Graduate Seminar (425-0-1)
Topic
Why Don't We Do It In The Road?
Instructors
Michael J Rakowitz
Meeting Info
Crowe Hall 1-140 Art T&P Room: Mon 1:00PM - 3:50PM
Overview of class
On November 22, 1968, five years to the day after the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, The Beatles released their self-titled double album, commonly referred to as The White Album. The recording sessions began on May 30, 1968, twenty-eight days after a student strike in France led to sweeping general strikes across the country that now stand as an emblem for a global moment during which left-wing factions prominently espoused their ideals and dissatisfaction with the administrators of power through creative physical and intellectual protest.
While the song Why Don't We Do It In The Road represents a flippant contribution to The White Album we will consider the title as having special meaning in examining what was a new sensibility through which, in the case of Paris 1968, the spaces of the city, the roads, and all else public was appropriated, transformed and utilized in proposing new gestures through which popular participation could yield radical social change.
The charged era of the 1960s begat the interventionist tendencies of many cultural producers in the 1970s and beyond. In this studio and discussion-based class, we will consider the way in which agitation—central to the production of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia before and after October 1917—is recouped as a strategy in public art and affiliated political movements.
Class Materials (Required)
No course costs.
Class Attributes
Graduate Students Only
Restricted to Students in Program Only