Performance and permanence in the literature of the SixtiesWhat is art? Each generation of artists is defined by the way they answer this question. The artists of the 1960s found their answer in the idea of ​​art as experience. Art wasn't something that happened; it was something that happened around you, with you, to you. At the moment of creation, and only at that moment, there was art. For artists of the 1960s, art was vibrant and alive, and so to say that a product was finished was simply to say that it was dead. For literary artists this obsession with the fleeting now translates into a fascination with performance itself, a fascination which in turn touches the very heart of art itself. Because if work must be performed to be truly experienced, then art is transitory and irreproducible, and therefore sterile. Art becomes local and deadly, tied to the life and influence of a single artist, unable to speak to those who were not there at the time. You can't have it both ways; if we accept the pre-eminence of "happening" and reject the notion of reproducibility, then art seems to become smaller, diminished. This struggle between performance and permanence, between moment and monument, can be seen as one of the central questions of the literature of the 1960s. Experimental theater provides a useful example of the extreme form of this perception of performance art. Drama has sometimes been praised, sometimes vilified, but it has undeniably been a type of literature for as long as literary studies has existed, as important in its own way as poetry and prose. Experimental theater challenged this notion in its absolute irreproducibility; the question arises: "Can something be literary that happens only once, that fails to... middle of paper... that would never and could never be touched by a single representation in a single place. Although all its raw emotional power, performance art is unattainable to many in the present and totally inaccessible to audiences in the future must be more than just performance. Biner, The Living Theatre Reader, pp. 288-293. Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums New York: Pengiun Books, 1958. Rader, Dotson "Notes of Andy Warhol: His Life and Work as Death in America: A Reader of the Sixties" -309 ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.