| ART HIS 140B | CNTMP ART & CNTRCLT | HUBER, J. | Contemporary Art and Countercultures Beatniks, Black Power, Barrios and brutality: contrary to the mythos of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, the postwar period brought anything but peace and quiet on the homefront for most Americans. Instead, it planted the dormant seeds for an era of unmatched public political resistance and the birth of the contemporary concept of the counterculture. Aesthetics often served as a cultural weapon in the hands of radical subcultures, and art was indeed used as an effective means of propaganda to combat the forces of complaisance and willful ignorance, foreign wars and drafts, segregation and discrimination, patriarchy and homophobia. The legacy of this resistance and the aesthetic forces it mobilized has lasted to the present day; to trace its path is to read against history’s grain and between its lines, yielding potent historical insight. Beginning with the immediate postwar period and its propagation of suburban patriarchal ideology, this course will both rigorously explore the history of American countercultural movements and examine their subcultural ideology and cohesion through art and aesthetics. Countercultures to be examined span from the 1950s to the present day and include the Beatniks, El Movimiento Chicano, Black Power, Civil Rights, Second-Wave Feminism, the antiwar movement, LGBT responses to the AIDS crisis and the Culture Wars, and the Black Metal music counterculture. Students will take away from this course: an in-depth historical understanding of post-1945 American politics and resistance; a conceptual framework for the study of subcultures and the politics of taste; familiarity with feminist, race-critical, Marxist, and queer theoretical methodologies; and an alternative history of postwar American art. |