One cannot undertake any study of the 1960s in America without hearing about the struggles for social change. From civil rights to freedom of speech, civil disobedience and nonviolent protest became a central part of the sixties culture, albeit representative of only a small portion of the population. As Mario Savio, a Free Speech Movement (FSM) leader, wrote in an essay in 1964: “The most exciting things going on in America today are movements to change America” (“Takin’ it to the Streets,” 115). His essay is critical of those that maintain the status quo and oppose change in America. It seems quite obvious that change has occurred as a result of the efforts of this highly vocal minority and few would argue that these changes were not good and just, yet historical perspective allows us to also consider the “flaws” and contradictions of this sixties subculture.
It is rather ironic that a group so dedicated to fighting for societal change could also be part of a resistance to change in other aspects of the same society or could be a part of maintaining the status quo. Savio also stated: “The most crucial problems facing the United States today are the problem of automation and the problem of racial injustice” (113). A group seeking to change America, Savio and the minority he represented seem to be both advocating and resisting change. While fighting for changes in attitudes toward and the treatment of racial minorities, the group also opposed automation. It seems obvious that automation has been a highly instrumental force in changing American society and to oppose automation would seemingly be a definite resistance to change. While opinions…
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…n 1968, Reagan condemned student militants, saying: “There has been general incitement against properly constituted law enforcement authorities and general trampling of the will, the rights and freedom of movement of the majority by the organized, militant, and highly vocal minority” (“Takin it to the Streets,” 346). It seems rather obvious today that “the great and thoughtful majority of citizens” to which Reagan referred in the same address are not always correct in their beliefs and that the laws that have been created by this majority, as well as the enforcement of such laws are not always just.
Works Cited
Biner, Pierre. The Living Theater. Takin’ It To The Streets: A Sixties Reader, pp. 288-293. ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Pengiun Books, 1958.
Performance and Permanence in Sixties Literature
Performance and Permanence in Sixties Literature
What is art? Any generation of artists defines itself by the way it answers this question. The artists of the 1960s found their answer in the idea of art as experience. Art was not something that happened; it was something that happened around you, with you, to you. In the moment of creation, and in that moment alone, there was art. For artists of the Sixties, art was vibrant and alive, and thus to say a product was finished was simply to say it was dead. For literary artists this obsession with the fleeting now translated to a fascination with performance itself-a fascination that in turn cuts at the very heart of art itself. For if work must be performed to be truly experienced, then art is transient and irreproducible, and therefore barren. Art becomes local and mortal, tied to the life and influence of a single artist-unable to speak to those who were not there at the time. One cannot have it both ways; if we accept the preeminence of “the happening” and reject the notion of reproducibility, then art seemingly becomes smaller, diminished. This struggle between performance and permanence, between moment and monument, can be see as one of the central questions of the literature of the 1960s.
Experimental theater provides a useful example of the extreme form of this perception about performance art. Drama has sometimes been praised, sometimes been maligned, but it has undeniably been a type of literature for as long as literary study has existed, as important in its own way as poetry, and prose. Experimental theater challenged this notion in its sheer irreproducibility; it begs the question, “Can something be literary which only happens once, which fails to…
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…who would never and could never be touched by a single performance in a single place. For all its raw emotional power, perfomance art is unreachable to many in the present and totally inaccessible to audiences in the future. To truly matter-to exert any real change over the present, to reach past its moment of creation into the future-art must be more than its performance alone.
Works Cited
Biner, Pierre. The Living Theater. Takin’ It To The Streets: A Sixties Reader, pp. 288-293. ed.
Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Pengiun Books, 1958.
Rader, Dotson. “Notes of Andy Warhol: His Life and Work as Death in America.” Takin’ It To
The Streets: A Sixties Reader, pp. 305-309. ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.