• 1 Caroline Maniaque, Les architectes français et la contre-culture nord-américaine, 1960-1975, PhD d (...)

1To develop the study of alternative architecture and the counterculture in North America and elsewhere, as I did for my doctoral thesis and the book based on it1—and to exhibit this kind of architecture—requires a departure from the usual historiographical approach. Traditional art history depends on research into the great names: the monographic book and exhibition. But the counterculture resists tradition. For example, the archives that collect around canonical architects are notably absent in the case of the counterculture. Many of the publications most often used at the time were ephemeral and are hard to find. On the other hand, because the history is recent, most of the key figures are still alive. The researcher can interview producers and consumers of the alternative built environment of the 1960s and 1970s. In my own work, I have relied on visiting important sites and interviewing participants.

• 2 The exhibition Ant Farm 1968–1978 curated by Constance Lewallen was presented at Berkeley Art Muse (...)
• 3 See Ant Farm, Inflatocookbook, Sausalito, CA: Aunt Farm, 1970, n.p. A reworked page from the Oakla (...)
• 4 Ant Farm, Automerica: A Trip Down U.S. Highways from World War II to the Future, New York, NY: Dut (...)

4How does a museum go about showing work based on defying the establishment? In 2004, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive staged an exhibition of the work of Ant Farm, the experimental architecture collective founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michels. The show illustrated how hard it is to transfer the spirit of a time into the present day.2 It consisted chiefly of two-dimensional documents, whereas Ant Farm’s work at the end of the 1960s centered on live events and happenings. True, the exhibition did include a full-size fifty-by-fifty-foot inflatable, but in a much less dramatic context than in an Ant Farm performance. For example, Air Emergency (1970) featured the inflatable in action at a happening staged for the Earth Day Teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley. Dressed in lab coats and gas masks, Ant Farm architects captured the escalating sense of the destruction and militarization of the environment. In Media Burn (1975), members of Ant Farm, dressed as astronauts, drove their “Phantom Dream Car” through a wall of burning television sets. Air Emergency was a “survival event” in which those who did not seek shelter from pollution by entering the inflatable were told that they would die rapidly.3 Media Burn was a media-oriented performance in a parking lot (far from museum walls). It was videotaped “on the rented Sony Trinitron.”4 The 2004 Berkeley Museum exhibition, on the other hand, presented textual documents, faithful to the museographical principle of authenticity. Original typewritten and collaged documents challenged the spectator to read and learn.

• 5 Steve Baer (Albuquerque) and Mike Reynolds (Taos) interviews with Caroline Maniaque, August 2001. (...)

6Writers of contemporary history draw upon a broad range of sources: graphic, written, and oral. Recorded interviews are often a good feature of an exhibition, for their ability to communicate to the audience the character of the people who were involved at the time. I made a personal contribution to this exhibition in the form of two filmed interviews with Steve Baer and Mike Reynolds. Steve Baer began inventing passive solar energy devices in 1968. Architect Mike Reynolds pioneered the construction of dwellings that recycled automobile tires and soft-drink cans in 1972. Both can claim a place in history because of what they have produced, what they have built and written, and what others have written about them.5 Two key aspects of the alternative culture of the 1960s emerged from these contemporary encounters: the emphasis on personal experimentation and the desire for autonomy from the state and its infrastructure. For example, Steve Baer is still opposed to high-tech solar solutions, such as photovoltaic panels, just as he was forty years ago. A proponent of passive solar energy, he prefers simple, common-sense applications (such as skylights for single-story buildings) to expensive technical devices, even if they offer tax benefits. Baer’s distrust of state-funded research reflects the attitudes of the 1960s counterculture. He clearly admires people who are actively experimenting with new ways of life—be they hippies or not.

• 6 This exhibition was a collaborative research and design project by a team of PhD candidates at the (...)

7Another attempt to capture the ephemeral world was the exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold 2: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X–197X.6 The aim was to juxtapose around seventy independent publications from the 1960s and 1970s. These diy publications, cheaply produced with the means at hand, mimeographed or printed, clipped, and stapled, are now valued, paradoxically, as extremely rare objects. Seemingly, an exhibition dedicated to preserving the fanzine as an information medium, mainly featuring facsimile copies of the covers, is another example of the transfer of knowledge into formalism. But part of the point of the exhibition was to show how the style of the avant-garde fanzine was adopted by professionally produced journals such as Architectural Design.

• 7 The exhibition Total Environment: Montréal, 1965–1975, curated by Professor Alessandra Ponte and a (...)

9The exhibition Environnement total: Montréal, 1965-19757 was about the influence of the concept of Total Environment in Montréal from ephemeral architecture in the 1960s and 1970s. On the wall, screens of moving images demonstrated that “today, everything is environment,” a term which dominated at the time in the discourses and practices of many artists, architects, and activists. Once again, the message was that the artists and architects of the late 1960s were breaking free from the studios and trying to recreate old forms of performance—circus, dance, musical events, poetry readings, and so on—using public spaces and other spaces not specifically designed for such events. The exhibition evoked this atmosphere with large moving images, objects, printed material, and archives.

• 8 Exhibition Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present was presented at MoMA (New York) from 14 March (...)

10To imagine a continuity between art practice and its representation in an exhibition, the recent show at moma, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, is a fascinating example.8 Marina Abramović did not limit herself to documenting her work over forty years with video, installations, and photographs. Rather she used volunteers to recreate happenings and confrontations with the public. She presented herself, also, seated at a table all day every day, inviting members of the public to share this exposure. Live collaborators, naked women framing the entrance, further conveyed the message that artistic practice is a way of life. The sense of confrontation and the risks of vulnerability were stimulated through full haptic experiences in a way that no documentation could reproduce.