24788 /44788 Getting the 90s We Deserve
The aim of this seminar is to help its members recover visions, texts, sounds, concepts, moods and utopian impulses from the 1990s that can help us to see our way out of our current situation, that help us to imagine different worlds. Through a series of readings, viewings, listenings, and conversations, we will engage in an ongoing collaborative project that will culminate with a collectively composed and designed performance and publication at the end of the quarter. Two areas of thematic focus will be 1) the nature and effects of the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War on political situations ranging in scale from the intimate and personal to the global and geopolitical and 2) the emergence of a new queer politics in response to the AIDS crisis and the corresponding emergence of queer theory. Our course title is inspired by a 1999 essay by Douglas Crimp, in which he argued for a return to Andy Warhol’s films and art through the methods and concepts offered by cultural studies and queer theory, instead of the ones that a conservative art history had theretofore presented. Crimp’s retrospective look at the gender and sexually transgressive underground film and theater scene of the 1960s in order to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of cultural, visual and queer studies motivates our desire to get more out of the 1990s for our troubled present.