction Center and the Department of Commerce. Before bombing his second target, the Marine Midland Building, Melville shipped a communiqué to the offices of Rat, a far-left newspaper rivaling the long-standing Village Voice and the subdued East Village Other. Soon after the bomb detonated, the cops showed up, raiding the cluttered office. In the early hours of November 11, Melville set off three bombs, sending the city into panic. Over the next day, hundreds of supposed threats were called in, yet only one actually detonated, this time at the courthouse. Hours later, as Melville was throwing dynamite into National Guard trucks, the NYPD arrested him and George Demmerle, an FBI informant who set him up. Further accomplices were found later, including Jane Alpert, star reporter for Rat. In jail awaiting her sentencing, she continued writing for the paper, filing copy from the Women’s House of Detention. Meanwhile, the Weathermen were making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse: they, too, were published in Rat. After bombing government buildings in California, New York City, and DC, the group would accidentally blow up their own home. Three were killed, and two ran out of the wreckage, later to be captured.

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“Although too young to have participated in most of these events I evoke,” J. Hoberman writes in the introduction to his new book Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop, “I am old enough to have experienced what might be termed the normalization of cultural craziness that characterized the 1960s.” Regardless of how provocative they are, cultural movements will be remembered, in part, by the media they leave behind: the trails of exhibition reviews, profiles, and interviews that fill in the gaps between then and now; Broadside and the folk revival; Rat and the militaristic Far Left; The Village Voice and their sprawling page-one recollections of the scene. Hoberman notes that he “read through virtually every copy of the Voice between late 1958 and early 1972, along with much of the East Village Other, Rat, and the New York Free Press.” Across the book’s nearly 500 pages, Hoberman reflects on these countercultural institutions, getting down in the weeds about dates, timelines, side characters, side plots. Culling from interviews, memoirs, and alt-weekly archives, Hoberman builds a greater narrative about the counterculture in this text: artists and activists on one side, The New York Times and the NYPD on the other.

Hoberman tells a personal story here too, embedded in footnotes, parentheticals, and acknowledgments. He grew up amid the urban detritus of New York, with early memories of a fallout shelter nestled in his building’s basement. As a kid, Hoberman trekked out to Forest Hills, watching Bob Dylan go electric. In college, he saw Che!, a fugue-like off-off-Broadway play that got busted for obscenity. Mentored by Ken Jacobs, Hoberman worked at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, running over to MoMA shows when time permitted. On sweltering summer nights, he walked down to Jack Smith’s apartment, watching early screenings of No President (1969). He even met Alejandro Jodorowsky in Mexico City; memories of Danish porn and Americans jumping on tables abound. Yet, when he returned to New York, the sixties were decidedly over. Now entering the seventies, much of the previous decade had eroded away. The Beatles had broken up. Diane Arbus had died by suicide. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Edie Sedgwick had all overdosed. Kent State saw four dead in Ohio.

Yet for one night, it seemed like the sixties again. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures was shown again in 1970, the first time since March 1964, when officers had raided the theater and cuffed Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, and Florence Karpf. A galvanizing film for New American Cinema, the concept of “camp,” and the underground writ large, the film is gritty and hallucinogenic, flowing between vignettes of drag queens, oral sex, and earthquakes. Hoberman was at the reshowing and, on a whim, submitted a review to The Village Voice. Little did he know that, over the next 40 years, he would join the ranks of Mekas, Jill Johnston, and many others: those who critique the culture, and those who preserve it for generations to come.