Re: <nettime> "Critical strategies in art and media" gets it wrong

[martha rosler <navva@earthlink.net>]

wrong? well, it depends on what you are referring to.
I begin in sympathy & agreement with what you are writing for the most  
part.
  The civil rights movement began in the 50s and was quite powerful in  
our minds, and then the other events you mention followed along.
Yet I would quibble a bit. Folk music was quite central to the  
counterculture/antiwar movement, but rock n roll was important too.
Bonnie and Clyde was an important generational marker (67), perhaps  
more so than Dr Strangelove.  The Graduate was also important,  
representing revolt of the 'personal".
Did you consciously leave out feminism, and emerging soon after, the  
gay & lesbian movement?

> But most of the relevant factors had more to do with the confluence  
> of demographics, new technologies, the lessons of recent history,  
> the examples of other and on-going social movements, etc., and  
> frankly political statements and actions.1968 was to some degree a  
> high tide but also a turning point in all these political movements,  
> in some ways leading directly to a conservative backlash, though  
> also helping  to institutionalize certain gains and demands.

sure, but for many in New York and certainly elsewhere, art was indeed  
a powerful part of the movement, including poetry, visual arts-of  
course including including posters—artists' protests though festivals  
like Angry Arts (65) and the Peace Tower, theater (Brecht, Living  
Theater-Marat/Sade) and, of course foreign movies from Godard to  
Antonioni to the 'early' Russians were important in establishing the  
importance of dissent and difference. People even read books; you  
know, Goodman, Marcuse, Debord, Norman O Brown, Morgan, the young  
Marx, Firestone, Bateson, Mead,  van Bertalanffy et al (though some of  
these were available just a bit later), not to mention a flood of  
underground newspapers & political pamphlets?
Oh, and did I forget sex and drugs? And Captain Beefheart Lord  
Buckley, the rediscovery of black blues, acoustic and electriified,  
the Velvet Underground, the Doors, Jimi and Janis, Cream,etc etc....  
Lenny Bruce, Jean Shepherd, Mort Sahl...
Video (post 68, it's true) was immediately used to record &  
disseminate antiwar protests & black rallies.
Sorry I don't have the time to do a proper job, but I would say that  
your negative reaction to what you consider to be people tooting the  
horns of their own disciplines seems to have led to an overly  
reductive response on your part.

  martha rosler

On May 14, 2010, at 4:50 AM, Michael H. Goldhaber wrote:

