Can the Beats go on? Poets, artists and fans hope so

Sitting by a swimming pool on a warm night as a party raged around him, local gallery owner John Natsoulas was explaining the purpose of a weekend conference focusing on visual art of the Beat generation.

He had cited San Francisco galleries, Venice sculptors and New York poets when he spotted an image closer to hand: a longhaired 6-year-old, naked as a cherub, cavorting in the pool.

“This is what it’s all about!” he exclaimed, pointing to the boy, the son of the Beat-era painter Michael Bowen, who was watching his offspring along with his young Italian wife. If there was any confusion as to what Natsoulas meant, within an hour the beret-clad art dealer was shouting, “Get rid of the structure!” before going back to blowing saxophone with the party’s jazz band.

Natsoulas, a short, intense, goateed man, has a kind of evangelical zeal about the Beats and their spontaneous, unfettered means of creation.

“What great piece of art ever came out of structure?” he asked. “What great event ever came out of structure? The art of the period was poorly made. The fact that the sculptures weren’t made to last is what I like about them.”

For decades, the reputation of the Beat generation has rested on such writers as Jack Kerouac (“On the Road”) and Allen Ginsberg (“Howl”), East Coasters based primarily in New York. That reputation, moreover, though apparently unquenchable, has flared periodically but mostly flickered.

But the heat seems to be on again. On Nov. 18, the Getty Research Institute will play host to a panel discussion, “Modern Art in Los Angeles: The Beat Years,” scheduled to include legendary curator Walter Hopps, artist George Herms, photographer Charles Brittin and poet David Meltzer.

And in its second year earlier this month, the Davis conference, “The Beat Generation and Beyond,” was dedicated to the Beats of the West Coast, particularly in San Francisco and Venice Beach, and to bringing visual artists and filmmakers, many of whom came after the movement’s heyday, some of the attention that Beat poets and novelists have long enjoyed.

The conference began with a montage of films by Paul Mazursky, whose 1976 movie “Next Stop, Greenwich Village” and years of drinking at Village bars like the San Remo qualified him for inclusion. It comprised panels and lectures about Beat artists and filmmakers, short experimental films, parts of a documentary about the San Francisco and oft-overlooked Venice Beach scene of the 1950s and several presentations of poetry, assemblage, action painting and performance art. There was also an event for the now neglected proto-Beat poet Kenneth Patchen.

Most of the events took place at an Art Deco movie theater downtown called the Varsity, but a Saturday night opening drew hundreds to Natsoulas’ enormous gallery, a converted UC Davis fraternity house, where a barefoot Bowen painted while a jazz quartet roared beside him. Many in the crowd were local students, teachers and professors, along with Northern California visual artists visiting a town that resembles a less gritty, more all-American Berkeley, full of coffee shops, bicycles and bookstores.

“What’s fabulous about the movement is that they didn’t know what they were doing, but they threw stuff together and improvised,” Natsoulas said of his inspiration for the weekend. “They didn’t care! It’s about getting up there and doing it.”

At times, the conference felt like a cult of self-expression or perhaps just of self: Many participants seemed to want to emphasize their own connections to the era. During questions for Mazursky, a woman raised her hand to point out that she knew some of the people involved in “Greenwich Village.”

When the director, confused, asked for clarification, she said, “I met the actors.” At much of “The Beat Generation and Beyond,” having been on the scene was enough.

The conference’s tone ranged from academic -- as in a lecture by art critic Donald Kuspit on Ginsberg’s relationship to Cezanne and the filmmaker Stan Brakhage -- to cheeky. “Any beatniks here?” asked Mazursky with a verbal wink after his film screened.

The guests included Herms, the Los Angeles artist who was, with Wallace Berman, a crucial pioneer of the ‘50s assemblage movement; San Francisco sculptor Manuel Neri, who was active at the epochal Six Gallery, where Ginsberg first read “Howl”; Oakland-based poet and radio host Jack Foley, who, with his black garb, rotund build and Roman Catholic wisdom seemed a kind a Beat monk; and Carolee Schneemann, an early proponent of body and performance art who was on the fringes of the original scene and is now recognized as a godmother to performance artist Karen Finley and to Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues.”

As an outspoken political artist whose unprintable sexual statements would make a sailor blush, Schneemann served as a kind of feminist conscience for the weekend. While male Beats were the first to see her work, most of the female artists of the time were “marginalized,” she said.

‘Huge Resurgence’

“The men sat in the center at parties,” she recalled of the era, at a combined performance and lecture that involved her smearing ketchup and mayonnaise on herself. “They spoke about the power of their art. And the women sat in their little dresses and smoked cigarettes and listened to their guys.”

