Curated by Jean-Jacques Lebel, Philippe-Alain Michaud, and Rani Singh

Focusing on Paris as a port of call for members of the essentially nomadic Beat movement, curators Michaud, Singh, and Fluxus artist Lebel will map the productions of the dispersed pantheon of doomed drifters across the French capital, New York, San Francisco, Mexico, and Tangier, Morocco. Set to offer a balanced view of a milieu that was chauvinistic even by the standards of midcentury bohemianism, the show will notably include a host of Beat women, including Joanne Kyger and Diane di Prima, along with the alpha males. “Beat Generation” will not entirely depart from our posthumanist zeitgeist. The show will take a media-archaeological approach, arguing—via some four hundred rare books, manuscripts, photographs, paintings, films, and audio recordings by about fifty artists and writers—that Beat artistic production involved systematic use of such analog technologies as tape recorders, records, radio, and the telephone as a historical first. Truman Capote already noted this inclination toward new media in 1959 when he condemned Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as mere “typing.”

— Lars Bang Larsen