A piece by Joey Mars featuring Harry Kemp
The Outsider Festival Kicks Off Inaugural Event
by Steve Desroches
Al Hansen would have been so proud. One of the founders of fluxus, an international community of artists who explored experimental performance, Hansen once tossed a piano off the roof of a four-story building in Frankfurt, Germany, during an Armed Forces show while he was serving in the 82nd Airborne Division in the late 1940s. It is often considered to be one of the first happenings, a live art performance that is often spontaneous. The piano drops became one of his most famous performance pieces, titled the Yoko Ono Piano Drop, so named for his good friend and fellow fluxus member. So, when Chuck White had an accidental piano drop outside The Commons while preparing for the first Outsider Festival in Provincetown, he took it as a good omen, even though it meant he’d have to repair the piano so that it could be destroyed later.
“I got impatient and thought I could get it off the truck myself,” says White. “As soon as it hit the ground I just laughed. Off course it broke. We started putting it back together just so we can take it apart. Then we made it to the Old Colony in time for last call.”
The Outsider Festival celebrates the art of Provincetown’s past, and present, that rattles the status quo. As its founder, White, whose mind is a veritable switchboard of art and outsider culture, says the whole concept of the festival is driven by that magical sense of synchronicity, serendipity, and community that is at Provincetown’s creative core. As vice president and chief archivist of the David Bieber Archives, a mammoth pop culture, art, and rock and roll collection in Norwood, Massachusetts, White is an indefatigable researcher whose work spills over into Provincetown, a place with which he has long and deep ties. In addition to the above-mentioned cosmic force, kismet came into play when White found an August 24, 1964 issue of Newsweek with an article about a tumultuous time in the art scene in Provincetown that mentions Hansen. That same week he was talking to his friend Adam Epstein, founder of Martha’s Vineyard’s Beach Road Weekend Music Festival, who was excited he landed rock star Beck as his headliner. Unbeknownst to White, Beck’s grandfather was Al Hansen. He took it as a sign and went back to the Newsweek article and read this passage, which planted the seed for the Outsider Festival:
“[Hans] Hoffman, a warm and judicious man, does not like to invoke controversy. But at the opening of the Golden Anniversary show, he said: “I wish the Art Association a long existence and from time to time some healthy troublemakers which hold the creative spirit alive…Representing the healthy troublemakers is Al Hansen, a young New York artist who directs he HCE (Here Comes Everybody) Gallery, Provincetown’s best, and shows his own elegant and witty collages at the more far-out East End Gallery. ‘The Art Association is a great case of arteriosclerosis,’ Hansen says.”
Neither the Vineyard concert nor the Outsider Festival happened when planned due to the pandemic, but Beck did play Vineyard Haven in 2022 and now the Outsider Festival launches, starting with HERESY: The Happening, where the piano will be dismantled and turned into an original work of art, as well as art exhibits, readings, music performances, parties, a fashion show, a special tour of Ronny Hazel’s iconic house, and the marquee event,
Billy Hough’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable at Provincetown Town Hall, an homage to Andy Warhol’s event of the same name, which was performed at the Chrysler Museum of Art (now the Provincetown Public Library) in 1966 and featured the Velvet Underground. It is also a celebration of Scream Along with Billy, the genre-breaking night of music Hough and Sue Goldberg have been presenting for 20 years and at which they will perform the music of the Velvet Underground.
“This festival would not be happening if it wasn’t for Provincetown and its people,” says White. “Provincetown people just make stuff happen. Ronny Hazel, Jay Critchley, Joey Mars, Karen Cappotto, Billy and Sue, Steve Azar. So many people. And the festival features 95 percent Provincetown people with the rest being people we want to introduce to the town.”
The names of people of Provincetown’s past that were important rabble-rousers who challenged the status quo and the establishment is lengthy and infuses the spirit of the festival. Folks like Hansen, Harry Kemp, Grace Gouveia, left-wing political activists and writers like John Reed and Louise Bryant who palled around with Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown Players, Jack Kerouac…the list goes on and on. And it also inspires the contemporary culture that encourages artists, writers, and other creative thinkers to challenge conventional thought to save Provincetown from becoming artistically stale, full of paintings of sand dunes and row boats or that just match the couch. The Outsider Festival’s energy is infectious and has a gravitational pull drawing those who want to keep Provincetown’s rebellious culture alive and well.
Poster images courtesy of Chuck White.
“Things just keep happening,” says White. “All the synchronicity just keeps happening.It’s beautiful.”
The Outsider Festival runs from Thursday, May 8 through Sunday, May 11. All festival passes ($99) and tickets to just Billy Hough’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable ($25) are available online at campprovincetown.com. For more information call 508.837.9607 or visit the festival headquarters at 229 Commercial St., Provincetown.
