s of Paris. “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” written in 1953 by the mad Ivan Chtcheglov, with its manically dreamy Rimbaud-like prose describing a drift through the city in search of the “hacienda,” is a key early text in this chain of visions. The Provo vision for the city of Amsterdam was carried out through a kind of public gift economy, featuring the famous white bicycles and “white door” vacant houses. A city of desire was envisioned, where human beings could be “players,” in the words of Johan Huizinga, the Dutch historian who wrote a history of play (Homo Ludens, 1938, before dying in a Nazi prison). “New Babylon” became a Provo cry in the streets.
Stories of these movements spread through the underground press of the 1960s, and Provo’s anarchist political strategies and actions inspired U.S. groups like the Diggers in San Francisco and the Yippies in New York. Key to all these groups’ actions was the implicitly anti-consumerist concept of the gift – giving it away, whatever “it” may be. Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies’ leader, wrote a book under the pen-name Free. The ethic of free continues to influence much of today’s viral activism (e.g., Food Not Bombs, Really Free Markets, “freegan” dumpster divers), and many post-urban communes.
In the early 1960s, the Happening itself spread throughout Europe as a new way of making art. In Paris, Jean-Jacques Lebel took it up, producing pointedly political art events. In one, Lebel hired nude models to bathe together. The young women in the bathtub wore masks of Khrushchev and Kennedy. In Berlin, Wolf Vostell became an important advocate of the form, producing an event in an auto junkyard at the end of an airport’s runway. The jets screaming over the tangled metal debris clearly referenced the U.S. bombing campaign in Vietnam.
The Happening as a new art form directly inspired a deeply intertwined cultural and political movement in Holland. Yet throughout the radical political movements in both Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, the culture and usages of artists played an important role. The traditional practices of the artworld often turned, or were turned political. At an opening of an exhibition of photographs of Provo actions, so the story is told, the always aggravated police began to beat the crowds of spectators waiting to get in. The exhibiting photographers themselves, waiting for their public inside the gallery, began to take pictures of the police action through the windows.
In 1971 the famous Christiania squatted city in the center of Copenhagen was initially occupied by a crowd coming from an art exhibition where the plans for just such an action had been exhibited.
With political interpretations of the conceptual art movement, gallery culture was increasingly used in a deliberately political way. One of the most explicit was the sensational “lock-in” of gallery goers in Argentina at an opening of an exhibition by in Rosario, Argentina in a glass-walled storefront in 1968. This action was a powerful social sculpture which, like the circumstantial Provo event before it, suddenly displayed a vitrine-like collection of elegantly clad angry art fanciers to the street.
Situationists Always Say “No!”
This turning, or détournement, of conventional cultural usages is precisely what the Situationists had in mind as a revolutionary tactic which they did not deign to call “social sculpture.” Nevertheless, sculpting the social world was the group’s intent. Their analysis of the Happening movement was contemptuous.
Jon Erickson succinctly summarizes the critique of Situationist leader Guy Debord, in terms so prescient I shall quote him at length. Debord “saw happenings in the light of the ‘team projects’ of capitalism, the creation of ‘spectacular pseudo-culture’ that reflected capitalism’s ‘recapture of the worker as the “personality well-integrated in the group.”… It is the same project everywhere: a restructuring without community” (SOS 192). He criticized the exclusionary ‘anti-spectacular spectacle’ as ‘restricted to actors alone,’ comparing them to the professional revolut