Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s

Laurel Jean Fredrickson's biographical narrative and analysis of artist/writer/provocateur Jean-Jacques Lebel leaves few stones unturned in an account of the surprisingly underrecognized, yet pivotal, French artist from the 1960s. * Bad at Sport * An important contribution to discourses on radical art, culture critique and political strategies in France during the 1960s. Lebel's practice is examined as a creative rhizome of dissent , as a problematic process of liberation located in contradictions within counterculture and the moment of 1968 . * Francis Frascina, John Raven Professor of Visual Arts (Emeritus), Keele University, UK * Fredrickson re-invests the 1960s Happening with revolutionary ideology in her fascinating examination of Jean-Jacques Lebel's radical art. She reveals a committed coordinator of deliberately disconcerting challenges to orthodox thinking, as she adroitly negotiates some of the social dilemmas raised by his political poetry-in-action. * Simon Anderson, Associate Professor of Art History, Theory & Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA * Fredrickson's book is a brilliant, even thrilling, study of one of the most astonishingly polymorphous and rhizomatic artists to have emerged from the surrealist cauldron. Attending to Lebel's fusion of anarchist politics, surrealist eroticism, fluxus-informed experimentation, and Beat generation poetics, Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s tells the story of a vibrant and radical creolite. At the same time, Fredrickson makes a compelling case for an expanded conception of Dick Higgins' notion of the intermedial wherein aesthetics and politics become impossible to disentangle. As the first full-length study of one of the most iconoclastic and uncategorizable figures of the European avant-garde, this book will reshape the way we think about performance art in the post-war period. * Roger Rothman, Professor of Art History, Bucknell University, USA * As a framework to study Lebel and happenings of the 1960s, [the book] is an important one, indicating the multi-generational, cross-disciplinary networks he and others moved within counterculture and the moment of May 1968. * Art History *