He talks about lsd and the prevalence of drugs in the hippie culture. Today we will talk about the counterculture which many people have associated with the 1960s, one of the major aspects of the 1960s. Radical politics have clearly faded away and social change against certain limitations. Legal segregation disappeared. Americans became more tolerant. Whichid not disappear, many in the 1950s and 1960s hoped that it would. Relations also changed. Women and men came to realize the differences between women and men were not repealed i simply declaring women and men were equal. Would notomen necessarily see things the same way. Were clearly cultural changes. Many had to deal with the counterculture. The word counterculture was invented by a sociologist, and it means an opposite culture of mainstream. Unlike the political and social challenges, the cultural challenges tended to stick. Americans really did change Cultural Values and practices in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond. Not so much in the 1960s. The counterculture of the 1960s is beginning a longterm movement. The counterculture of the 1960s begins with political change and that fails, and then social change which also takes place in terms of race and gender but doesnt entirely succeed. Cultural change is really what is the legacy of the 1960s. Counterculture had a lot to do with that. A sociologist defined and created the word counterculture to describe a culture that was opposite mainstream culture. Not everyone adopted the same ideas, but enough people over time in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s came to adopt new ideas so the whole culture changed as a result. I will talk about the legacy. I want to start by going back to the beats and the beatniks. The first postwar critics of American Society and culture and been the beats. They were criticizing america and the aftermath of world war ii. They wanted to create a revolution in expectation. The beats, the original beat writers, jack kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and their friends believed American Society was very repressive, especially sexually repressive. In advocating hedonism, they were trying to make face for their own selfindulgence, especially homosexual selfindulgence. When the beats became celebrities in the late 1950s, traditional American Culture was very unsure of itself. The traditional values were under attack and traditionalists were feeling uncomfortable. The original beats had been a very small number of writers. The followers of the beats in the late 1950s after they , becamec and ginsburg very popular and kerouac sold millions of copies of on the road the young followers of the beats were clearly a different generation. The beats experienced world war ii, veterans of the war or people who came of age right after, the people who came of age in the late 1950s were clearly a different generation. Having being born during or after the war. They became known as beatniks. The beatniks dressed in secondhand clothing, wore a lot of black clothing, expressed a depressed view of life. Everything is rotten. Everything is hopeless. Wild in despair. Voluntary homelessness was an example and joblessness. Jobs are a terrible idea. Many lived in new york city or San Francisco in north beach which became the 2 beatnik hangouts in the and nine at states. In the United States. Tourists flocked to those districts in order to see reallife beatniks. They went to gawk at people. People are always looking at people one way or another. Some of the more amusing things, local suburbanites that would dress up like beatniks on the weekend and go into Greenwich Village or north beach and pretend to be a beatnik. You could always tell they were not dressed quite right. They didnt have quite the right hair. They could party in the beatnik bars in the village or north beach. They were sometimes referred to as weekend beatniks because of the way they did this. They of course had real jobs. You can sell a real beatnik man from a weekend beatnik easily because real beatnik men had long hair and beards. That was proof in the 1950s that you did not have a regular job because no employer would hire anyone with a beard or long hair, and you would be fired if you did. This is how writers and artists could separate themselves as they were selfemployed. Unless you were selfemployed, you really cannot do this. You didnt see many beards. Real beatnik women wore their hair very long as well. Beatniks wore sandals made out of old rubber tires from mexico. They were very cheap. About . 29 for a pair of sandals. They did not take many showers. They thought deodorant was a capitalist plot. Beatniks were so exciting for some of the avantgarde in new york city that you can actually rent a beatnik. I am not making this up. Advertisements appeared in the Village Voice a kind of counterculture newspaper in new york and you can rent a beatnik and for your very upscale party on fifth avenue in your fancy apartment, coop, or you could have a longhaired, bearded beatnik come to the party and be the center of attention. Very strange, i think. It was actually going on in the late 1950s. The beatniks, like the beats, liked jazz and read poetry aloud. The beats in San Francisco more or less invented reading poetry out loud. They read a lot of odd books that were carried in beatnik bookstores, particularly the 8th street bookshop in Greenwich Village and in San Francisco. You could buy radical political books or self printed poetry books or Foreign Language publications in the stores. Many of the books that were sold in these stores were mostly in paperback, which was also a new idea. Most books that were published in the u. S. Were not published in paperback in the late 1950s. That was very unusual and rare. Bookstores did not like to sell them because it didnt make as much profit as the hardback. As simple as that. There was a new idea spreading, the