But social movements and socially engaged artists, haven't only used that type of method. So, for example, refusal and boycotting. >> Sure. >> Have been essential, right? >> Exactly, I mean, not only is it, and, in fact, it's a kind of historic, kind of shift of whether or not one wants to produce their own world or completely defy the existing world. So protest or classic American civil disobedience and civil disobedience in general. Certainly what comes to mind is the civil rights era movement of the Montgomery bus boycott where Rosa Parks, African-Americans were not allowed to sit in the front of the bus. Rosa Parks, in a planned, coordinated action did so, and kind of stirred up a kind of movement. And it was a plan. It was a targeted movement. This wasn't just a lady who decided to go sit in the front of the bus. This was a social justice decision to produce civil disobedience, to spark and galvanize a movement. >> And other important examples are, not just from the 60s in terms of avoiding the draft, but the draft exists in many countries around the world, so it's very different whether we talk about Vietnam and the US or the refuseniks in Israel, right? >> Yeah. >> People who have been drafted and are asked to serve the country by fighting a war, there's a long history of people refusing to do that, right? Boycotting, refusing, not doing something is part of this type of cultural production, a really important one. It even comes to the workplace. You know, in a bit, in the style of a Bartleby, a contemporary Bartleby, Melville wrote this story in the 1800s about this scrivener who is sitting in a Wall Street office. >> What is a scrivener? >> A scrivener is, I guess he was the contemporary version of a law clerk. >> Okay. >> But he just keeps being asked to do stuff and all he says is, I prefer not to. >> Yeah. >> And people just tolerate him but they kind of think he's a weird type, they don't know what to do. And so it's a fantastic, really early is a story of refusing to work in the labor place and what that does to the entire social structure. So different artists have played with this format. But this artist in Helsinki, Takala, she basically did a whole project actually in collaboration with a museum, where she got herself a job as a trainee in this marketing department, and she started acting stranger and stranger. There are moments of the documentation of this work where you see her standing for an entire day in an elevator. >> Do we have a clip of that? >> Yeah. >> Let's watch it. [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN] [CROSSTALK] >> [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN] [LAUGH] [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN] >> So you can imagine, you're at your office or wherever you work, the entire day. This woman is standing there and she's getting paid. Some people get upset, other simply think she's strange, others think she's hilarious, but she's an artist. Basically, doing this not just as a provocation, but as a meditation on what it means to disobey by not working, or at least not doing it in a conventional way, right. >> Sure, I mean in some ways too, you could say an overarching thematic event is often the non-utility of art, is in fact a form of resistance, to the logic of making sense. >> Yeah. >> And some people when they don't understand something, and I think this has happened to all of us. Artists love to surprise people. And when social movements do radical stuff, they also surprise. People did not realize that something was an option, right? It's new to them. And some people respond to that with anger. But another way to respond to it is actually laughter. So some people, I'm sure, encountered this artist in the elevator and didn't even know she was an artist and thought, that's hilarious. They were laughing. So artists have used, and social movements, especially in the last few decades, who wanted to stay away from a self-righteous tone or a certain kind of moralistic position taking. They wanted to include other people and humor they have found is an incredible tool for that, right? So for example, in our guest presenters in this module, we have many artists who play with humor. But we have all kinds of forms of humor in social movements. We have parody, we have satire, right? >> Yeah. >> But we also have simply nervous laughter sometimes and so some of the- >> Although I gotta say, it's hard to get funny, right. You go on Netflix and you look at the comedy thing, one star, one star, two star. Comedy is hard and in the art activist tradition, man, it's hard to find actually funny stuff. >> But we also take it for granted because so many of the things that come from the radical cultures that we will study in movements, and many of the materials are on our Wiki, actually happened, preceded shows like The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, by decades, right? But people did not see the original version. You know what I mean? It is really a bit like the Mondrian painting ended up on our shampoo packaging, right, many of these radical humor elements of social movements have ended up in mainstream culture, right? >> Yes. >> So I think one group, that to me is worth mentioning within that, is this group called Asco, that in the 70s and all the way through the 80s, was doing these really radical interventions in LA. They're a Chicano group. And I'll just kind of list one example. They were doing performances in the streets and public squares, and doing things that people now recognize as the most avant-garde art of that time. >> Sure. >> But museum people at the time, especially in LA, not only were they just beginning to recognize Happenings and Allan Kaprow and this type of work, and Suzanne Lacey,. They weren't even recognizing that yet, but they certainly wouldn't have accepted it from Chicanos and Hispanics. There's this kind of discrimination happening. So someone came up to them and said, through the chief curators at the time of LA Mook and El Flacma, in LA, a major museum in LA, and said, you should go do a show of these really radical artists who are doing performance art in the streets in all of LA, in East LA, but all over the place. And their response was Chicanos don't make art, they make graffiti. And you know what Asco did the next day? They showed up and they graffitied their name, they signed the LACMA building and just signed Asco. >> Yeah. >> So basically in the Duchampian gesture took over the building. But if you look at their example, they have so many examples of parody used to talk about sex education for AIDS, and then at another event it's just this abstract meditation on humor and political life, right? >> Well, and certainly, another example is the Yippies of the kind of 60s, which was started by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Kind of famous group, as you know, who basically were very self-consciously. I mean, one of the things to think about, too, is this humor is also very media-savvy, which was they felt like, as opposed to just communicating earnestness, that getting people to laugh did two things at once. It got people to open up, but it also showed the absurdity of the political situation. So and they were pranksters in a big way. >> Yeah. >> So one of their movements was to go down to Wall Street near the Stock Exchange, and throw dollar bills during the stock trading, when you could actually get in there and watch all the stock traders chase all the money. >> Yeah. >> Or another one was they gathered to actually meditate and levitate the Pentagon. >> Right. >> Which they actually did. It actually levitated. >> Yeah. >> I'm joking. >> [LAUGH] >> Ayee! Jokes. >> We can show it on the green screen though like the levitating Pentagon. >> Yeah, we can show that. But do you know what's interesting too is, I mean there's a funny thing about that history because the group, the Yes Men, who also do the parodies,were really kind of comical but also parodying the positions of the WTO. But then they also became precursors to things like Borat. There's other ways in which their kind of methods have been stolen by major media and do kind of not necessarily politically radical stuff. >> Well, and they themselves learned a lot from the radical 60s student movement and different parts around the world. And a really important example is actually the Situationist International. >> Yeah. >> Which many of the members of that organization in France- >> Got kicked out of it. >> Yeah, they got kicked out by Guy Debord, their leader. But who wrote this really influential book called The Society of the Spectacle, right, a critique of contemporary capitalist society. But many of them were former members of the Letterist group, the international Letterist group. And so they have really amazing theories of cultural production, of political life.
