Impure Thoughts: The Art Of Sam Durant - Brief Article

ArtForum, April, 2000 by James Meyer

Each period casts a very long shadow. One's period is when one is very young.

--Diana Vreeland

THE SUMMER OF LOVE GAME LATE TO THE VINEYARD. WHEN IT DID, IT HIT HARD. That summer Ali MacGraw died in Ryan O'Neal's arms after warming his cold, preppy heart ("Love means never having to say you're sorry"). Our local bard, James Taylor, told us we had a friend, and we believed him. Sitting cross-legged at a free concert, joints aflame all around us, we savored Sweet Baby James's romantic baritone and sincere words. That summer the hippies took over the beaches. Their insouciance offended our Eisenhower-era parents, who vainly shielded our eyes from unsightly penises and breasts. Though we pretended to be grossed our and giggled a lot, we were fascinated: To the children of the '60S the hippies were mythic creatures.

In those days kids hitchhiked around the island all day long. Though no more than seven or eight years old, we often placed ourselves in strangers' hands. One day an old VW microbus pulled over. Flower girls in granny dresses. Driver with Jesus hair. "Come on in!" Everyone going to the beach. Soon the van stops, and stops again, picking up new passengers and letting others off. Jesus always has more room. The ride is incredibly slow, but that's the point, isn't it? We're all in this together.

It's hard to say when the hitchhiking stopped. There was the foggy night in the '70S when some teenagers got run over. Now, you think that's Ted Bundy out there waiting to get in. Nobody stops for anyone anymore.

Partially Buried 1960s/70s: Utopia Reflected, Dystopia Revealed, 1998, an installation by Sam Durant, consists of two sheets of mirrored glass laid flat on the floor. The mirrors are covered with dirt, mimicking Robert Smithson's 1969 rock-salt and mirror Non-Sites. But the electric cords connected to tape recorders buried in the loam reveal that this isn't a Smithson at all. The first tape is of Wavy Gravy, a fellow traveler of the Diggers, the counterculture collective that distributed food for free during the '60s, speaking to the crowd at Woodstock. In Michael Wadleigh's film of the concert, Wavy is the picture of generosity. An aw-shucks kinda guy. Nobody had expected such a massive crowd; the local merchants were unprepared for the swarms of teenagers who arrived. Yet despite these problems it seemed to be working: People were getting along. Wavy's gravelly voice, emanating from the dirt, is reassuring though distant: "You've been really really groovy, and you're making the scene."

The second tape is of Mick Jagger at Altamont, the "West Coast Woodstock," held at the Altamont Speedway in Tracy, California, in 1969. It's the festival's most famous moment, the culminating scene in the Maysles brothers' documentary Gimme Shelter. The strung-out crowd is pushing aggressively toward the stage. The Hell's Angels, hired as bodyguards, have been beating up fans, even the musicians who were performing, since the moment the concert began. It's a hysterical situation--a disaster. Nothing to be done. Mick, always the coolest, sounds scared:

Why are we fighting?! Why are we fighting?! We don't want to fight! Come on! Who wants to fight? Every other scene has been cool [ldots] Let's just get it together! [ldots] Everyone--Hell's Angels, everybody, let's just keep ourselves together.

Shortly after Jagger's plea, one of the concertgoers, Meredith Hunter, brandishing a gun, was beaten and stabbed to death by one of the Angels during a rendition of "Under My Thumb." Three other people died at Altamont that day: Two fans were run over; another, high on LSD, jumped into an aqueduct.

The contrast between Woodstock and Altamont is one of the enduring myths of the '60s. In the Catskills, we are told, the counterculture triumphed; in California it spun out of control. Wavy's heaven became Mick's nightmare. In his remarkable memoir, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, describes the West Coast festival as "the famous collectivity of a generation cracking into thousands of shards." The deaths at Altamont--as well as the Manson murders, the Weathermen bombings, the execution of Chicago Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, etc.--represent the meltdown of the era's high-minded ideals; by the end of the '60s, anarchy and cruelty ruled the day.

Durant's vision of the decade is more distant and far less earnest. Only seven in 1969, the artist harbors a perverse fascination for the notorious concert. The Altamont he knows is an utterly mediated Altamont, the concert as depicted in the Maysles film, in Rolling Stones lore, and in histories of the '60s, a myth that is intertwined with the myth of Woodstock. It is this construction that Partially Buried 1960s/70s builds upon. Literalizing the cliche of Woodstock as utopia and Altamont as dystopia, the two tapes and identical mirrors suggest that the concerts were of a piece. Rather than an aberration or betrayal of '60s ideals, Altamont becomes the entropic fulfillment of that epoch's lofty expectations: For every Martin Luther King there was a Charles Manson; for every Wavy, an Angel wielding a knife. Durant's dissection of the Woodstock/Altamont myth is the demonstration of a basic structural logic. The antinomies of harmony/chaos, utopia/dystopia, refinement/vulgarity, hygiene/filth pervade the artis t's impure aesthetic. Rather than privilege one term or the other, his practice explores the dialectical relationship of the two, the entropic collapse of one state into another.