Paradise Now: From Sexual Liberation to Aesthetic Revolution in the U.S. during the 1960s

Abstract

In this paper, I present the connections that artists and cultural intellectuals forged between social-political revolution and sexual-libidinal revolution in the United States during the 1960s. Focusing on the influential and exemplary theoretical work of Herbert Marcuse, I consider how writings such as Eros and Civilization and An Essay on Liberation updated classic notions of the “aesthetic state” in light of collective libidinal and cultural revolutionary motifs. I then discuss instances of early performance art, proto-feminist art, and Living Theater, in which the libidinal and socio-political are figurally conflated as ciphers of one another, either in the form of a protest against repression or in images of collective erotic liberation. I conclude with observations about the apparent contradiction between Marcuse’s theory, which seems to have strong affinities with these avant-garde tendencies, and his rather conservative taste, which led him to repudiate the Living Theater and other such actionist art.