Cross Gender/Cross Genre

Iwould like to say a few words about the aesthetics of the period from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, in regard to images of gender confusion. This period, which, for want of a better term, I will call "Psychedelic," is rife with such images. I will attempt to explain why I believe this is so, and to describe some of the various operative trajectories.

I think it's best to begin by explaining where I come from and why all this has some meaning for me. Having been born in 1954, I am part of the last of the 60s generation. I was 14 years old in 1968, old enough to feel part of the general social turmoil, and I was the last of the generation to still be eligible for the draft in the Vietnam War. I was, in essence, really too young to be a Hippie, but my worldview was very much a by-product of that movement of resistance. The 60s were a period of immense social change and unrest in America. As a result of this, I had nothing in common with my older siblings, eight years my senior. They were post-War; I was mediated, I was part of the TV generation, I was Pop. I didn't feel part of my family, I didn't feel part of my country; I had no sense of history: the world seemed to me a media facade, a fiction, and a pack of lies. This, I believe, is what has come to be known as the postmodern condition. This is a form of alienation quite different from post-War Existentialism, because it lacks any historical footing. There is no notion of a truth that has been lost, there is simply nothing.

Nevertheless, I was enough a part of the 60s trajectory to involve myself, at least as a spectator, in radical politics. The local version, in the city I grew up in (Detroit, Michigan) was the White Panther Party, supposedly a white spin-off of the revolutionary Black Panther Party. In reality, they were more a branch of the Yippies: a primarily white, hedonist, anarchist group. The politics of this group consisted primarily of "acting out"--making one's life into a kind of radical street theatre. The purpose of this exercise was to make one unfit to function in normal society, and thus to prevent one from participating in and prolonging it. As the logic went, if you consumed enough drugs you simply could not work in the military-industrial complex. The White Panthers were centered in Ann Arbor, a college town, and my interest in their activities led me to related avant-garde music, theatre, film, and political events. This is what caused me to become an artist, which is quite remarkable, since I come from a working-class background and had little or no exposure to the arts as a child.

This psychedelic culture completely changed my worldview. When I first heard psychedelic music it was as if I had discovered myself. I had never much cared for music before I heard bands like the MC5, the Stooges, the Mothers of Invention, and Jimi Hendrix. The fractured nature of this music made sense to me; it mirrored the nature of the world, as I understood it, and my psyche. Of course, as every educated person knows, this was all old hat as far as modernism goes. I mean, Cubism was invented at the turn of the century, but we are talking mass culture here, not academia. What is interesting about this particular period was that the twentieth-century avant-garde was picked up and inserted into popular culture, under the guise of radical youth culture. In one swoop, Surrealism became teenybopper culture. This was possible because the artists involved in this period of crossover still considered themselves avant-gardists; this was a notion that was still conceivable at this point. Psychedelic...