Free The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit

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    Those smitten with the conventional notion of revolution had hung onto the notion of vanguards. They believed in the idea that the few would lead the many; thus a lot of college students without a clue of how to get along with the proletariat fantasized that they would bring it into armed revolt. The idea of vanguards—or avant-gardes—had been important in the art world too. A military term presuming linear narrative,the phrase suggests humanity as an army of sorts that someone was leading forward.
    If the 1970s accomplished anything, it was the realization that we actually wanted to go in a lot of different directions, not one. We never had been anything as neatly assembled and homogenized as an army, and we shouldn’t trust leaders. This meant, for art and for revolution, no more avant-gardes, though there might be prophetic and influential elements in both culture and politics. In 1977, the Stranglers released what might be the most anthemic of punk songs, “No More Heroes.” Heroes were leaders; leaders begot followers; following was demonstrated to be literally fatal and otherwise troublesome in that era in which so many followed their leaders down strange and malevolent paths.
    To go to or stay in California had always meant to choose to be outside the mainstream, the orthodoxy, to choose other influences and a less Eurocentric point of view. This could mean cults, but it more often meant a little useful distance, literally and otherwise, from the status quo at the center of cultural power. You were further from the culture police—that’s why a painter like David Park could drive all his abstract expressionist paintings to the dump in 1949 and begin to paint in the style that would be called Bay Area Figurative. Artists such as Bruce Conner and Jess made a conscious choice to stay outside the market and the mainstream by settling in California and abandoning the reigning aesthetics.
    In the 1970s, the art world would go “pluralist,” which means only that New York abandoned its dominant narrative of an avant-garde and admitted to the variety of artists and directions that had always been there. While race was talked about by the New York–based national media as though it were a black/white division well into the 1990s, Californians had, since the Gold Rush, inhabited a region where indigenous, Asian, and Latino presences mattered. To be in California was to braid together various possibilities and to unravel the main thread. Further away from Europe and the notion of an elite white lineage, those under the big black sun of the Golden State were closer to all sorts of fecund things—Asian, Latin, and indigenous traditions; esoteric subcultures and the burgeoning countercultures of Buddhists, bikers, communes, foodies, druggies, Diggers,and more—as well as to the vastness of deserts and mountains, the untamed landscape.
    More of what began as 1960s revolution became part of everyday life. Communes mostly failed, but organic farming, food co-ops, and attention to food as politics, health, and pleasure spread. Arenas like health care were democratized (a comment that only makes sense to those who know that before feminists took on the medical establishment in the 1970s, doctors were autocratic figures who made decisions for you, including whether you should know your diagnosis and prognosis). Queer people advanced astonishingly in both legal standing and cultural acceptance. The conservative movement has made its own inroads, particularly in the economic organization of the country, but the genies of reproductive rights, women’s rights, queer rights, and the rights of people of color are not going back into any bottle. The SLA’s food program failed; Milk was assassinated; many visible projects failed; many subterranean forces moved onward; everything changed. In the 1970s, many things blew up spectacularly (and sometimes literally), but a lot of seeds were quietly planted.
    “You can go your own