what created the Sixties Zeitgeist?

Sixties Zeitgeist The Sixties Media Art Revolution - the Zeitgeist 

Why did so many creatives - even wannabe art students like me - realise so early in the decade that the world had changed, and reflected this in their work? How did they all recognise this new zeitgeist and respond to it so early in the decade? 

Perhaps the answer is that all of them were aware of the same opportunity-space (the range of opportunities in their sector)- because they were creative people - they knew the various, previously disparate, cultural vectors glimpsed in Arthur Koestler’s book The Act of Creation (1963) (innovation happens when the artist/scientist/comic puts two or more previously quite separate ideas together) and they knew too that innovation resides in this ‘opportunity-space’ so they were all interpreting this as the current zeitgeist - the previously unseen spirit of the times. If this is the case, it might explain how Licklider (glimpsing his own opportunity-space) had his vision of Human-Computer Symbiosis (JCR Licklider: Man-Computer Symbiosis 1960) - a vision that was followed soon after by his idea that soon all the computers in the world might be networked (JCR Licklider: The InterGalactic Computer Network 1962) (love the hint of scifi here), and also, how the largely self-trained fashion entrepreneur Mary Quant had picked up ideas from friends in the original ‘Chelsea Set’ and the places they liked to hang-out in, and set-up a retail-replica of these places - and the clothes they preferred - in her Bazaar shops, and a bit later commercialised the perfect Sixties fashion-pairing: the Mini-Skirt and the panty-hose or ‘tights' that were their necessary accessory. Of course all these opportunity-spaces were different, depending on the influences, knowledge, talents and skills enjoyed by the individual, so Licklider, Quant, - and the Rolling Stones et al - had their own mental model of the zeitgeist-cum-opportunity-space - to which they applied their own interpretation, resulting in the welter of innovations that became ‘the Sixties’. 

You could, if you were even more pedantic than me, put together a chrono-map (what Buckminster Fuller called a ‘chronofile’) or that Joseph Novak christened a ‘concept-map’ - (both these ideas invented in this period) of each of these creatives, and perhaps trace their commonalities, and thus build a kaliedoscopic ‘picture’ or montage of the zeitgeist. and all the ‘opportunity-spaces' for all the creatives of the time - and see where they converged). This might explain the seeming simultaneity and immediacy of Sixties Culture - and how it evolved from post-Beat hipster to Mini-Skirt to Mods, Flower Power and Bra-Burning or how British R&B and the NY Folk Revival evolved into Folk-Rock, Poet-singer-songwriters and other forms within this decade - or how Abstract Expressionism mutated into Pop-Art through Rauschenberg, Hamilton and Paolozzi, and then spawned the Duchamp-inspired Fluxus (from c1963) and Conceptual Art of the late Sixties, or how Dada Cabaret Voltaire art-performance became the semi-scripted (algorithmic, multimedia, stochastic immersive performance) of the Happening, and added Performance  Art early in the decade -  and so on, building a slowly-evolving concept-map/timeline of the zeitgeist, and how we all contributed to it. Or perhaps there are two or three other solutions:  The Cultural  City Solution, the Art Movement Solution, and the Intermedia/Inter-disciplinary Research Group solution. The Cultural City - as Mary Quant notes, in 1960, London was happening (buzzing)  - this essay illustrates that fact - and Cities are great cultural attractors - it was Paris in the Belle Epoque, it was Moscow and St Petersburg in the 19-teens and New York in the 1920s, it was also New York in the 1940s and 1950s, San Francisco in the late Sixties, but in the early Sixties it was London that was THE Place. Later in the decade the US weeklies Time and Life began to recognise this and made the 'Swinging London' headline. The Art-Movement argument - that artists are the "cultural distant early-warning systems of society" (McLuhan), and that therefor, they set the style and the lifestyle of cultural change before anyone else (and are often called 'ahead of their time' by critics). This has a lot of merit, but perhaps it was all of these factors that helped kick-start this revolutionary decade?
And remember that artists do capture the essence of the decadal zeitgeist - just as Picasso and Braque responded to the fragmentary perspectives of Cinema in the 1910s. Raoul Hausmann captured the 'spirit of Industrialisation' in 1920, and the futurist John McHale in his 'Machine-Made America' captured the essence of the technological changes to come in the Sixties. Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York (1960) auto-destructive 'happening' at MOMA was another hint, as were Rauschenberg's large silk-screen paintings Paolozzi's montage silk-screens and Warhol Campbells Soup prints.

A simplified example: I imagine how three icons of creativity in the very early Sixties each perceived their own opportunity-space - I've ringed just two commonalities 'style' and 'dance' - (there are many more) this might be a way of pin-pointing the spirit of the age...

In terms of art-movements, and artist-clusters,we've already mentioned the central importance of Fluxus, and the creative techniques they developed - including event-scores (Brecht, Higgins, Ono etc), the role of Performance, the recognition and use of chance, the construction of installations, conceptual art, the role of print publications, artefact collections and 'boxes' and much more, absorbing the influences of Dada, Duchamp, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, radical innovation in music-scores, use of algorithms and event scores, Happenings (etc).

Other examples of art-clusters include the Arts Lab ideas of Jim Haynes (Drury Land Arts Lab (1967) and David Bowie's folk-club cum arts lab in Beckenham

Bowie performing at the The Three Tuns Beckenham (later re-christened as the Beckenham Folk Club and then the  Beckenham Arts Lab.

The  'Arts Lab' creative clusters idea evolved into a variety of 'studio'-type interdisciplinary clusters like Fluxus, Nicholas Negroponte's inspired Media Lab at MIT, the Apple Advanced  Technology Group, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre), the Viacom Media Kitchen, USCO, the Hornsey Light/Sound Workshop - and many others - all supporting the notion of bottom-up creativity and experimentation, interdisciplinary creative approaches, problem-based learning, industrial design, multimedia, software innovation, interactivity, multi-sensory immersion, network/systems-thinking etc - pursuing many of the 'themes' of modernist art movements from early in the 20th century...

For more on the Sixties, download my pdf:

Bob Cotton: The Sixties Art-Media Revolution 2020