Routine Pleasures

Open to Art School only.

"For the rustle," asserts Roland Barthes, "implies
a community of bodies: in the sounds of the
pleasure which is 'working,' no voice is raised,
guides, or swerves, no voice is constituted; the
rustle is the very sound of plural
delectation-plural but never massive (the mass,
quite the contrary, has a single voice, and
terribly loud)." This course will consider the
individual and the collective as tactical and
historically charged positions for artists, with
critical implications for agency and authorship as
well as for notions of labor and pleasure. We will
begin with Jean-Pierre Gorin's 1986 film-essay
Routine Pleasures, an elliptical meditation on
plural delectation, among other things. Along the
way, we will also consider Manny Farber's "White
Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," Don Cherry and
Organic Music Society, EZTV, the quilters of Gee's
Bend, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Simon Leung's
War After War, Simon Rodia's Nuestro Pueblo (Watts
Towers), Noah Purifoy and the Outdoor Desert Art
Museum, the Center for Land Use Interpretation,
and Deep Listening Band, among others. The class
will include screenings, readings, discussions,
field trips, and student demonstrations and
research projects.