This guide is not a road map or instruction manual. It�s a match struck in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies of those who took Bertolt Brecht�s words to heart: �Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.� It was written in a whirlwind of three days in December 2010, between the first and second days of action by UK students against the government cuts, and intended to reflect on the possibility of new creative forms of action in the current movements.
Human degradation of the environment has been documented by scholars across a range of disciplines: the global temperature of the planet continues to rise, abandoned industrial sites stain once vibrant communities, and questions about the purity of our water and foods linger. In the shadow of these material conditions, concerned citizens have reacted by issuing critiques against careless consumerism and excessive lifestyles. Their hope is to illustrate and inspire alternative ways of living. As part of such efforts and activism, some have turned to performance as a means to investigate matters further, pose challenges and questions, and enact new ways of being and thinking in a globalized world. Performance on Behalf of the Environment is a collection of essays from a diverse group of scholars that explore critically the strengths, limitations, and processes of what can be termed environmental performances.
Degrowth is an emerging social movement that overlaps with proposals for systemic change such as anti-globalization and climate justice, commons and transition towns, basic income and Buen Vivir. Degrowth in Movement(s) reflects on the current situation of social movements aiming at overcoming capitalism, industrialism and domination. The essays ask: What is the key idea of the respective movement? Who is active? What is the relation with the degrowth movement? What can the degrowth movement learn from these other movements and the other way around? Which common proposals, but also which contradictions, oppositions and tensions exist? And what alliances could be possible for broader systemic transformations? Corinna Bukhart, Matthias Schmelzer, and Nina Treu have curated an impressive demonstration that there are, beyond regressive neoliberalism and techno-fixes, emancipatory alternatives contributing to a good life for all. Degrowth in Movement(s) explores this mosaic for social-ecological transformation - an alliance strengthened by diversity.
This book analyses the aesthetic and utopian dimensions of various activist social movements in Western Europe since 1989. Through a series of case studies, it demonstrates how dreams of a better society have manifested themselves in contexts of political confrontation, and how artistic forms have provided a language to express the collective desire for social change. The study begins with the 1993 occupation of Claremont Road in east London, an attempt to prevent the demolition of homes to make room for a new motorway. In a squatted row of houses, all available space was transformed and filled with elements that were both aesthetic and defensive – so when the authorities arrived to evict the protestors, sculptures were turned into barricades. At the end of the decade, this kind of performative celebration merged with the practices of the antiglobalisation movement, where activists staged spectacular parallel events alongside the global elite’s international meetings. As this book shows, social movements try to erase the distance that separates reality and political desire, turning ordinary people into creators of utopias. Squatted houses, carnivalesque street parties, counter-summits, and camps in central squares, all create a physical place of these utopian visions
The Hawthorn Archive, named after the richly fabled tree, has long welcomed the participants in the various Euro-American social struggles against slavery, racial capitalism, imperialism, and authoritarian forms of order. The Archive is not a library or a research collection in the conventional sense but rather a disorganized and fugitive space for the development of a political consciousness of being indifferent to the deadly forms of power that characterize our society. Housed by the Archive are autonomous radicals, runaways, abolitionists, commoners, and dreamers who no longer live as obedient or merely resistant subjects. In this innovative, genre- and format-bending publication, Avery F. Gordon, the “keeper” of the Archive, presents a selection of its documents—original and compelling essays, letters, cultural analyses, images, photographs, conversations, friendship exchanges, and collaborations with various artists. Gordon creatively uses the imaginary of the Archive to explore the utopian elements found in a variety of resistive and defiant activity in the past and in the present, zeroing in on Marxist critical theory and the black radical tradition. Fusing critical theory with creative writing in a historical context, The Hawthorn Archive represents voices from the utopian margins, where fact, fiction, theory, and image converge. Reminiscent of the later fictions of Italo Calvino or Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, The Hawthorn Archive is a groundbreaking work that defies strict disciplinary, methodological, and aesthetic boundaries. And like Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, which established Gordon as one of the most influential interdisciplinary scholars of the humanities and social sciences in recent years, it provides a kaleidoscopic analysis of power and effect. The Hawthorn Archive’s experimental format and inventive synthesis of critical theory and creative writing make way for a powerful reconception of what counts as social change and political action, offering creative inspiration and critical tools to artists, activists, scholars across various disciplines, and general readers alike.
A fascinating and comprehensive history, 'Demanding the Impossible' is a challenging and thought-provoking exploration of anarchist ideas and actions from ancient times to the present day.
“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from Thought in the Act Combining philosophy and aesthetics, Thought in the Act is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. Thought in the Act enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.
The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.
Since the turn of the millennium, protests, meetings, schoolrooms, reading groups and many other social forms have been proposed as artworks or, more ambiguously, as interventions that are somewhere between art and politics. This book surveys the resurgence of politicized art, tracing key currents of theory and practice, and mapping them against the dominant experience of the last decade: crisis. Drawing upon leading artists and theorists within this field – including Hito Steyerl, Marina Vishmidt, Art & Language, Gregory Sholette, John Roberts and Dave Beech – this book argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between socially-engaged art and neoliberalism. Kim Charnley explores the possibility that neoliberalism has destabilized the art system so that it is no longer able to absorb and neutralize dissent. As a result, the relationship between aesthetics and politics is experienced with fresh urgency and militancy.
In 2008 an Iraqi artist was waterboarded as performance art. In 2010 artists upturned police cars in Russia. But what exactly do we mean by militant art and aesthetics? Bringing together the philosophy of art and politics, Martin Lang provides a comprehensive examination of militant art activism: its history, its advocates and the aesthetic theory behind it. Protest art is not a new concept and yet this book argues that after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 distinctly 21st-century forms of art activism emerged. On the one hand these became militant as artists retained belief in the possibility of radical political change through art. On the other hand, this belief developed in a hostile environment, when anti-terror legislations reclassified activists and artists as terrorists. Through first-hand interviews and experiences, Militant Aesthetics sheds light on numerous international case studies of modern art activism and the different ways they can be classified as militant. Many artists and collectives, including Grupo Etcétera in Buenos Aries, are prepared to break the law and risk arrest for their art. Others like Thomas Bresolin's Militant Training Camp utilise military uniforms in violent performances that connect with public anger, and artists such as Zthoven in the Czech Republic occupy, hack, antagonise and disrupt in increasingly militant ways. Combining these examples with the pioneering thought of Badiou, iek, Rancière and Mouffe, as well as up-to-date scholarship from Bishop, Léger and others, Lang investigates the instances, attributes and rules of militant art in order to introduce a new overall theory of 21st-century militant aesthetics.