paperback book, which is much easier and cheaper. Too. Er to carry around, do so, that is one change going on. At the same time, just to show the beats were not the only source of what was counterculture, there was also the avantgarde. The avantgarde is a small group of people who challenge mainstream culture, but not for my beatnik point of view from a different angle of vision. One of the examples, one of the earliest ones in new york actually are julian and malvina beck, who open a theater in new york in 1951. It is important that it is that early. The becks were anarchists. The purpose of their theater was to jar the audience and step get them to step outside of their mainstream Cultural Values, and maybe embrace anarchism, but at least challenge the cultural norms of the 1950s. They performed only radical new plays in small spaces. They were cheap to rent and very few props. No scenery ever. Their Theater Company attempted to engage the audience. Their theory of theater was quite different and radical. The separation between the audience and the performance was to be minimized, or reduced to nothing if at all possible. Theater was performed by the actors for the audience, rather the actors were supposed to push the audience past the limits that have been set by traditional culture, which was obsessed with setting limits, especially for public performances. One can see there was one other play they managed to film in 1963 which is set inside a u. S. Marine corps prison. Although, i think the hidden subtext of the play is actually the german concentration camps. You can see the video. It is available if you want to watch it. If you can stand to watch it. Is one thing to watch it on the television and actually see the live performance. It must have been excruciating to see it going on a few feet away from you in the theater. With the audience identifying with the guard or the abused prisoners who spend the entire time of the performance of the play, which has no intermission, being abused by the guards . Or would the audience perhaps end up sympathizing a little bit with each . That very question would challenge the audience. Where do you stand . Are you standing with authority, the guard . Or with the victim of authority, the prisoners . A good question to ask, especially if you are an anarchist. What would happen in another play, they decided they would question the challenges of nudity. What if an actor performed in the nude . It would be a shocking idea and also illegal. What would the police to . Would they arrest the actors, the audience as well for being at a nude performance . This could be challenging. It would be sort of interesting. If you remember, the audience might to be a little bit nervous they are going to be arrested and have their name in the New York Times the next day. During the 1950s, the Living Theatre provoked its audiences, which were partly composed of other avantgarde artists, partly composed of beatniks, although they rarely had money for tickets. They often had to get tickets given to them by somebody else. And partly composed of respectable middleclass people who were bored with American Culture and turned off by the sitcoms on tv. Another change that went on at the time is Performance Art. The redefinition of art. Art had traditionally been thought of as perhaps painting or sculpture, or photography, but it was something the artist did and presented to the audience as a finished product. In Performance Art, there is an action that takes place, and the action is the art. The art takes place in front of the audience and involves the audience. You can see that was a relationship as we living theater and Performance Art. In the 1950s, the avantgarde poet and Classical Music composer ned rorum wrote a fourminute piece in which the performers did not play a single note. This was certainly taking music to the ultimate absurdity. The performers are on the stage and they sit there with their instruments and do absolutely nothing for four minutes. It was a very interesting score. The performers had to keep turning the pages. That is the only thing they do. They never make a sound. The audience at the first performance were not in on the joke. Of coarse after the first , performance, people might know what is going on. As the musicians were sitting on the stage turning their pages, emotionless, the audience was becoming increasingly restless and uncomfortable and wondering what is going on. Am i missing something . There were whispers and then wheezes and finally coughs. Of course, that is the music. The music is the audience making all of these sounds and whispering. That is the music. That is the performance. The performance has been shifted from the stage to the actual audience. That is what he was trying to do. That was his purpose. You will notice that every time the musical piece is performed before a different audience, it will have a different result, right . So, no two performances will ever be exactly the same, and that is also part of what he was trying to achieve. The performers were only catalysts that were designed to bring the audience together as an audience, as a group in this session where this was taking place. He went on to collaborate in other Performance Art pieces later on with the avantgarde where he actually did compose real music. Robert might paint spontaneous paintings on the stage using rorums background musical rift for motivation. You have the intersection of music and visual art going on by having a musical composer, having composed music that would stimulate or inspire the production of the artwork. Rauschenberg would show that the feelings he had were being conveyed by the music. It can be even more interactive. What if the actors arrive nude, or given the fact they dont want to be arrested, seminude and rolled on the floor in heaps of embracing bodies . What does this convey about people . What does this mean, or perhaps