The Phenomenology of Everyday Life, the unbranded brand of impromptu activity, proto-YouTube, beginning around 1960, of documenting anything and everything, the less obviously consequential the better, extended from a disposition toward collecting oddments (from baseball cards to bottle caps) gathered before, in the 50s, and likewise had a lot to do with recording devices. Somehow the record keepers have never gathered the strands––and no one yet knows the full import––of the sundry manifestations, in visual art, writing and general culture, of this passion to look, listen and record.
Doubtless, drug culture played a part, the attention seduced by some active ingredient to rivet on any cosmic morsel happening to waft by. (A paradigm was William Burroughs’s account of sitting in a room in Tangiers for weeks on end, “staring at my big toe.”) Be that as it may, the baseline technology developed by the mid-60s consisted of newly available hardware: the portable cassette recorder and the Sony Portapak joined the Gestetner mimeograph printer, Thermofax and Xerox photocopiers, the Super-8 movie camera, the (also by Kodak) Instamatic and advanced versions of the Polaroid Land Camera.
Beginning around 1965, prosody often took on the look and sound of inventory; poems were lists. Lecterns at poetry readings were jammed with differently shaped plastic microphones; chitchat at the after-parties got summarily tape recorded, an open-mike ethic closely parallel to the one that resulted in Andy Warhol’s A. Brigid Polk made innumerable transfer rubbings à la Rauschenberg and lined the walls of her tiny room at the Hotel Thomas Jefferson floor-to-ceiling with cassette tapes of her life with others on the telephone. At the same time, Brigid was compiling theme books using ink pads to print from people’s bodies, one of penises, another of scars, mine from scratching a chicken-pox sore included. One-of-a-kind or anyway limited-edition books using Xeroxed found images abounded, as did deadpan photographs of anything that looked photographable. Ed Ruscha’s series of books of obvious imagery was the prototype. (As Ed must have intuited, with the photograph the world in all its visual states became photogenic.) Bernadette Mayer’s Memory was 1200 color snapshots and seven hours of taped narration, recording the incidentals of every day in the month of July 1971. All this ran parallel, and to some extent still does, to reality television (the Louds in An American Family, filmed in 1971), cinema verité, and the official streams of video, performance and conceptual art, but closer to the bone, more literally psychedelic, in the sense of increased alertness to average particulars.