gregory sholette | Queens College of the City University of New York (original) (raw)
Papers by gregory sholette
Afterimage, 1997
... that depicted an iconic cowboy on horseback with a bold caption that read "Area Nati... more ... that depicted an iconic cowboy on horseback with a bold caption that read "Area Natives ... of-the-century workers' organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies. ... Dion's largely symbolic investigations, borrow from the little known history of left politics and ...
THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART GREGORY SHOLETTE, 2022
* This is the introductory chapter to THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART (Lund Humphries... more * This is the introductory chapter to THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART (Lund Humphries, UK, 2022) *
Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and reflected forms of protest within their art practice itself. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art maps, critiques, celebrates and historicises activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to it. Gregory Sholette approaches his subject from the dual perspective of commentator (as scholar and writer) and insider (as activist artist), in order to propose that the narrowing gap separating forms of activist art from an aesthetics of protest is part of a broader paradigm shift constituted by the multiplying crises within contemporary capitalism and democratic governance across the globe.
Art Agenda Reports: e-flux, 2022
Exploring the social, political and curatorial aspects of the Documenta 15 controversy (2022), th... more Exploring the social, political and curatorial aspects of the Documenta 15 controversy (2022), this essay first published by e-flux for Art Agenda Reports argues that the Indonesian collective ruangrupa critically intervened in the acclaimed event in Kassel, Germany, occupying and opening-up its structure, before the mainstream art world sought to shut it down as an act of reprisal and warning to future attempts at curating "badly" as resistance.
Resistance Anew: Artworks, Culture & Democracy , 2022
It appears to be particular and perhaps even unique to the field of the visual arts, especially o... more It appears to be particular and perhaps even unique to the field of the visual arts, especially over the past century, but especially the past 50 years, that those who labor within it feel an obligation to oppose, reject, boycott, and sometimes engage in combat against the same establishment that they in turn depend upon as producers. Try to imagine any other cohort of highly educated professionals doing the same thing. Given this is a primary
condition of artistic work, it has inevitably generated a resistant response from art’s institutional sector. This paper offers a brief history of this
love/hate (or perhaps hate/love?) relationship between art and state/private/religious management, along with a few thoughts about how this complex affair continues to inform and to shape contemporary art in the 21st century. Published to accompany a major exhibition held at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne during spring 2022 (18 February - 15 May),
Imagining Resistance : Visual Culture and Activism in Canada, 2011
Clowns always speak of the same thing, they speak of hunger; hunger for food, hunger for sex, but... more Clowns always speak of the same thing, they speak of hunger; hunger for food, hunger for sex, but also hunger for dignity, hunger for identity, hunger for power. In fact, they introduce questions about who commands, who protests, and who laughs, all necessary dispositions in a precarious age of neoliberal, enterprise culture. This 2011 essay is a chapter in the book Imagining resistance: Visual culture and activism in Canada, edited by Kirsty Robertson and J. Keri Cronin (Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2011). pp 38-59.
ISBN 9781554583119
Electra Magazine, 2021
This op-ed style essay examines the wildly exaggerated claims made for Non-Fungible Tokens or NFT... more This op-ed style essay examines the wildly exaggerated claims made for Non-Fungible Tokens or NFT artworks. Above all, it questions the NFT's peculiar reversal of digital media's inherent interchangeability by turning back to the centuries-old legacy of individual authorship and visionary private property. "NFT Fever: Is it Time for a Great Refusal 2.0?," was originally written for and published by the Portuguese cultural journal, Electra Magazine, and is hereby updated with some important corrections to the technical details. https://www.fundacaoedp.pt/en/content/electra-magazine
In fiamme: La performance nello spazio delle lotte [1967-1979], 2020
The concept of Art Worker first appeared in the US context in the 1930s, returning in the late 19... more The concept of Art Worker first appeared in the US context in the 1930s, returning in the late 1960s particularly amongst members of Art Workers' Coalition in New York City and similar, vanguard cultural groups. But what do we make of the curious transformation of this idea from the mid-20th century dissident outlook of Conceptual art where it served to a de-privilege the legacy of artist exceptionalism during a period of widespread social re-appraisal especially by disaffected young people, to the period of post-1968, the pessimism of the 1970s, followed by the rise of the neoliberal notion of creative worker where everyone was now supposed to work like an artist by "thinking outside the box"? This paper explores this question by focusing on the often agonizing self-critique of a small group of Marxian inspired artists in New York City who were determined to transform their practice into a form of cultural activism supportive of broader liberation struggles on the very cusp of the "free market" economic and ideological conversion of the 1980s.
