VCU news

By Leila Ugincius

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, as the famous saying goes.

Robert Meganck, chair of the Department of Communication Arts in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, remembers the past well, and he had an idea about a new way to help teach it to others.

The thought came to him during a conversation with Margaret Lindauer, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Art History, about the different art history classes taught in the VCU School of the Arts. Classes largely emphasize the histories of individual disciplines of art.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could create a class that essentially talked about how all these different disciplines related to one another?” Meganck said at the time. “What if we just took one year and talked about what everyone was doing that one year? And how everybody is relating to the same material.”

That conversation led to a new arts class open to the entire university that launched this semester: 1968: Love, War, and Revolution. Meganck chose 1968 because it was a consequential year with ramifications still being felt today.

Major events in 1968 included the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and the Democratic National Convention protests. The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed and VCU was formed. In pop culture, it was the year of the releases of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Yellow Submarine” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

These students, they hear about something called the ’60s, and this lives in their psyche.

No field was immune to the upheavals. The arts world faced its own violence when Andy Warhol nearly died after being shot.

“These students, they hear about something called the ’60s, and this lives in their psyche,” Meganck said. “But they did not experience any of this stuff. They have absolutely no clue. This to them is ancient history. … There’s a lot of that ’68 stuff that’s kind of happening again. Students don’t understand the context of Black Lives Matter, but this, to me, is like this is 1968 again.”

Jorge Benitez, assistant professor of communication arts, suggested the class tie all these events to the zeitgeist of the times. While Benitez teaches the course, it is very much a university affair. Because the class addresses such a range of material from the time and how they relate to one another, no one person has the expertise to cover it all in a nuanced way. Instead, various professors lead lectures on everything from black activism to the Paris Riots and the Prague Spring.

Meganck chose to address rock ’n’ roll, which was sparked by what was happening politically at the time. He called his lecture, “Bye Bye Surfer Girl, Hello Foxy Lady,” to reflect a shift from upbeat tunes, such as those by the Beach Boys, to something louder and darker.

“All that stuff was responding musically to what was happening politically,” Meganck said. “We want the students to understand that all this stuff was happening collectively.”

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