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Enraged and confused : art after student revolt, circa 1970

University of British Columbia

This dissertation takes the university classroom as a point of contact and departure to analyze the counterrevolutionary reach of the post-1968 moment and its impact on changing definitions of agency, collectivity, and political commitment within new models of artistic production. As the New Right gained power and public support, and as calls for law and order overcame the waning promises of collective refusal in the United States and abroad by the end of the 1960s, I contend the manifest closing of revolutionary endeavours compelled the conditions for new ways of thinking about collective engagement and personal empowerment, and radically altered the parameters of political action and its relationship to artistic praxis. One place where this can be seen is at the intersection of art and critical pedagogy in the context of higher education. From Lygia Clark’s courses on gestural communication at L’Université Paris-Sorbonne (1972-1976), the Feminist Art Program’s embrace of consciousness raising at CalArts (1970-1976), to the instalment of a new Intermedia program at the University of Iowa in 1969, I attend to the diverse ways that artists in this period attempted to forge open new spaces for discourse and catharsis, even survival. When brought to bear on the global pressures of the period and the concomitant emergence of critical pedagogy, through a close social analysis I maintain these and other examples sit uncomfortably within established histories of art education. Instead I argue their different investments in lived experience, participation, and the body open onto a much wider art historical horizon apropos the shared terms of art and education circa 1970, while also exposing a slice of history that fundamentally altered what was both possible and meaningful for so many artists at the time. As the dust of revolt was still settling and as questions regarding the viability and relationship between art and politics were thrust into tension, this study shows that what mattered most for so many artists, students, and others on the political left was finding ways to engage and exist with renewed critical force. The university classroom, I argue, was one place where this was still possible.

Text

2023-04-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/69781

Art History

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/