Behind much of the weekend hung the question: What does Beat mean now? Do its animating ideas -- a sometimes secretive nonconformity, a rejection of “square” society, of consumerism and aesthetic form -- still resonate? Has the movement been packaged or distorted by academe, Hollywood, “the media”?

“There’s a huge resurgence of the Beat thing in Europe,” said Bowen, who had just returned to California after a one-man show in Italy and a Beat-themed show in Norway. “It’s mostly people around 20,” he said, smoking beneath his long, wavy hair at the party. “They want every slice of information they can get -- about themselves, about their own freedom. And I think it’s about to catch here.”

Two conference attendees around 20, both students at UC Davis, said they didn’t know much about the Beat movement apart from “On the Road.” And few of their peers, they reported, were Beat enthusiasts. “I think people are into it in a cliche way,” said Elif Sonmez, a slender literature major who’d been turned on to the era in a class taught by poet Gary Snyder, recently retired from the university. “Like soul patches and berets and so on.”

It may be a good time for renewed attention to Beat artists, as the literary reputation of the movement seems to be in another of its periodic declines.

Last month, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the author of the poetry volume “A Coney Island of the Mind” and founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, the movement’s shrine, expressed mixed feelings for Beat nostalgia in a New York Times interview.

“It’s really much more interesting today than in the ‘50s,” said Ferlinghetti, 84. “There has been all this mythologizing of the ‘50s and the Beat generation in San Francisco and so forth, but it has been wildly overdone, because it was a really depressing period, I thought, on account of the general repressive atmosphere and the political climate.”

Similarly, in 2000 “The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors” devoted an essay to the Beats’ limits instead of offering entries on individual writers. “Directly or indirectly, the Beat sensibility transformed much of American culture,” novelist David Gates wrote, referring to Woodstock, bluejeans and coffeehouse culture. “Yet this essentially literary movement failed to transform American literature.”One unlikely advocate of the Beats as visual artists was Kuspit, who seemed, with his blue blazer, gray hair and professional distance, an exile from academia stranded on planet Beat. His speech, “Beat Sensibility: Verbal or Visual,” was the subject of many private denunciations throughout the conference.

But after his lecture, Kuspit, a much-published author and professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, discussed Beat visual art with a different tone.

“As a comment on society, it’s more radical, formally it’s more radical,” he said of the work in comparison with Beat writing. “It’s not all about me -- ‘Here I am and I’m going to lead you into salvation.’ A lot of the poetry is more predictable. The films are visually really sharp and stunning. Even the most casual ones carry forth European avant-gardism.”

Why has the visual side been given less attention?

“We painters and sculptors are not proselytizers,” Herms, a benign presence throughout the conference, said of the Beats. “But Allen Ginsberg was a great publicist,” who made himself and his writer friends almost instantly famous.

‘All the debris’

The conference also showed how the arts could come together.

Filmmaker Mary Kerr screened parts of “Swinging in the Shadows,” an in-progress documentary on the San Francisco and Venice scenes that included Stuart Perkoff’s Venice West Cafe on Dudley Avenue, which housed both poetry and jazz. The film was animated by the pounding music of Charles Mingus and showed Venice Beach before gentrification, back when it was, in the words of one of the film’s subjects, a place where “all the debris” in the country fell, as from an enormous tablecloth shaken onto the sand.

Perhaps the most dramatic moment in the conference was a performance by Herms, who donned a golden wig and swung an enormous pole with a flowing Mylar banner behind it to the tune of Duke Ellington’s marathon “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.”

After the jazz number, Herms climbed onto a Skyjack elevated platform and unfurled a 10-foot-wide roll of heavy paper, wrapping it around the Skyjack, which he then wrapped further, and imperfectly, with the Mylar flag. Especially with colored lights shining on it, the resulting “sculpture” resembled the small assemblages for which Herms is known.

Still not resting, the 68-year-old artist grabbed strips of Venetian blinds in each hand and ran up the aisles of the theater shaking them clamorously, like a shaman wrestling very loud snakes to death.

Although much of the conference was perched between a nostalgia for the Eisenhower-haunted, jazz-blaring old days in North Beach and Venice and a concern that the movement be passed down to “the kids,” Herms’ performance was refreshing in its emphasis on the now.

“The magic of theater is if you’re not there that night to experience it, you don’t get it,” he said afterward, sitting outside the Varsity. “Not unlike the great jazz solos.”

And perhaps not unlike the Beat era itself.