Kate Wolf speaks to J. Hoberman about his latest book, Everything is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde. It recaptures the frenetic, creative simultaneity of New York in the 60s, rendering the era's cultural explosion in real time. The events of a single decade, let alone a single year, or month, or even day, can be staggering. Hoberman compiles the work of various musicians, painters, filmmakers and poets who gave birth to everything from Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Protest Folk, Black Arts, and Underground Film, and more often than not, faced censorship and legal consequences for their innovations. The book reifies the link between artistic vanguardism and progressive politics, exploring the web of connection between artists and fate of the city—and country— at a time of ruthless redevelopment, labor strikes, atomic bomb scares, and emerging civil rights battles.
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