>
> In the newly published, brief conference book or booklet , “Critical  
> strategies in art and media:Perspectives on New Cultural Practices”  
> at one point Ted Byfield (on the panel)  asks the sensible question:  
> “I’d like to ask a question to some of my elders here.We’ve heard  
> various references to 1968 here, but what did all those ‘68ers have  
> in 1967?”
>
> The transcript continues, “Audience: Drugs!”
>
> Byfield then asks ”Any other suggestions about what they had before  
> the efflorescence that apparently surprised even them?”
>
> “Jim Fleming [one of the two convenors and moderators]: Sex, drugs  
> and rock’n’roll.” Fleming then added something about the relative  
> affluence (of students?) in the ’60’s, -- itself a highly debatable  
> assertion.
>
> Fleming’s  answer is glaringly incomplete, at best. The fact that  
> the participants and the audience accepted it indicates why the  
> whole enterprise of the conference was virtually meaningless, I  
> submit.
>
> I was finishing up my Ph.D. In ’68, therefore older than many if not  
> most of the participants in the events, in which I also had a minor  
> role. Let me try therefore to list in no definite order some of what  
> we had in ’67  or earlier in the ‘60‘s that helped lead to ’68:
> The feelings against racism  and for justice and equality that  
> emerged from reaction to the Nazis after WWII, from the civil rights  
> movement and the anti-colonial movement, all of which were well in  
> evidence before ’68;
> Un-precedented numbers of young people in the universities and  
> colleges, as the baby-boom generation had begun to reach early  
> adulthood;
> Television news showing the civil-rights and anti-colonial movements  
> in action along with other demonstrations, offering easy-to- 
> understand and compelling role models of resistance;
> John F. Kennedy’s inaugural and anti-individualist line “Ask not  
> what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your  
> country”, along with the founding of the Peace Corps;
> The continued opposition to the activities of groups such as the  
> House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and, related to that,  
> the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in ’64;
> The Port Huron Statement of ’62 that founded SDS, and called for a  
> variety of democratic socialism; the founding (’66) of the Black  
> Panther Party
> The ’62 publication of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” and  
> of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”; the ’63 translation of Fanon’s  
> (’61) “Wretched of the Earth;” Malcolm X’s ‘ 65 “Autobiography.”
> In the US, at least , the draft, which put all young men in jeopardy  
> of having to go and fight the Vietnam war, which, as it dragged on,  
> along with its repercussions (such as the self-immolation of  
> Buddhist monks) was also seen on TV;
> New and relatively cheap jet travel, which enabled many semi- 
> affluent young people to mix with their cohort in other countries,  
> thus adding a sense of a single wide youth movement;
> The relatively recent Cuban Revolution and its aftermath, such as  
> the hunting down of Che, (and the influential pamphlet by Regis  
> Debray “Revolution in the Revolution”) and Mao’s Cultural  
> Revolution, which was understood idealistically as democratizing  
> decision making and opposing the stultifying power of bureaucrats  
> and experts.
> Even LBJ’s ‘ 64 promise of the “Great Society.”
>
> Note that neither anything which would have gone under the rubric of  
> art nor the sort of people’s media discussed in the conference  
> played a very strong role, although certainly sermons in the  
> southern black churches or Mario Savio’s impromptu speech from on  
> top of a captured police car in Berkeley in ’64 did do so. The most  
> prominent artform in moving people to take political stances was  
> probably not rock, but rather folk and folk-like music, Pete Seeger,  
> Joan Baez, early Dylan, etc. (In derision, Tom Lehrer wrote [in  
> about ’65] : “We are the Folk Song Army, Everyone of us cares. We  
> all hate poverty war and injustice, Unlike the rest of you squares.”  
> But that just proves that those who listened to folk songs in  
> concert or recordings or more informally heard a distinct and  
> intended political message.) Also movies, such as “Dr. Strangelove”  
> and If  helped increase opposition to established authority, and  
> probably novels such as “Catch 22’ (’61) and even “Lord of the Rings.”
> But most of the relevant factors had more to do with the confluence  
> of demographics, new technologies, the lessons of recent history,  
> the examples of other and on-going social movements, etc., and  
> frankly political statements and actions.1968 was to some degree a  
> high tide but also a turning point in all these political movements,  
> in some ways leading directly to a conservative backlash, though  
> also helping  to institutionalize certain gains and demands.
>
> “Critical strategies” fails to take into account  comparatively wide  
> picture of the current situation, instead focusing on “art” as a  
> source of political inspiration and action all by itself. This is of  
> course a narrow and very peculiar branch of art itself, with some of  
> the main examples, being more like, e.g.,  a kind of people’s  
> science that simply chooses to call itself art for funding purposes.  
> (Incidentally I was one of the founders of “Science for the People”  
> in ’68, and there are more efforts for people’s science  of various  
> kinds that don’t label themselves as art still today. ) There  
> appears to be no effort in the book to consider or be informed by,  
> much less co-ordinate with wider  present-day political or social  
> movements — or even current social theory, except in a very narrow  
> sense.
> To put it cynically,  the book can be described as follows: A group  
> of self-styled, semi-academic, self-appointed, basically uninformed  
> artistic leaders of a very ill-defined  movement with very unclear  
> aims, but its heart possibly in the right place,  solipsistically  
> examines itself for strategic ideas. It does not come up with much.
>
> I had hoped for something better.
 <...>


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org