I attended my first political rally while still in high school at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Earlier that year, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, many cities were in flames, and antiwar sentiment raged. The convention site was locked down, but I jumped right into the street protests. Television news cameras filmed the police riot that bloodied and bruised us as we chanted, “The whole world is watching.”
Amidst the civil unrest of that decade, an aesthetic revolution was also percolating. Peter Brook’s The Empty Space and Jerzy Grotwoski’s Towards a Poor Theatre called for reimaging a stripped down essentialism. Their credos echoed Anna Halprin’s task-oriented movement and Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto. John Cage, Terry Riley, and Ornette Coleman deconstructed compositional notions. Amiri Baraka’s plays called out white racism, New Wave filmmakers embraced quirky realness, and visual artists tossed out all the rules, as art performed life.
By the time I moved to New York in the early 1970s, the next wave of post-modernism was blossoming: Meredith Monk performing in parking lots, Trisha Brown dancing on rooftops, David Gordon improvising with Grand Union at the 14th Street Y, Phillip Glass playing at the Whitney, and Patti Smith singing in St. Mark’s Church. By the next decade, these iconoclasts were appearing in major theaters and opera houses—proof that change oftentimes emanates from the fringes.
Not all was high art. Charles Ludlum’s camp extravaganzas ignited gender-bending hijinks in bars, clubs, and small theaters across the East Village. All was fabulous, nothing was sacred. The annual queer pride parade allowed us all to be theatrical and political.
Today, the convergence of COVID-19 closing down public events, along with the explosive outrage with continued police carnage in communities of color, brings us to a similar inflection point as the late 1960s. Once again, a fundamental shift wherein art is stripped of any pretense is emerging. As well, the enormous chasm between aesthetics and inequity must be addressed as systemic racism is dismantled.
Perhaps it is a gift that we are currently forced to live in a continuous present, with no past, and no future, just now. Artists and organizations are re-examining their practices. Art can no longer be treated solely as a transactional product, with audience as consumers. What is important now is how culture can be essential in our communities.
Makers shifted to online strategies to create, disseminate, help others, and enliven protests. Organizations struggled at first, not realizing their missions were not tied to shuttered galleries and stages. However, many are slowly pivoting to seeing themselves as virtual community centers. Black Lives Matter must also manifest in staffing, governance, and programming within cultural organizations to redress structural racism. Embracing this new normal will have profound impact as we slowly rebuild our social, economic, and civic lives.
We are in this liminal moment imagining a post-pandemic art world. The opportunity in this crisis will be lost, if in hindsight we simply rush to put everything back together the way it was. As Peter Brook reminded us 50 years ago, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.”