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For Arendt, the fragile balance between labour, work and action that lies at the heart of the human condition was fundamentally endangered by the planned obsolescence characteristic of the new post-war consumer capitalism. Artworks displaying a ‘junk’ aesthetic produced on the East and West Coasts of the United States in the period between 1957 and 1962 can be read in light of Arendt’s perspective, which intersected with both sociological critiques of the new capitalism and the writings of Zen master D.T. Suzuki and other popularisers of Zen Buddhism. Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums resonated with both critiques of consumer society and newly discovered Zen alternatives. This chapter outlines some of the links between Kerouac’s Beat aesthetic and the assemblage and happenings of the early 1960s, by analysing the reception of landmark exhibitions such as The Art of Assemblage in 1961, and the practices of Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Conner and Allan Kaprow.

This chapter hinges on a comparison between George Brecht’s 1961 concept of a ‘borderline’ art ‘at the point of imperceptibility’ and the concerns with invisible forces and energies of an international group of kinetic artists, associated with the Signals Gallery in London between 1964 and 1966. While the evolution of Brecht’s work from 1957 to 1962 was shaped by a search for the concrete and the changeable in which other ‘junk’ artists, such as Allan Kaprow, were engaged at the time, the Signals Gallery artists were more closely linked to a trajectory of abstract and constructive art. Nevertheless, both the Signals Gallery artists and Brecht shared a similar desire to create experimental forms that would reflect a new vision of reality, inflected by both scientific discoveries and Zen Buddhism. In particular, the issue of perception was closely tied to the role of the spectator, whether in Brecht’s participatory ‘arrangements’ and ‘borderline’ event scores or Lygia Clark’s manipulable sculptures and her conception of an ‘art without art’. Brecht’s work is shown to have contributed to Allan Kaprow’s reflections on precarious ‘activities’, while both the artists’ work impacted Lawrence Alloway’s definition of an ’expanding and disappearing’ artwork in the late 1960s.

In chapter 5, Frank traces the spread of Nueva Figuración’s international renown, discussing the artists’ growing number of group shows and related reviews in U.S. and European magazines. Comparing it to the postmodern treatise The Anti-Aesthetic by Hal Foster, Frank examines Noé’s Antiestética, a theoretical text in which he extolled chaos as a value in art and announces his views on other dominant movements of the day such as Pop Art. Frank closes on the dissolution of Nueva Figuración: with the art scene in Argentina trending toward Pop and related styles and with Marta Minujín staging “Happenings” and proclaiming that painting was dead, the New Figurationists had one final group show in Buenos Aires and then went their separate ways.

By the mid-1960s, many practitioners desired to leave behind the notions of ephemerality, transience and improvisation associated with the Happenings of the late 1950s. This is vividly demonstrated by a 1966 attempt to create a simultaneous Three Country Happening by Allan Kaprow, Marta Minujín and Wolf Vostell that establishes the book’s central concerns, revealing how artistic fascination with the politics of communication was spurred by the transnationalism fostered through mass media technologies, together with the ways in which artists drew on sociology and psychology to develop alternative studies of interpersonal relations. Interpersonal communication emerged as a key focal point of sociology and psychology in the postwar period, fuelled by the advent of cybernetics and reactions against psychoanalysis. The introduction situates the Happening’s transnational development in relation to this preoccupation with communication, while proposing that artists working in performance were influenced by the counterculture to create works that resisted determinist, predictive models of interaction.

This essay highlights innovative painters, filmmakers, and assemblage artists who shaped what art historians have only recently began to call “Beat Art.” Featuring a paired art history/American literature course, the essay considers the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of Beat art as a prime mover in the anti-Vietnam War, civil rights, and women’s movements. Artists discussed include Wallace Berman, Wally Hendrick, Robert Rauschenberg, Jay DeFeo, and Alice Neel.