1960s radical performance movements
A01=Bradford D. Martin
activist art documentation
activist artist collectives
activist cultural history
activist media performance
aesthetic resistance movements
American History
anti-institutional art practice
art in public commons
Author_Bradford D. Martin
avant-garde street actions
Category=ATX
Civil Rights
clandestine creative actions
collective artistic activism
collective resistance culture
Counter Culture
counter-hegemonic cultural practice
counterculture performance legacies
creative civil disobedience history
cultural insurgency
decolonizing public space through art
direct action art strategies
embodied political expression
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
experimental activist theatre history
grassroots cultural resistance
improvisational political performance
museum disruption campaigns
music as mobilizing force
participatory political art
performance and power structures
performance-based social critique
political art archives
Politics
protest art historiography
protest choreography
protest theater genealogy
Protests
public action art
radical aesthetics of protest
radical community art
radical performance pedagogy
radical sound and song traditions
revolutionary cultural tactics
site-specific protest performances
Sixties
street interventions in urban space
street-based creative protest
subversive public spectacles
Theater
theatrical direct action
underground art networks
unsanctioned art interventions
urban political spectacle
Product details
- ISBN 9781558494589
- Weight: 339g
- Dimensions: 155 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2004
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Explores the link between cultural expression and political protest; During the 1960s, the SNCC Freedom Singers, The Living Theatre, the Diggers, the Art Workers Coalition, and the Guerrilla Art Action Group fused art and politics by staging unexpected and uninvited performances in public spaces. Through their activism and the response it provoked, art, theater, and politics began to converge and assume a new visibility in everyday life. While their specific political visions varied, these groups shared the impulse to stage performances and actions publicly - ""in the streets"" - eschewing museums, theaters, and other conventional halls of culture. Bradford D. Martin offers detailed portraits of each of these groups and examines why they embraced public performance as a vehicle to express and advance their politics. At a time when the New Left and the counterculture were on the rise, these artists reflected the decade's political and cultural radicalism and helped to define a new aesthetic. Civil rights activists mobilized singing in the struggle for desegregation, introducing a vibrant musical form into the public space. The Living Theatre culminated an arduous quest to mesh artistic and political goals, leading audiences from theaters into the streets to begin the ""beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution."" The Diggers playfully engaged San Francisco's counterculture in politics with their carnivalesque public actions. The Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Action Art Group sought to disrupt the conventional art world, mounting protests in and around New York City museums. By questioning the values and assumptions that separated art from politics, these groups not only established public performance as a legitimate aesthetic but also provided a new creative vocabulary for future generations of artists. Their continued involvement with the women's liberation movement, rural communes, and political street theater into the 1970s and beyond challenges the popular myth that activists disengaged from politics after the 1960s.
