Anarchic street performances in late-1950s Japan; inauguration of the first Happenings in Antwerp and charging of the "magic circle" in Amsterdam; Bauhaus Situationiste and anti-national art exchanges, networks and communes. As "Happener" and "Art Missionary," Yoshio Nakajima’s storied career traverses an astounding range of locations, scenes, movements, media, and performance modes in the global 1960s and 1970s in ways that challenge our notions of the possibilities of art. Nakajima repeatedly plays a role in jump-starting spaces of possibility, from Tokyo to Ubbeboda, from Spui Square and the Dutch Provos to Antwerp and Sweden. Despite this, Nakajima’s work has paradoxically been largely excluded from accounts where it might have justifiably featured. The present volume represents an international collaboration of researchers working to remedy this oversight. Nakajima’s work demands a reconceptualization of narratives of this art and politics and their specific interrelation to consider his exemplary nonconformity—and its exemplary exclusion. This history demonstrates the inadequacy of notions of specificity that would oppose an authentic local or national frame to an inauthentic transnational one. Conversely, Nakajima manifests a key dimension of the 1960s as a global event in the interrelation between eventfulness itself and the redrawing of categories of practice and understanding.

During the 1960s, the SNCC Freedom Singers, the Living Theatre, the Diggers, the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Art Action Group fused art and politics by staging unexpected and uninvited performances in public spaces. This text offers detailed portraits of each of these groups.

No detailed description available for "Political Graffiti in Critical Times".

During the 1960s, the SNCC Freedom Singers, the Living Theatre, the Diggers, the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Art Action Group fused art and politics by staging unexpected and uninvited performances in public spaces. This text offers detailed portraits of each of these groups.

An examination of the origins and legacy of the conceptual art movement.

Law and Order offers a valuable new study of the political and social history of the 1960s. It presents a sophisticated account of how the issues of street crime and civil unrest enhanced the popularity of conservatives, eroded the credibility of liberals, and transformed the landscape of American politics. Ultimately, the legacy of law and order was a political world in which the grand ambitions of the Great Society gave way to grim expectations. In the mid-1960s, amid a pervasive sense that American society was coming apart at the seams, a new issue known as law and order emerged at the forefront of national politics. First introduced by Barry Goldwater in his ill-fated run for president in 1964, it eventually punished Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats and propelled Richard Nixon and the Republicans to the White House in 1968. In this thought-provoking study, Michael Flamm examines how conservatives successfully blamed liberals for the rapid rise in street crime and then skillfully used law and order to link the understandable fears of white voters to growing unease about changing moral values, the civil rights movement, urban disorder, and antiwar protests. Flamm documents how conservatives constructed a persuasive message that argued that the civil rights movement had contributed to racial unrest and the Great Society had rewarded rather than punished the perpetrators of violence. The president should, conservatives also contended, promote respect for law and order and contempt for those who violated it, regardless of cause. Liberals, Flamm argues, were by contrast unable to craft a compelling message for anxious voters. Instead, liberals either ignored the crime crisis, claimed that law and order was a racist ruse, or maintained that social programs would solve the "root causes" of civil disorder, which by 1968 seemed increasingly unlikely and contributed to a loss of faith in the ability of the government to do what it was above all sworn to do-protect personal security and private property.

Innovative artists in 1960s Japan who made art in the "wilderness"--away from Tokyo, outside traditional norms, and with little institutional support--with global resonances. 1960s Japan was one of the world's major frontiers of vanguard art. As Japanese artists developed diverse practices parallel to, and sometimes antecedent to, their Western counterparts, they found themselves in a new reality of "international contemporaneity" ( kokusaiteki dōjisei). In this book Reiko Tomii examines three key figures in Japanese art of the 1960s who made radical and inventive art in the "wilderness"--away from Tokyo, outside traditional norms, and with little institutional support. These practitioners are the conceptualist Matsuzawa Yutaka, known for the principle of "vanishing of matter" and the practice of "meditative visualization" ( kannen); The Play, a collective of "Happeners"; and the local collective GUN (Group Ultra Niigata). The innovative work of these artists included a visionary exhibition in Central Japan of "formless emissions" organized by Matsuzwa; the launching of a huge fiberglass egg--"an image of liberation"--from the southernmost tip of Japan's main island by The Play; and gorgeous color field abstractions painted by GUN on accumulating snow on the riverbeds of the Shinano River. Pioneers in conceptualism, performance art, land art, mail art, and political art, these artists delved into the local and achieved global relevance. Making "connections" and finding "resonances" between these three practitioners and artists elsewhere, Tomii links their local practices to the global narrative and illuminates the fundamentally "similar yet dissimilar" characteristics of their work. In her reading, Japan becomes a paradigmatic site of world art history, on the periphery but asserting its place through hard-won international contemporaneity.