saying something about the oneness of humanity . Or maybe it is people rolling around on the floor. What if the audience is invited to join on the rolling of the floor . What will that do . The audience members have to make a decision at that point. Are they a separate audience watching what is going on or are they participants in the process and how much participation do they want to have . Do they want to engage or not . This is shifting everything on the audience away from the performers. What if the floor was covered in the trip paper covered in the chair covered in butcher paper and then covered in paint and then the rolling bodies are covered in paint . What if they are rolling around even more and begin to randomly paint the paper by moving around in this way . The resultant paper might at the end of the performance be cut up into one foot squares and passed out to the members of the audience to take home. You thought you were going to performance and you end up with a painting to take home. Very weird. So, this is the kind of stuff that is going on particularly in new york in Greenwich Village. One of the leading Performance Artists in Greenwich Village was yoko ono. She was better known later as marrying john lennon of the beatles. Yoko ono staged an avantgarde performance in her loft in 1961. She was as creative as what she was before she married a creative avantgarde musician, john lennon. She had the entire apartment fixed with a floor set at a 30 degree angle. That is really steep. That is about as steep as you can get and still able to walk on it. It depends on if you have slippery shoes, i suppose. She that invited new yorks leading avantgarde dancer to stage a dance on this sloped floor. They knew they were coming to her loft, but they didnt know about the floor. They only found out when they got there. The dancers never encountered such a floor before, and their attempt to perform at this angle revealed interesting things to them about their own bodies. Their psychological state. They were afraid of falling, and it shows. The dancers would normally have a little fear of falling, but they are so practiced in the discipline to overcome that so the audience never sees that. In this situation, the audience, who also have to sit on the slope, would be seeing this as well. It also revealed something about the will of the performer. People really were if they had a Strong Enough will, they could do it, but if they gave up, they would end up sliding down the floor towards the end of the room. As the performance continued, the audience could see and the performers came to realize that they had gradually adjusted their movements according to the sloped floor. The floor was causing people to behave differently. It was a physical fact, and it was interfering with the production and interfering with the assumptions of what people could do and couldnt do. Human beings, in other words, had to adapt and that of course was yoko onos whole point. That was the whole point of the evening, to get everyone who left to realize that human beings needed to adapt. They needed to change. They needed to change the way they thought about things and change the way they behaved in the world. Yoko ono had grown up in tokyo, and she had lived in this very traditional and repressed japanese culture, which was especially unfavorable to bright, talented young women like her. There was very little of a role she could imagine for herself in tokyo. She could marry some banker or something, but that was about it. She certainly could not be a performing artist of any time. Of any kind and retain the class status that she had. So, she ended up in new york city because she found it much freer than tokyo. She still criticized the culture in the United States for being rigid and repressive as well, but she recognized it was not nearly as rigid and repressive as the culture in japan. She wanted everyone to understand that cultural change was hard. She had to undergo the cultural change of being a japanese woman to being an american, and that was a big change for her. She was now trying to pass that information on with her Performance Art in new york city and open the eyes of the people so that they can see they too can make changes in their lives. All of this avantgarde art is about changing yourself ultimately. The performers are stimulating the audience to change themselves. One of the interesting examples comes from a Dance Company in 1963. It was founded in the basement of an avantgarde baptist church, if you can imagine that, but there was one in Greenwich Village. It was a church that was founded to help sailors that came into the port of new york. It became an avantgarde church in the 1950s. The judsen Dance Company practiced and performed in the basement of the church and developed what really became modern dance. While background music may some sense of rhythm or timing, the emphasis on modern dance was on the celebration of the human body. Dancers wore tightfitting clothing to emphasize physicality and dance motions were tightly controlled and quite athletic. I sometimes think if you see dancing with the stars on television, you are seeing this is where it ended up with commercialization, but that is the kind of dance the Dance Company was doing in 1963. Sometimes the dances seems more like gymnastics. Still, there were many romantic or sexually suggestive aspects to the Dance Companys performances and a celebrated sexuality as a part of the celebration of the body. This contrasted with traditional middleclass American Values which held that sex should never be discussed and certainly not of audiences composed of men and women. Sex was best left for the privacy of the bedroom, not for of the bedroom, that was the mainstream culture of the 1950s. By the end of the 1960s, the celebration of the body would take on much more open form than having a Dance Company in the basement of a Church Building in