More than 60 years removed from that observation, an intrepid group of locals has convened to stage the town’s inaugural Outsiders Festival, from May 8-11. This carnival honoring Provincetown’s history as a magnet for artists features a packed calendar of events, including a performance of an Andy Warhol-related play, a recreation of the Velvet Underground’s 1966 Provincetown residency, and a tribute to a once-nationally famous local known as the “Hobo Poet.”
“It’s a town of voyeurs,” one unnamed artist told the magazine. “It’s impossible to do anything without half a dozen people watching.”
When the Provincetown Art Association turned 50 in 1964, Newsweek covered the town’s changing art world. They dubbed it “tradition vs. ignition.”
It was Harry Kemp, the “hobo poet,” who coined the phrase “the Art of Spectacularism,” which the organizers have taken as their mantra, says the festival’s primary instigator, Chuck White. He is the chief archivist at the David Bieber Archives in Norwood and a former talent booker at several Boston rock clubs.
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“The whole thing is a big improv stunt on one level,” explains White, who began working in a Provincetown T-shirt shop as a teenager from Quincy.
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The makers and doers behind the Outsiders Festival are carrying on a long tradition of willful eccentricity in the town, White says.
“We’re a collective of misfits, even in a misfit town.”
Kemp, who died in Provincetown at age 76 in 1960, was a notorious scalawag. He hung out with the Lost Generation in Paris, ran off with Upton Sinclair’s wife, and wrote the memoir “Tramping on Life” (1922).
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Kemp is one of several largely forgotten Provincetown characters whose lives and work will be celebrated at the festival. Another, the late Al Hansen, ran local art galleries for several years in the early 1960s. An early member of the experimental art collective known as Fluxus, he once pushed a piano off a building in Germany while serving in the US military during World War II. That stunt inspired Yoko Ono, John Cage, and possibly the annual “piano drop” tradition at MIT.
Hansen — the grandfather of the musician Beck — lived by an “anything goes” ethos that inspired the planning for the Outsiders Festival’s opening night. On the Provincetown Commons, several dozen artists will be creating live work as part of a spectacle called HERESY: The Happening. In the centerpiece, participants will dismantle an old upright piano, creating new art and sound sculptures in the process.
An intrepid group of locals has convened to stage the town’s inaugural Outsiders Festival, from May 8-11, to honor Provincetown’s history as a magnet for artists. Courtesy photos
Works representing the “modern Provincetown Collagist movement” will be on display through May 12 in the community room at the Commons. That show is also called “Heresy,” a variation on Hansen’s own series of collages made from Hershey’s chocolate wrappers.
Karen Cappotto, who first met White decades ago at the Rat, is a Provincetown-based visual artist who has been curating an annual show of locally produced collage art for years.
“For some of the artists, it’s their first time doing collage,” she says. “I kind of tease it out of them.”
Recent generations of Provincetown artists have embraced the medium because it’s a more modern form of art than, say, plein-air painting, she believes: “Collage wasn’t, like, [painting] sailboats.”
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The Outsiders Festival honors Provincetown’s history as a magnet for artists. Courtesy photos
On Friday, a Provincetown cast will stage a reading of “Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned” (1971), an outrageous off-off-Broadway musical written by the late Warhol “superstar” Jackie Curtis. The cast has been coached by Lary Chaplan, the show’s original composer, who lives on Cape Cod.
At Provincetown Town Hall on Saturday, the town’s favorite literary punk rocker, Billy Hough, will lead a tribute to the Velvet Underground’s five-night run of their Exploding Plastic Inevitable show in 1966, in what was then the Chrysler Art Museum (now the Provincetown Public Library). Sunday’s wrap-up includes a drag queen brunch and an auction hosted by the artist Joey Mars.
In that old edition of Newsweek, Hansen is critical of the Art Association, calling their advocacy work “a great case of arteriosclerosis.” Once White stumbled on that article, he went down a rabbit hole on Hansen’s life, he says.
A decade after Hansen’s time in Provincetown, he cofounded the Los Angeles nightclub the Masque and managed some of the city’s earliest punk bands.
“He started the punk movement in LA,” White says. “It’s the best story, but it’s untold.”
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.
