California Countercultures
Public Course Syllabus for L&S 25 — Arts and Design @ Berkeley University of California at Berkeley, Spring 2017
Professors:
Natasha Boas, Independent International Curator.
Michael Mark Cohen, Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies and African Studies.
Lectures:
Mondays, 12–2 in LeConte 3
Wednesdays, 12–2 in the BAM / PFA Theater (OPEN TO THE PUBLIC)
Course Description:
What is a counterculture? What kind of culture does a counterculture counter? Can culture be a space of political opposition? Can culture be revolutionary? Activists and artists have asked these questions for generations, seeking out new ideas and new art forms while struggling to create a new world within the shell of the old.
What is a counterculture? What kind of culture does a counterculture counter? Can culture be a space of political opposition? Can culture be revolutionary? Activists and artists have asked these questions for generations, seeking out new ideas and new art forms while struggling to create a new world within the shell of the old.
This class, BIG IDEAS L&S 25: California Countercultures, looks at the range of countercultural expressions in the Bay Area centering around the decade of the 1960s. Berkeley occupies a vital place in counterculture history and mythology, and throughout this class we will consider this confluence of art and politics, community and memory that make the East Bay such a unique place in American culture.
This class is designed to introduce students to the full range of art and design resources at UC Berkeley. Developed around the new exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum on “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia,” curated by UC Berkeley professor Greg Castillo, this class combines academic lectures and discussion sections with museum visits, performances at Zellerbach Hall, films at the Pacific Film Archive and an extraordinary speakers series of Bay Area countercultural figures curated by Natasha Boas. These lectures are held in the PFA auditorium and are open to the public.
Links to Related Exhibits and Events at UC Berkeley:
Berkeley Art Museum: Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia
Arts & Design @ Berkeley: California Countercultures Speakers Series
Pacific Film Archive: Cinema & Counterculture 1964–1974
Books to Buy:
1. Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle (Black and Red)
2. Rebecca Solnit, ed. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (UC Press)
3. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
4. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Harper Perennial)
5. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (Scribner)
6. Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (Scribner)
Schedule:
Part 1 — Introduction
Week 1: Arts and Design @ Berkeley
Wednesday, January 18th — BAM / PFA Theater
Part 2 — The Making of a Counterculture
Week 2: Aesthetic Activism & Modernist Methodologies
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, January 25th — BAM / PFA Theater
Natasha Boas, “Beat Notes: From the Rat Bastards to the Mission School”
Performance: Sunday January 29th — Cal Performances Presents Steve Reich at Hertz Hall.
Reading: Dada and Surrealism: Texts and Extracts (1920s)
Guy DeBord, Society of the Spectacle [1967] (Black & Red, 1983)
Raymond Williams, “Base & Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”
Week 3: Golden State Radicalism
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, February 1st — BAM / PFA Theater
Iain Boal, “On the Left Edge: California’s Renegade Tradition”
Reading: Jack London, “South of the Slot” (1909)
Rebecca Solnit: Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (pages 1–84)
Part 3 — The Long Sixties in the Bay Area
Week 4: The Beats
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, February 8th — BAM / PFA Theater
Jack Hirshman, “The North Beach Beat Generation”
Gallery Talk: Wed, February 8, 1:30 pm with Curator Greg Castillo
Reading: Allen Ginsburg, Howl and other Poems (City Lights, 1956)
Selected Poetry and Prose by Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima
Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters 1968–1971
Week 5: Civil Rights & the New Left
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, February 15th — BAM / PFA Theater
Speaker: Leigh Raiford, “Civil Rights Movement Photography & Its Legacies”
Museum Visit: Black Panthers at 50 @ the Oakland Museum of California, exhibit closes Feb 26th
Reading: Early Student Movement Documents (1959–1962)
Students for a Democratic Society, “The Port Huron Statement” (1962)
Herbert Marcuse, The One Dimensional Man (1964)
Mario Savio, Berkeley Fall (1965)
Ronald Reagan, “The Morality Gap at Berkeley” Video of Speech (1966)
Jerry Rubin, Do It! (1970)
Week 6: Hippie Modernism
Guest Speaker: Greg Castillo, “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia”
Museum Visit: “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia” at BAM
Reading: Time, “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture” (July 7, 1967)
Greg Castillo, “How Bay Area Design Radicals Tried to Save the Planet.”
