The Whole World Is Watching

In the 80s artist Raymond Pettibon, together with a couple of pals from the punk band Sonic Youth, shot a home video about an American terror group of the 60s: The Whole World Is Watching: Weatherman ’69.

This obscure relic of the American Underground is a ludicrous and sad-melancholy reflection on the lost utopias of the extreme-left student movement caught between violent excesses and sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. With a series of spectacular bomb attacks killing no one but its own members, the Weatherman movement, originating in the white middle-class of the Eastern States, became the most eccentric and notorious splinter group of the students opposition of the 60s.

The dialogues written by Pettibon comprise 50 pages of everyday vignettes from the Underground, anarchic propaganda, jetsam from pop culture, and extensively complex reflections. Seemingly casual, absurd dialogues alternate with monolithic paragraphs. With a cast of over twenty and partly historical personages, the text reproduces historical events and encounters with celebrities of pop culture like Jane Fonda and John Lennon, and traces the everyday mania of the Underground.

Twenty years later, Oliver Augst has turned the texts into a libretto and will put Raymond Pettibon on stage together with Schorsch Kamerun and Japanese noise legend Keiji Haino in a musical version of the material, performed at Sophiensæle. The musical The Whole World Is Watching is the third cooperation of Oliver Augst and Raymond Pettibon.