Performance and Permanence in Sixties Literature Essay -- Sixties 60

Performance and Permanence in Sixties lit What is maneuver? Any generation of artists defines itself by the way it answers this question. The artists of the 1960s open their answer in the idea of art as experience. Art was not something that happened it was something that happened around you, with you, to you. In the moment of creation, and in that moment alone, there was art. For artists of the Sixties, art was vibrant and alive, and thus to say a product was finished was exactly to say it was dead. For literary artists this obsession with the fleeting now translated to a bewitchment with operation itself-a fascination that in turn cuts at the very stub of art itself. For if work must be performed to be truly experienced, thusly art is transient and irreproducible, and therefore barren. Art becomes local and mortal, tied to the conduct and influence of a single artist-unable to speak to those who were not there at the time. One cannot have it both ways if we accept the pr eeminence of the chance and reject the supposition of reproducibility, then art seemingly becomes smaller, diminished. This struggle amongst act and permanence, between moment and monument, can be see as one of the central questions of the literary productions of the 1960s. Experimental theater provides a reusable example of the extreme form of this perception about performance art. dramatic play has sometimes been praised, sometimes been maligned, but it has undeniably been a type of literature for as long as literary study has existed, as central in its own way as poetry, and prose. Experimental theater challenged this notion in its sheer irreproducibility it begs the question, Can something be literary which only happens once, which fails to... ...who would neer and could never be touched by a single performance in a single place. For all its raw emotional power, perfomance art is un extend toable to many in the present and totally inaccessible to audiences in the fut ure. To truly matter-to exert any real change over the present, to reach past its moment of creation into the future-art must be more than its performance alone. Works Cited Biner, Pierre. The Living Theater. Takin It To The Streets A Sixties Reader, pp. 288-293. ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines. new-sprung(prenominal) York Oxford University Press, 1995. Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York Pengiun Books, 1958. Rader, Dotson. Notes of Andy Warhol His Life and Work as Death in America. Takin It To The Streets A Sixties Reader, pp. 305-309. ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines. New York Oxford University Press, 1995.