Week 7: Paranoid California Literature
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, March 1st — BAM / PFA Theater
Michael Mark Cohen, “Pynchon’s Paranoid California”
Reading: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Radical Student Union, The Uses of UC Berkeley: Research (1969)
Week 8: Disobedient Objects & Alternative Spaces
Guest Lecture: Monday, March 6th
Protest Posters at CAL School of Design with Waverly Lowell, Curator Environmental Design Archives College of Environmental Design, UCB.
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, March 8th — BAM / PFA Theater
Speaker: Dena Beard, Director and Chief Curator The Lab, “Experimental Art and Subjectile Space.”
Featuring a performance by Brontez Purnell: Emotional/Content.
Reading: Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City (85 — end)
Newsweek, “California: University on Trial” (November 23, 1970)
Tom Wilson, “Paper Walls: Political Posters in an Age of Mass Media”
Scott Montgomery, “Signifying the Ineffable: Rock Poster Art & Psychedelic Counterculture in SF”
Deanne Pytlinski, “San Francisco Video Collectives and the Counterculture”
San Francisco, CA 94103
Week 9: Black Power & Black Arts
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, March 15th — BAM / PFA Theater
Ishmael Reed, “Poetry and Protest”
Performance: Tuesday, March 14th — Cal Performances Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Reading: Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (1972)
Colette Gaiter, “Black Panther Artist Emory Douglass”
Angela Davis, et. al. If They Come in the Morning (1971)
Black Panther Party, Guest Editor, CoEvolution Quarterly (Fall 1974)
Week 10: Feminism & Public Practice
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, March 22nd — BAM / PFA Theater
Laura Pérez, “Ana Mendieta: Decolonialized Feminist and Artist”
Reading: Suzanne Lacy, “The Name of the Game” (1996)
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971)
Week 11: Spring Break
Week 12: Psychedelics and Consumer Culture
Guest Lecture: Monday April 9
“Drugs and Cults in the Age of the Holy Biosphere” with Dr. Jelena Martinovich, Harvard University
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, April 5th — BAM / PFA Theater
Stephanie Syjuco, “Art/Politics/Aesthetics (notes from the field)”
Reading: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Catalog (№1, Fall 1968)
Mark Harris, “Countercultural Intoxication: An Aesthetics of Transformation”
Part 4 — Contemporary Countercultures from Punk to Occupy
Week 13: The Struggle for Utopia
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, April 12 — BAM / PFA Theater
Peter Coyote, “Diggers, Communes & Counterculture & the Death of Hope”
Reading: Ursula Le Guin,The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
Peter Coyote, “Carla’s Story” (1992)
Week 14: DIY: Bricolage & Punk
Artist Speaker: Kal Spelletich “San Francisco Machine Art” Monday, April 17
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, April 19 — BAM / PFA Theater
V.Vale, RE/Search publications, “San Francisco Punk,” with film screenings by Marian Wallace.
Reading: Excerpts from Search & Destroy 1–11 (1977–79)
RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook (1983)
Week 15: Countercultures: Co-Opted and Enduring
Guest Speaker: Wed, April 26 — BAM / PFA Theater
Mark Pauline & Amy Critchett, Survival Research Labs and Bay Lights,
“Go Big or Go Home: when too much is never enough”
“Go Big or Go Home: when too much is never enough,” April 26, 2017.
Reading: Strike Debt, The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual (2014)
Thomas Frank, Why Johnny Can’t Dissent, The Baffler (1995)
Sunaura Taylor & Rebecca Solnit, “Scenes from Occupied Oakland” (2011)
Elizabeth Jochum & Ken Goldberg, “Cultivating the Uncanny: The Telegarden & Other Oddities”
