The DIY Movement in Art, Music and Publishing

Subjugated Knowledges

Sarah Lowndes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317555650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This book considers the history of Do It Yourself art, music and publishing, demonstrating how DIY strategies have transitioned from being marginal, to emergent, to embedded. Through secondary research, observation and 30 original interviews, each chapter analyses one of 15 creative cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dusseldorf, New York, London, Manchester, Cologne, Washington DC, Detroit, Berlin, Glasgow, Olympia (Washington), Portland (Oregon), Moscow and Istanbul) and assesses the contemporary situation in each in the post-subcultural era of digital and internet technologies. The book challenges existing subcultural histories by examining less well-known scenes as well as exploring DIY "best practices" to trace a template of best approaches for sustainable, independent, locally owned creative enterprises.

Part I
Creative Self-Reliance in the Post-War Period

This section begins with an examination of the countercultural scene in San Francisco from 1955 onward, before considering the concurrent arts scene dating from the same period in Los Angeles. A discussion of the interlinked Düsseldorf art and music scenes from 1967 onward is followed by an analysis of the downtown scene in New York, which reached its epoch in 1975, when New Wave met Disco. This section considers the birth and development of DIY, a movement shaped by the aftermath of WWII, which became in the 1960s a fulcrum for experimentation, political protest and countercultural expression, and details how DIY practices shifted course once more during the global recession of the 1970s, anticipating the entrepreneurialism that guided DIY activity in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the post 1945 period the old cities of the West and East coast of America, and in particular the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles were the domain of the urban Democrats, a situation that prevails to this day. The post-war period was a time when American culture flourished, owing in part to the legacy of FDR’s New Deal and in part to the GI Bill Servicemen’s Readjustment Act or GI Bill of 1944, which provided tuition fees and living expenses for veterans.¹ In the post-WWII period higher education institutions in America had a more diverse study body than ever before, owing to the 2.2 million ex-servicemen who entered colleges and universities after the war. The sociologist Howard S. Becker, who studied in the post-war period at the University of Chicago, remembered,

The enterprise of higher education grew so much … they couldn’t teach us because there were too many, so we taught each other. Many of the students had been to many places [during the war], and had much life experience. They were worldly and smart and we drank coffee together in a neighborhood drug store and stood around smoking together outside the library.²

The GI Bill brought education and social mobility to the American working classes for the first time, and the meeting of the working classes with the middle classes in colleges and universities had many profound social, political and cultural effects in the post-war years.

The alternative belief system propagated by the liberal climates of San Francisco and LA resulted in a pronounced political aspect in the cities’ respective art scenes, which during the tumultuous years of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War (1965–1973), were enlivened by anti-war protesters, gays, drop-outs and draft-evaders. The geographical isolation, temperate climate and horizontal spatial organization of the West Coast also meant that fringe activities ranging from beat poetry to assemblage art and concrete performance were more readily facilitated there than in the more competitive environment of New York.

By the late 1960s direct action protest had begun to take trenchant hold on the West Coast—partly in response to a local political situation, as the Governor of California, former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan decried the activities of protest groups and Californian college professors who he held to be partly responsible for youth insurgency.³ In California, the upheavals prompted by events in Vietnam and Algeria, the Civil Rights movement, the ongoing Cold War, threat of the atom bomb, and the advent of feminism and sexual emancipation were reflected by the work of numerous political campaigners. These groups ranged from the Black Panthers, to the feminist artist-activists involved in the LA Womanhouse project and the student groups inspired by the writings and teachings of University of California at San Diego professor Herbert Marcuse, author of One Dimensional Man (1964), who adopted a position of active engagement with the political scene.

In his attempt to make ‘the established language itself speak what it conceals or excludes’.⁴ Marcuse’s position should also be contextualized alongside concurrent political developments such as The New Left movement that came to prominence in the late 1960s, and advocated a return to authenticity. Similarly, San Francisco-based countercultural groups such as The Diggers and Guerilla Theatre, articulated ‘the intention of destroying an unjust order and therefore an intention … to replace the old with the new’.⁵ Many of the most difficult and controversial works made in Southern California in the 1960s and early 1970s can, and indeed must, be read as part of the wider counter-cultural scene. Peggy Phelan has argued that performance art, which grew as a discipline during the period, was endowed with an ‘oppositional edge’⁶ which reflected the mood of a wider youth culture pre-occupied not with history and traditions, but with the here and now. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle point out in the introduction to their recent American counterculture reader Imagine Nation that,

The countercultural mode reveled in tangents, metaphors, unresolved contradictions, conscious ruptures of thought; it was expressly anti-linear, anti-teleological, rooted in the present, disdainful of thought processes that were circumscribed by causation and consequence.⁷

By the late 1960s, America’s escalating involvement in Vietnam and tensions relating to the Women’s and Civil Rights movements had created a palpable sense of civic unrest. By 1966, 6,000 Americans had been killed in action in Vietnam and some 4,000,000 US military were stationed there. By early 1967, public support for US involvement in Vietnam began to waver. There were many direct action protests against the Military Selective Service Act of 1967 and America’s continued involvement in the war, perhaps the most notable early instance of which was the Spring Mobilization to End the War held in New York in April 1967.⁸ Over 400,000 protestors marched, among them a group of Vietnam war veterans, including Jan “Barry” Crumb, Mark Donnelly and David Braum, who would later found the consciousness-raising organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

