Like Paris in the 1920s, New York in the 1960s was a center of artistic innovation. As James Hoberman, adjunct professor of film and media studies at School of the Arts, shows in his book, Everything Is Now, boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and the alternative press, he chronicles this collective history as it played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters, and streets.
Hoberman covers such artists as Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneeman, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and more. Some were associated with specific movements—avant rock, destruction art, fluxus, free jazz, guerrilla theater, happenings, mimeographed zines, pop art, protest folk, ridiculous theater, stand-up poetry, underground comix, underground movies. Others worked on their own.
Hoberman discusses the book with Columbia News, as well his summer plans and current research.
How did this book come about?
The 1960s New York art world has been a long-standing interest of mine. Having written a trilogy of books about Hollywood and the Cold War, I wanted to revisit the era that I grew up with.