More Art in the Public Eye, 2020
We are witnessing today the full-on return of socially engaged cultural activism, not only amongs... more We are witnessing today the full-on return of socially engaged cultural activism, not only amongst embedded movement artists and community-based cultural workers, but by professionally trained, MFA-bearing artists who refuse the conventional opposition separating art from politics, from current events, and from life in general. Still, what makes this return of a highly politicized cultural consciousness so very robust and far-reaching today? [* Originally entitled, "Can a Transformative Avant-Garde Art Survive in a World of Lolcats, Doomsday Preppers, and Xenophobic Frog Memes? Do We Have a Choice?" ]
UPFRONT a journal by PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution) , 1984
Virology enters this 1984 text written just as I was discovering Derrida's ideas (in English), so... more Virology enters this 1984 text written just as I was discovering Derrida's ideas (in English), so please pardon the datedness of this, but I start off with a startling and prescient quote by biologist Lewis Thomas: "the viruses, instead of being single-minded agents of disease and death, now begin to look more like mobile genes. We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party."
Free LIbre: Technologies, Arts and the Commons, 2019
A series of remarkable gains by organized museum workers in the United States is now in danger of... more A series of remarkable gains by organized museum workers in the United States is now in danger of being erased. I am writing this on April 11 2020, as all "non-essential" businesses, including museums, have been physically shuttered in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The result over the past few weeks is that hundreds of museum workers, many who are newly unionized, have being furloughed, or layed-off, even as the depth and longevity of the crisis remains uncertain. This short paper was generated during a far more hopeful moment as museum staff from the New Museum and Guggenheim to the LA Museum of Contemporary were unionizing in an effort to secure and protect their typically precarious jobs from the uncertainties of the marketplace. It was also a time, only weeks ago now, that sales of art soared into the billions. And what I argued then is that the cultural workers' drive to self-organize can in part be traced back to the practice of institutional critique, an artistic methodology studied by this generation of museum staff as they pursued their degrees in art or art history (BFA, MFA, MA or PhD). First presented at the University of Nicosia Research Foundation in Cyprus, this text was written for the "UnConference" organized by Evanthia Tselika and her associates in the summer of 2019. More about that event and other presentations can be found here: http://www.unrf.ac.cy/files/unconference-proceedings-phygital.pdf
Art in the Pursuit of Social Change: 1967-1987, 2011
The title of this essay, which was written for a book about the Peace Press published by The Cent... more The title of this essay, which was written for a book about the Peace Press published by The Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles, comes from an awkward discovery by Josh MacPhee and the late Dara Greenwald in 2008. While researching materials for an exhibition they were curating about social movement art for Exit Art (NYC not-for-profit gallery now closed) they came across a post-it note "not cool enough to catalog" attached to posters in the PAD/D Archive at the Museum of Modern Art. Using this anecdote as a jumping-off point this essay attempts to invert the usual way such movement culture is discussed by suggesting that well-known artists such as Andy Warhol or Richard Serra drew upon an ethereal body of fugitive posters, radical Left imagery and political graphic visual tropes that constitute a "phantom archive" informing both "professional" and informal art works when it comes to making a "statement." [From: Kaplan, Ilee, et al. Peace Press Graphics 1967-1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change. University Art Museum, California State University, 2011. ]
Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, 2017
Challenging ideas about class, debt, and labor as set forth by such arts and culture writers as D... more Challenging ideas about class, debt, and labor as set forth by such arts and culture writers as Dave Beech, Ben Davis, Coco Fusco, Kerstin Stakemeier, Marina Vishmidt and Hans Abbing among others, this essay proposes that "there are exactly as many artists as the system requires for reproducing itself." It was written for the book Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (Pluto Press 2017).