From 1965 onward the protest movement, which had previously mainly emanated from colleges and universities, gathered increasing momentum and support from wider sections of the community, as journalists and other independent observers began to file reports on the war in Vietnam that bore little resemblance to those issued by the U.S. government. One Vietnam veteran later recalled that in the mid-1960s, ‘Everything changed. All attitudes toward power figures, authority figures. Respect for authority truly broke down. In college we were just against everything’.⁹ The series of political assassinations between 1963 and 1968, of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King increased the existing sense of civic agitation in many American cities, and the frequency of public displays of anger. America’s continuing involvement in Vietnam resulted in increasingly militant political activities by guerilla groups such as The Weathermen, Black Panthers and others. This unrest culminated in a series of violent clashes between the general public and the authorities, notably during The Watts riots that took place in LA in 1965, the Detroit riots of 1967, street protests at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, the Washington riots of 1968 and the establishment of Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1969. The invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and the shootings of students by state guardsmen at Kent State and Jackson State Universities later that year also played an important part in generating a sense of disillusionment with the earlier idealism of the 1964–1967 ‘flower-child’ phase of the Hippie movement.

By the late 1960s, the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements had forced the question of the political commitment of artists onto the agenda in a way not seen since the end of WWII. The conceptual art movement that gained traction across Europe and America from 1967 onward shook and undermined previous concepts of art and was brought to wider attention through exhibitions such as When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969) and Documenta 5 (1972), both of which were organized by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, and championed minimal art, conceptual art, arte povera and earth art, by artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Beuys, all of whom shared an interest in leftist politics. The post-war years in Germany had been a time of reconstruction on every level of German society and culture, as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1949–1963) led Germany out of the ruins of World War II and into a time of peace and prosperity often referred to as the “Wirtschaftswunder” (economic miracle). In the post-war years, following the division of Berlin, the focus of cultural activity moved to West Germany and the neighboring cities of Cologne and Düsseldorf—fertile ground for the development of “krautrock” groups Can (1968–), Kraftwerk (1970–) and Neu! (1971–). The equality of educational opportunity enshrined in German law contributed significantly to the post-war cultural scene, notably at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, which in the 1960s and 1970s fostered the work of many of the most notable artists of the post-war period including Joseph Beuys, Capitalist Realists (Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), Jörg Immendorf, Anselm Kiefer, Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo and Walter Dahn.

At Documenta 5 (1972) Joseph Beuys opened his exhibition space as a temporary information office to debate and discuss his ideas about “Direct Democracy” with anyone who wanted to engage in conversation.¹⁰ Curator Harold Szeeman later reflected that this period constituted the second revolutionary moment in twentieth century art production: “after the first revolution in visual arts at the beginning of the twentieth century it was the second revolution”.¹¹ The West Coast artist and curator Tom Marioni agreed that the shifts in artistic practice that took place in the late 1960s onward constituted a marked challenge to everything that had come before. He wrote,

It was an invisible decade; the work that was produced had low commercial value; relics, documents and photos of events, earthworks and installations – all works not made as ends in themselves. It was a vital era and the art world could hardly wait for it to pass.¹²

The emerging conceptual art movement reflected many of the ideas associated with the protest movement and counter-culture, as many artists attempted to make work that challenged the prevailing consumer culture and resisted the existing structure of the art market. As Lucy R. Lippard wrote in her study of the period, ‘the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or “dematerialized”’.¹³

This section concludes with a consideration of the downtown art and music scenes New York in the 1970s, when the moment of conceptual art coincided with a seismic shift occurring simultaneously in the music field. The first rumblings of punk had been heard in the abrasive and energetic sound of Detroit’s MC5 and Iggy and The Stooges in the late 1960s, but punk as we know it gained most ground in New York as The Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls and The Ramones outlined an edgier alternative to overblown stadium rock in intimate, low key venues such as CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. In Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, she recalled the CBGBs scene, where punk and new wave bands The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Blondie and Patti Smith played in the mid-1970s.

There are many things I remember of this time. The smell of piss and beer. The entwining guitar lines of [Television’s] Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine as they elevated “Kingdom Come” […] The presence of [The Velvet Underground’s] Lou Reed, whose exploration of poetry and rock and roll had served us all. The thin line between the stage and the people and the faces of all who supported us.¹⁴

The feeling of local community fostered in small venues such as CBGBs meant that the line between stage and audience was not only thin, but easily crossed by aspirant singers and musicians who one day plucked up the courage to cross that line.

Notes

1. Veterans of the Korean War and the Vietnam War did not take up their educational entitlements to the same extent as WWII veterans for a variety of reasons.

2. Howard S. Becker, “Chicago, 1950, Another Look”, 50th Anniversary Erving Goffman Memorial Lecture, Edinburgh University, November 27, 2014.

3. Reagan was Governor of California from 1967–1975. In May 1969, regarding the ongoing student protests at UC Berkeley, he was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying, ‘If there has to be a bloodbath, then let’s get it over with’.

4. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), this edition (London and New York: Routledge, 1986), 195.

5. R.G. Davis, Guerilla Theater manifesto, quoted in Michael William Doyle, “Staging the Revolution”, Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle eds., Imagine Nation, The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 74.

6. Peggy Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: representation without reproduction”, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 146.

7. Peter Braunstein and ...