Intersubjective Communications: Psychedelic Journalisms ~ with Robby Herbst, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
~ Fall 2006 ~ 9:30 - 11:00am _ 11.07 / 11.14 / 11.21 ~
We will explore transcendent contexts, times and spaces. Primarily experiments in non fiction writing and journalism; though all the communicative arts (conversation, mind projection...) are grist for the mill.
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Robby wanted us to stare into a partner’s eyes for at least three minutes. Nothing else. Just stare at each other. Instead we all stared at him, smiling a little. “What?” he asked. This is the same exercise your brother had us do, we told him.
“I knew it,” Robby said, obviously amused. “I knew these would be the lines that I would be walking on here—what Marc has done.”
And then, very little was the same. He told us that he’d spent the morning at a public school in Woodland Hills; his first day as their art teacher. This indirectly led to a conversation about alternative schooling in which we found out that in addition to attending school at a kibbutz in Israel, Robby also attended school in the same district where Michael’s dad had designed the curriculum. It had been over 20 years since they had attended this school, but, Michael said, “in a later conversation with my dad, he said he remembers the twins.”
Here are some of the things we did with Robby. We read excerpts from books that challenged standard cultural assumptions about disease and sickness (i.e. passivism/pacifism is a disease, argues Ward Churchill). We watched the film Rock my Religion. We talked about freaks and squares and the commercialization of counter-culture.
“Even though you can tell [Robby] has very strong opinions, he’s still able to facilitate an open and positive discussion,” Sarah said. “Hearing about his childhood [alternative educational experiences] was super interesting—especially about the downsides of being raised the way he was, living a non-structured life and now he’s explaining the difficulties of a waking up on time for a regular job.”
We met Robby at The Museum of Craft and Folk Art on our last day together, where he had curated: “Solar Ovens and Socialcraft” with his brother Marc. We walked amidst the bicycle-powered blenders and lcok-boxes and large American flags (knit by Lisa Anne Auerbach, another one of our instructors, who, Robby said, had to be heavily swayed into participating in this show at a museum with the word craft in it’s name. “Lisa very much wants to be seen as a fine artist and not as a crafts person,” Robby said) and also an entire room devoted to artifacts from the struggle to save the South Central Farm.
Michael said it was an experience in “placing protest within the context of art and also art within protest.”