Art As Social Action: An Introduction To The Principles and Practice of Teaching Social Practice Art, 2018
This is the concluding essay written for the book Art As Social Action: An Introduction To The Pr... more This is the concluding essay written for the book Art As Social Action: An Introduction To The Principles and Practice of Teaching Social Practice Art with Chloë Bass and Social Practice Queens (Skyhorse Press 2018) and it is both a personal and theoretical reflection on the peculiar pedagogical qualities and quandaries of teaching socially engaged art in an academic, college level context.
Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, 2017
The practice of repurposing resources that already exist—versus innovating or engineering new... more The practice of repurposing resources that already exist—versus innovating or engineering new ones—is an area of significant overlap between contemporary art and twenty-first-century capitalism. Low-risk and relatively low-cost, the process of creative reuse generates fantastic value-adding possibilities. Or so it seems. For even as real estate speculators and city planners discover the value of high culture for upgrading urban infrastructures, so too have a growing number of contemporary artists learned to mimic and perhaps intentionally mistranslate neoliberal enterprise culture's urban strategies into a repertoire of exonomic tools and “art+realty” hybrids that game the system against itself. Whether post-Fordist capitalism now resembles art or vice versa, virtually everything we thought we knew about “serious” culture has been peeled away with astonishing force, leaving behind a raw, and in some ways vulnerable thing: a bare art world, fully congruent with the political and economic emergency that marks our contemporaneous present.
FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism issue #s 12/13, 2019
In January 2018, at the request of Grant Kester editor and founder of FIELD: A Journal of Sociall... more In January 2018, at the request of Grant Kester editor and founder of FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, I asked several dozen associates around the world if they would submit a report about current, local conditions of cultural innovation and resistance, especially in opposition to the rise of extreme Right wing politics since the 2016 Brexit and US elections. One year later these reflections have been collected in a double issue of FIELD numbers 12 and 13 and available online at: http://field-journal.com/issue-12?cat=30 . This essay serves as the introduction to this special issue. I wish to thank Grant Kester for encouraging me to organize this project, along with his remarkable team of UCSD based editors –Erika Barbosa, Noni Brynjolson, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Jonah Gray, Alex Kershaw and Jordan Rosez- as well as the outstanding artists, intellectuals and activists who contributed their insights in the form of thirty-six international reports including:
Ireland (Dublin)
Emma Mahony
UK (Plyymouth)
Kim Charnley
Poland (Warsaw)
Kuba Szreder
Serbia (Belgrade)
rena raedle
Australia (Melbourne)
Nikos Papastergiadis
Germany (U. Zeppelin, Friedrichshafen)
Karen van den Berg
France (Paris)
Vanessa Theodoropoulou
S. Africa (Cape Town)
Nkule Mabaso
Mexico (Puebla)
Alberto López Cuenca
Colombia (Bogotá)
Jimena Andrade, Victoria Argoty, Daniel Castellanos,
Camila Cifuentes, Miguel Estupiñán, María Gamarra,
Guerthy Gutiérrez, Susana Lyons, Silvia Valderrama,
Esthefanny Yague, Nicolás Vargas.
US Great Lakes Region,
Dan S Wang
Brazil (São Paulo )
Andre Mesquita
Sweden (Gothenburg)
Fredrik Svensk
Russia (St. Petersburg)
Dmitry Vilensky & Chto Delat?
