DE GUSTIBUS
Decade Delirium
The '60s make a comeback. Ugh.
BY JOHN FUND
Friday, October 24, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
MONTREAL--Nostalgia is a growth industry. Fox has scored with "That '70s Show," and millions have tuned into VH1's instant nostalgia countdowns, which serve up news clips, concert footage and TV ads in all their retro splendor.
Most nostalgia is harmless, of course, but an exception could be made for the 1960s, a decade overloaded with reverential mythologizing. This is the one decade that won't let you forget its "importance" no matter how hard you try.
The mythmakers keep pushing the case that that mod-mod world brought us liberation, cool music, civil-rights progress and antiwar idealism. Often swept to the side is that it entrenched moral relativism in the psyche of many Western nations, set into motion trends that soon led to skyrocketing rates of illegitimacy, and generated the political correctness that has plagued our universities.
At the moment, the self-flattering myth is given its fullest expression in "Global Village: The 1960s," at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. (It heads to the Dallas Museum of Art in February 2004.) Curator Stephanie Aquin says that "when you look at the '60s, you recognize yourself, in terms of style, music, communication, advertising, the consumer society. It's already our world."
True enough, which is why I wish the 250 pieces she has assembled presented a more balanced view. To her credit, Ms. Aquin acknowledged in the Montreal Gazette that "there was perhaps a bit of excess of individualism, the breaking down of some traditional values that should not have been trashed" on the way to "a more open, more tolerant society." But such cautions are missing from her collection.
A few powerful works are featured. A 1965 painting by Norman Rockwell, atypically for him, portrays the murder of civil-rights workers in Mississippi. Andy Warhol's silkscreen of Jacqueline Kennedy before and after her husband's assassination can be seen, without the usual Warhol irony, as a comment on the era's political violence.
But many pieces are trivial or bizarre. A work by Christo marking the construction of the Berlin Wall consists of a pile of oil drums between the walls of a street. The wall text says the wall divided the world between the "egalitarian utopia of the communist regimes" and "the 'free world' of the capitalist societies." (Note the scare quotes around free world.)
A video monitor showcases "Meat Joy," a 1964 film by Carolee Schneemann featuring nude performers writhing about in a sea of raw fish, uncooked chickens, paint, plastic and rope. (A PETA ad before its time?) Other pieces feature "celebrities" from Yoko Ono to Charles Manson and Ho Chi Minh. Ho is gone and Manson is behind bars, but last month, in Paris, Ms. Ono reprised "Cut Piece," a 1960s performance art effort in which audience members are invited to cut away her clothing one piece at a time.
The show ends with Janis Joplin's last car. She may have pined for a Mercedes Benz in her song, but in reality she drove a Porsche done up in groovy, psychedelic colors. Who knew?
I saw all this on the official museum tour. As it wound down, the guide asked our group if the idealism of the 1960s had failed since war and poverty still dominated much of the world. "Not at all," said Joseph Reed, a visitor from Boston who was a college student during the 1960s. "We glimpsed how to think more openly and are still working on that."
But Mindi Alt, visiting from Seattle, was more skeptical. "My husband's aunt was the caretaker for Janis Joplin in her last years," she said. "She would get stoned, throw up, recover and then crash again--until she died of an overdose." Maybe the show could have paid more attention to this side of the 1960s, the cost paid for the "trashing" of traditional values, as Ms. Aquin put it.
On the way out of the exhibit, I visited the gift shop. There in front of me was half a table of revolutionary kitsch--tote bags, posters and coasters emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara, the communist who died fomenting an uprising in Bolivia in 1967.
Start the retro-revolution without me. |
