It was 1977 and I was in the final grade, when one day I heard a song of the rock band “Sex Pistols” on the radio. Then I learned about them from a Soviet magazine called Ровестник. It was a youth magazine that regularly published articles criticizing the bourgeois “spoiled” culture of the capitalist world. This is how I discovered the Sex Pistols and the Punk movement. I especially liked that the DADA tradition that was created at the beginning of the 20th century had come out of the intellectual museum state and became accessible to a wide range of youth through Punk. During the perestroika years, my friends and I initiated the “3rd Floor” movement, where I regularly tried to emphasize the connection between modern art and revolutionary-progressive subcultures.
The course will focus on the youth movements of the second half of the 20th century in the West and its reactions in non-Western countries. It will specifically refer to the interactions between modern art and revolutionary-progressive subcultures (nudists, punks, hippies, bikers, vegans), which will be revealed in a series of lectures consisting of four thematic sections.
1. Attempts of revolutionary transformation in art and life in the first half of the 20th century
2. Youth movements and art after the Second World War
3. The Armenian and regional avant-garde during the Cold War.
4. “3rd Floor” alternative movement and Armenian contemporary art of the following period
Lecturer
Arman Grigoryan
10 lectures
Price: 35 000 AMD
