From the late 1950s on, artists in New York created exhibition-performances that sought to uproot the preexisting gallery and museum structures. Although they weren’t strung together by concept or subject matter, these performances held the same free-for-all ethos: “Happenings,” they were called. They took place in many forms, such as music and theater, and in many places, including in galleries and out on the street. Happenings broke down the rigid divide between audience and artist, merging the two into an inseparable, coterminous being. Art was no longer static, sitting silently in a gallery wall, but was instead free-form, ever-changing, and ephemeral, with no two performances ever the same.
A typical formula for Happenings, which merged film, music, strobe lights, and the occasional passing-around of LSD, was nothing new. Tony Conrad, the drone musician, structural filmmaker, and honorary Velvets member, messed around with strobes, tearing apart projectors to create flashes of light. His film The Flicker returned to the basics of filmmaking—a short introduction before two frames of white and black flash in alternating ratios for thirty minutes. Decades before, in the 1940s, Harry Everett Smith experimented with oils, projectors, and mirrors, creating the psychoactive light show that would later come to define Bill Graham’s Fillmore. Smith was one of those characters who seems indefinable: an archivist, collector, occultist, ethnographer, and animator, among many other attributes. Smith’s most known achievement was his Anthology of American Folk Music. Transcending beyond a sheer cultural document, it became a sprawling epic of folk 45s without any one focus, jumping from murder ballads to train songs and fishing odes. Released on Smithsonian Folkways in 1952, the three-volume compendium would ripple through the Village just some years later, giving Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk their earliest arrangements.
In 1965, 13 years after gifting his collection to Moses Asch, Smith came back to Folkways with a group he wanted to record: the Fugs, a New York jug band whacked-out on peyote and acid. In exchange for one bottle of rum, Smith produced their debut record, a stumbling effort with circular poems-as-lyrics. On the album’s final track, the members chant, whine, and grumble: “Oh, Village Voice, nothing / New Yorker, nothing / Sing Out and Folkways, nothing / Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg / Nothing, nothing, nothing // Poetry nothing.” The Fugs would participate in the “Trips Festival” over on St. Marks, performing under the flashing haze of media art collective USCO’s strobe lights and Rudi Stern’s projections.