• Please submit a course evaluation!

• Socratic Circle Final Exam on
  Thursday, December 13
  8 to 10:30 AM

• Photo 321 Special Topics
  TTh 7 to 10 PM
  with Alejandro Sanchez!

*Cut Piece

First version for single performer:

Performer sits on stage with a pair of scissors in front of him. It is announced that members of the audience may come on stage one at a time to cut a small piece of the performer's clothing to take with them.

Performer remains motionless throughout the piece. Piece ends at the performer's option.

Second version for audience: It is announced that members of the audience may cut each others clothing.

* The audience may cut as long as they wish

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Performed on September 15, 2003 at Theatre Le Ranelagh, Paris, France.

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."

- Guy Debord

The Venetian in Las Vegas

The Situationists International

Founded in 1957, the Situationists International was an avant-garde activist group that attacked capitalism in Western society for transforming citizens into passive consumers of depoliticized media spectacle. They asserted that the spectacle replaced active participation in public life.

Asger Jorn, The Worrying Duck, 1959.

The highly influential Situationist book The Society of the Spectacle argued that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. To overthrow such a system, the group supported the May 1968 revolts in Paris, and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to run them with direct democracy, through workers' councils composed by instantly revocable delegates.

"Humanity won't be happy until the day the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist."

Vandalism inside the Sobornne University, 1968

The “Situationist International” were heavily involved in the student/worker demonstrations and protests of 1968. The group rejected all art that separated itself from politics, and believed that the notion of artistic expression being separated from politics and current events “renders artwork that expresses comprehensive critiques of society impotent.” - Art Daily October 11, 2012

University of Lyon, 1968

• We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.

• Expect anything. Fear nothing.

• Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!

• Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.

• Boredom is a pattern, not reality.

• We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.

• In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.

• Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives.”

• Stalinists, your children are with us!

• A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.

• Under the paving stones, the beach.

• Live without dead time.

• Be realistic, demand the impossible.

• If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.

• Fall in love, not in line!

Situationist Graffitti in Paris, May 1968.

Lunch counter sit-in, 1961

I Am A Man March, 1965.

"Long Hot Summer of 1967" 159 events of civil unrest across the United States

Civil unrest in Watts, August, 1965.

Newark Rebellion, 1967.

Six days of unrest, 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, 3,438 arrests, and over $40 million in property damage

In Detroit, five days of unrest, 43 dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed

Duane Hanson, Race Riot, 1968.

Duane Hanson, Tourists II, 1988. Polyester resin, fiberglass and human paraphernalia.

• Star Trek airs first interracial kiss on U.S. television

• Night of the Living Dead

• First manned spacecraft orbits the moon. Apollo 11 will land on the moon the following year.

• Worst oil spill yet off the coast of Santa Barbara leads to the establishment of the EPA and largest oil reserve in North America discovered in Alaska

Tommie Smith (gold medal) and John Carlos (bronze medal) protest at 1968 Olympics in Mexico City

Guy Debord's aim and proposal, was "to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images," "through radical action in the form of the construction of situations," "situations that bring a revolutionary reordering of life, politics, and art." In the Situationist view, situations are actively created moments characterized by "a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience."

Christo, Wrapped sculpture in the garden of the Villa Borghese, Rome

Barry Le Va, On Edge, Shatter, Scatter, 1968.

Eva Hesse, Ringaround ARosie, 1965.

Eva Hesse, Repetition Nineteen III, 1968.

Draft card burning, 1969

Malcolm Browne, Thích Quiang Duc's self-immolation, 1963

Post-Structuralism = philosophical approach based on the idea that words and photographs are unstable and cannot be trusted, and that everything is a momentary construction with no ultimate meaning or truth.

East L.A. Brownout, 1968

1968 Earthwork movement launched by
group exhibition "Earthworks" at the Dwan Gallery

Entropy = 1) a measure of the amount of energy in a physical system that cannot be used to do work; a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system. 2) lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.

a classic example of entropy described in 1862 by Rudolf Clausius as an increase in the disgregation of the molecules of the body of ice.

Center for Land Use Interpretation, Michael Heizer, Double Negative present day

Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970 to present day.

in progress

January 1970

current state

John Paul Filo, 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, who was shot by the Ohio National Guard during the Kent State shootings, 1970.

Hal Foster proposes "critical theory has served as a secret continuation of the avant-garde by other means. After the climax of the 1968 revolts, it also occupied the position of cultural politics, at least to the extent that radical rhetoric compensated a little for lost activism." Indeed, it is a popularly held view within cultural studies that the ’68 uprisings were the last genuine flowering of a politically emulsified avant-garde, the last moment – in the West at least – that art and politics met and worked towards a common aim before radical politics and contemporary art skulked off to their respective departments within the academy or under the bright lights of what Foster calls the ‘false pluralism of the posthistorical museum market where anything goes (as long as accepted forms predominate).’ - John Douglas Millar

Sigmar Polke, Dublin, 1968.

Robert Morris, Plywood Show, 1964.

Felix Gonzalez torres, Untitled (Corner of Baci), 1990.

• Postmodernists believe that no single truth exists

• Everything that can be done, has been done

• Sense that the avant-garde has broken down -
  there is no longer a shared message or purpose

• Embrace diversity

• Encourage parody, irony and playfulness

Sigmar Polke, Bunnies, 1966.
Acrylic on canvas, 59 x 39-½ in.

the painting is a copy of a photograph

the photograph is a copy of the "original"

the "original" may have been set up to remind the viewer of something prior

"This image does not represent reality, it represents paint." - David Hopkins

Gerhard Richter, Helen, 1964.

Gerhard Richter, Woman Descending Staircase, 1965.