Billy Name’s mentor Nick Cernovich worked at the time in a Zen bookstore, another big influence. Buddhism was all the rage among downtown artists such as Ray Johnson, and Warhol surely absorbed Zen’s penchant for repetition in his own silkscreen prints. “You can’t really understand Andy Warhol or any of these people—John Cage or any of them—without understanding Zen,” said Bibbe Hansen. “All these people who were interconnected were going to Zen classes, and even people who weren’t regularly practicing, like my dad, Al Hansen, would drop in once in a while.” Zen practices informed John Cage’s Untitled Event, a proto-Happening produced in the summer of 1952 at Black Mountain College. Standing on a stepladder and wearing a suit and tie, Cage read passages on “the relation of music to Zen Buddhism” as David Tudor played a “treated” piano and Merce Cunningham danced through the aisles. The space was also decorated with Robert Rauschenberg’s provocative White Paintings (in a Zen-like gesture, the canvases were completely painted white). “Rather than being predetermined,” art historian Judith F. Rodenbeck wrote, “the interactions of any given set of actions with any other was the result of aleatory juxtaposition of performances as perceived by an audience at a particular moment, creating a temporal collision. Thus anything that happened, according to Cage, ‘happened in the observer himself.’” By the late 1950s, Cage and his partner Cunningham would incorporate these strategies while working in their studio in the Living Theatre building.

From Chapter 3 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Al Hansen’s long, strange trip began when he served as a GI in post–World War II Germany, where he impulsively pushed a piano off the edge of a bombed-out building. He always considered that his first performance piece, and even reprised it as the Yoko Ono Piano Drop during his involvement in the Fluxus art movement, when he appeared at the Judson Gallery and many other downtown spaces. (Fluxus artists often named pieces after their friends, in a sort of intertextual social networking game.) “Al Hansen was one of these crazy figures that marries all of these scenes together,” said his daughter, Bibbe Hansen. “He’s the connect-the-dots guy between the post–World War II beatnik to neo-Dada to Pop Art and Fluxus and Happenings and performance art and Intermedia.” He was a roommate of Beat poet Gregory Corso, and when Bibbe was a young teen she lived in a Lower East Side apartment with Janet Kerouac, daughter of Jack Kerouac. Bibbe also tagged along with her father to see underground film screenings at Jonas Mekas’s loft that were attended by Andy Warhol, with whom she would later collaborate on a couple of films (she also appeared in some of Jonas Mekas’s films).

From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

In 1959, the Judson Gallery was founded in the church’s basement at 239 Thompson Street, which displayed work by Pop and conceptual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, and Red Grooms—and was home to several Happenings. Happenings were often unpredictable and provocative, like Carolee Schnee­mann’s 1964 performance piece Meat Joy, which featured nude performers who played with paint, sausage, and raw chickens, and was presented at Judson Gallery. The seeds of Happenings were planted in the early 1950s at Black Mountain College, when John Cage and his peers began developing mixed-media spectacles that emphasized live performance. Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, and Al Hansen were early Happenings innovators who attended Cage’s influential, consciousness-raising class at the New School for Social Research in 1958. Kaprow started out as a Jackson Pollock–inspired action painter, then began incorporating aluminum foil and other matter. Like many artists who became part of 1960s avant-garde art movements, he developed an expanded approach to painting, composition, poetry, and, eventually, performance. Kaprow’s classmate Al Hansen also performed Happenings at Judson Gallery—such as his 1964 piece, Oogadooga—and in 1965 was the first to publish a book about the subject, A Primer of Happenings and Time/Space Art. However, his idiosyncratic nature doomed any possibility of a “career” in art.

From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Like many who were part of the Factory scene, Bibbe Hansen had a chaotic childhood. Her mother was, at times, an amphetamine and heroin addict who had troubling alliances with men. By the time Hansen was fourteen, an escalating series of troubles landed her at the notorious Spofford Juvenile Detention Center in the South Bronx. After serving several months in 1965, she was released into her father’s custody on a Friday. The next day, Bibbe and Al Hansen resumed one of their weekend rituals: walking the uptown art gallery circuit that stretched from Fifty-Seventh Street to Seventy-Ninth Street. After their visit to Castelli Gallery, they wound up at a restaurant-bar called Stark’s, where her dad’s artist friends asked them to join their table. “Roy Lichtenstein offered to buy us burgers, and after a few months in the youth house, that was really a wonderful thing, let me tell you,” Bibbe said. “They’re all talking artist-guy stuff, which is pretty uninteresting to me, but I’m very happy with my burger. Suddenly, eyes are peering at me from across the table, and it’s Andy Warhol.” He was a familiar sight from Jonas Mekas’s underground screenings, which she attended with her dad and where she would sometimes nap on a pile of coats, and soon she would be spending many of her days at the Factory.

From Chapter 11 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

“And you,” Andy Warhol asked Bibbe Hansen when he first met her, “What do you do?” Before she could say a word, Al Hansen proudly blurted out, “I just sprung her from jail!” The curious artist asked, “Jail? Why? Please tell us all about that!” In her element, Bibbe jumped up and performed three or four of her best war stories from the big house. Clapping his hands in delight, Warhol said, “We have to make a movie out of that. Would you come to the Factory and make a movie with me about jail?” Bibbe of course said yes, and Warhol assistants Gerard Malanga and Chuck Wein made plans for her to come to the Factory at the start of the next workweek. “She can’t come Monday,” her dad countered. “She has to go to school! If she doesn’t go to school they’re gonna send her back to jail.” Everyone burst out laughing: “Oh, right, right, right. She has to go to school! Of course!” In a compromise, it was agreed that she could go to the Factory after school let out that Monday, and they eventually shot the feature-length Prison with Edie Sedgwick. The film consists of a static shot of Bibbe telling Sedgwick about her jail experiences as they sit on a box in a bare room; at one point, some female guards burst in and rob them of their possessions.

From Chapter 11 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore