Each period casts a exceedingly long shadow.

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

--Diana Vreeland

THE SUMMER OF delight in 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 cutting preppy heart ("Love means at no time having to say you're sorry"). Our local bard, James Taylor, told us we had a friend, and we believed him. Sitting cross-legg at a at liberty concert, joints aflame all around us, we savored Sweet Baby James's romantic baritone and sincere words. That summer the hippies took throughout the beaches. Their insouciance give offence toed our Eisenhower-era parents, who vainly shielded our organ of visions from unsightly penises and breasts. notwithstanding that we pretended to be thicked our and giggled a division we were fascinated: To the children of the '60 the hippies were mythic creatures.

In those days kids hitchhiked around the island all day drawn out Though no more than seven or eight years advanced in years we often placed ourselves in strangers' hands. individual day an old VW microbus contested over. Flower girls in granny dresse Driver with Jesus hair. "Come onward in!" Everyone going to the beach. pretty soon the van stops, and stops again, picking up novel passengers and letting others opposite to Jesus always has more latitude The ride is incredibly dull 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 muddled night in the '70S when one teenagers got run over. Now, you think that's T Bundy without there waiting to get in. Nobody stops for anyone anymore.

Partially Buried 1960s/70s: Utopia meditateed Dystopia Revealed, 1998, an installation from Sam Durant, consists of pair sheets of mirrored glass laid flat in succession the floor. The mirrors are cloaked with dirt, mimicking Robert Smithson's 1969 rock-salt and mirror Non-Sites. still 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 equal traveler of the Diggers, the counterculture collective that distributed rations for free during the '60 speaking to the populace at Woodstock. In Michael Wadleigh's film of the concordance Wavy is the picture of generosity. An aw-shucks kinda scarecrow Nobody had expected such a massive crowd; the local merchants were unprepared for the swarms of teenagers who arrived. to this time despite these problems it present the appearanceed to be working: People were getting along. Wavy's gravelly voice, emanating from the dirt, is reassuring allowing distant: "You've been really really groovy and you're making the scene"

The inferior 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 principally famous moment, the culminating spectacle in the Maysles brothers' documentary Gimme Shelter. The strung-out [i]ignobile vulgus is pushing aggressively toward the stage. The Hell's Angels, hired as bodyguards, have been beating up fans, level the musicians who were performing, since the jiffy the concert began. It's a hysterical situation--a disaster. Nothing to be done. Mick, always the coolest wholes scared:

Why are we fighting?! for what purpose are we fighting?! We don't want to fight! flow on! Who wants to fight? each other scene has been unexcited [ldots] Let's just get it together! [ldots] Everyone--Hell's Angels, everybody let's just retain ourselves together.

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

The contrast between Woodstock and Altamont is individual of the enduring myths of the '60 In the Catskills, we are told, the counterculture triumphed; in California it spun gone out of control. Wavy's heaven became Mick's nightmare. In his remarkable memoir, The Sixties: Years of confidence Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin, a caster 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 kill cruellys the Weathermen bombings, the execution of Chicago Black Panthers Fr Hampton and Mark Clark, etc--represent the meltdown of the era's high-minded ideals; at the end of the '60 anarchy and brutality ruled the day.

Durant's vision of the decade is more distant and far les earnest. single seven in 1969, the artist harbors a untrastable fascination for the notorious plan The Altamont he knows is an utterly mediated Altamont, the plan as depicted in the Maysles film, in Rolling Stones lore, and in histories of the '60 a myth that is intertwined with the myth of Woodstock. It is this construction that Partially Buried 1960s/70 builds relating to Literalizing the cliche of Woodstock as utopia and Altamont as dystopia, the couple tapes and identical mirrors intimate that the concerts were of a piece. Rather than an aberration or betrayal of '60 ideals, Altamont becomes the entropic fulfillment of that epoch's proud expectations: For every Martin Luther King there was a Charles Manson; for each 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 undivided term or the other, his practice explores the dialectical relationship of the brace the entropic collapse of single in kind state into another.