t an inventive anarchist vision for the city.
These street Happenings were animated by curious Amsterdam characters. Chief among these was Robert Jasper Grootveld, a chanting poet-magician and jokester. Grootveld campaigned against tobacco addiction and rampant consumerism. His public projects were bizarre and complex, including the “marihu” campaign, centered around a complex game of inserting packaged substances like marijuana and soliciting police attention and arrests. Grootveld convened street meetings at the statue of a little boy – paid for by a tobacco company – which at one point was set on fire. At his Happenings, Grootveld prophesied that Amsterdam would become a magic center, the home of prophets and hordes of international young people. This transfiguration, Grootveld said and graffitied around town, would be led by a “Klaas,” a mysterious figurehead. In 1965, the “Klaas” Grootveld had prophesied arrived – the Dutch Princess Beatrix married former Nazi soldier Claus Von Amsberg of Germany. The demonstrations against this unpopular alliance in a formerly occupied country launched the Provos as a political movement in Holland.
Magic played a central role in Grootveld’s and other proto-Provo’s adaptation of the Happening form. Perhaps it was a legacy of the Surrealist movement, whose aged chieftain André Breton had delved into the arcana of the Tarot. This decadence of Surrealism (in the view of many younger politicized artists) was probably less significant as an influence than were traditional modes of street performance. Similarly, Peter Schumann claimed a source of inspiration for his Bread and Puppet Theater was the itinerant street puppeteers he watched as a child in Germany.
The Provo movement was supported by Constant (Constant Nieuwenheuys), an artist of the post-war avant-garde CoBrA group. His influential conception of a city of play called New Babylon, was elaborated in drawings and collages of an infinitely adaptable fantasy architecture he had evolved in collaboration with the Situationists 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 a