Proposals for Intermedia Art Education: Robert Watts and the Experimental Workshop at UC Santa Cruz, 1968-69

In the academic year 1968-69, Fluxus artist Robert Watts was invited to the recently founded University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) to launch an Experimental Workshop with students as part of a $105,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation to innovate arts pedagogy at the university level. Reflective of the ongoing evolution of Fluxus activities, Watts’s Experimental Workshop at UCSC tested theories and practices of experimental intermedia art in North America in the 1960s, as students created non-narrative film and audio works and mounted participatory events on and off campus that quoted and remixed countercultural gestures. The Workshop’s history—including its failure to endure on the institutional level—unfolded in parallel to the broad mandates of the UC system and the Carnegie Commission, a source of transformative funding for American universities. Considering Watts within this context reveals a savvy, thoroughly institutional subject who applied newly emergent experimental intermedia concepts and tactics to advocate for progressive change in arts education. It also shows that the emergence and meaning of intermedia art in the postwar period is inextricable from the history of post-secondary arts education, and therefore of the creative labor of art students. This paper illuminates the institutionalization of Fluxus practice in a university setting by reconstructing Watts’s Workshop and its context through grant letters, institutional correspondence, transcripts of staged discourse among faculty and students, an “Instant Class Kit” designed by George Maciunas, and the 1970 report, Proposals for Art Education, a signal record of late-1960s aesthetic debates and their relation to higher education.