Puerto Rico/S.Bronx,
Libertad Guerra & Monxo Lopez
China (Hong Kong)
Bo Zheng
West Coast (Bay Area),
Jeffrey Skoller
Palestine/Gaza,
Amin Husain & Nitasha Dhillon
S. Korea,
Heng-Gil Han
Italy (Venice)
Marco Baravalle
Philadelphia
Nato Thompson
Indigenous Canada
Lindsay Nixon
India
Mriganka Madhukaillya
Bangladesh
Katatare Prajapati Collective
Networked World
Chloë Bass
NATO Alliance
Marc Leger
Hungary
Kata Benedek & Ágnes Básthy
European Academic Precariousness
Carlos Garrido Castellano
Manifesto: A Moderate Proposal exhibition catalog by Ciara Ennis and Jennifer Vanderpool., 2018
For well over one hundred years, at regular punctuated intervals, and perhaps even before you fin... more For well over one hundred years, at regular punctuated intervals, and perhaps even before you finish this sentence, someone somewhere in the world is preparing to detonate an artistic manifesto. The objective is clear enough: carve out a yawning cavity within the otherwise predictable topography of art historical tropes and social norms. Meanwhile, at this strange and uncanny present moment, President Trump is at best a third-rate Marinetti whose digital declarations ping-pong across a planet tethered together by networks of immeasurable fiber optic cable, concrete arteries of automobile-choked highway, containerized shipping channels, privatized public spaces, real estate laws, reality TV politics, and a pharmaceutically infantilized global population.
An essay commissioned for the exhibition, "A Moderate Proposal," and published by the Pitzer College Art Galleries, 2018, curated by Ciara Ennis and Jennifer Vanderpool: https://www.pitzer.edu/manifesto/
This is the penultimate chapter of Nick Thurston and Maik Fieltz's book Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US, 2018
Along with the social antagonism that fully networked culture fosters with its panoptic vulnerabi... more Along with the social antagonism that fully networked culture fosters with its panoptic vulnerability to surveillance and self-obsessive tendencies (such as sharing one’s privacy with thousands of others as well as corporate marketing specialists), there are also no barricades or prohibitions that prevent assemblies of authoritarian and white supremacist bodies from similarly using networked culture to assemble in an effort to eclipse (or to affirm) their own dark matter obscurity. And this is precisely what we have seen over the past few years across the globe, at an accelerating pace.
An inner link has always connected the artistic avant-garde with acts of insurgency carried out b... more An inner link has always connected the artistic avant-garde with acts of insurgency carried out by socially disenfranchised populations insofar as both embrace the possibility of an emancipated future that is radically at odds with the present (picture Gustave Courbet
helping to topple the Vendome Column in
1871), except something about such historical repetition and reenactment at this time –a moment best described as an uncanny present: a present unfamiliar in its very presentness (Rebecca Bryant)– cries out for something like verification. The essay (published in ASAP Journal 3.2 2018) asks is such a thing as proof of authenticity even possible?
Bad deeds are actions that occur seemingly outside what Deleuze called the “society of control.” ... more Bad deeds are actions that occur seemingly outside what Deleuze called the “society of control.” But what is the status of such acts in the modern capitalist era when artists who do seek freedom from racism, military conscription, environmental injustice, and oppressive laws encounter censorship, criminal indictment, incarceration, or worse? If the truest artistic act in an unfree society amounts to committing some type of crime then are bad deeds beautiful? (The Collective Bad is published in The Collective Good, edited by Michael Birchall and Geir Haraldseth and published in 2017 by Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger. My essay appears on pages 34 to 42.)
Afterimage, 1997
... that depicted an iconic cowboy on horseback with a bold caption that read "Area Nati... more ... that depicted an iconic cowboy on horseback with a bold caption that read "Area Natives ... of-the-century workers' organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies. ... Dion's largely symbolic investigations, borrow from the little known history of left politics and ...
THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART GREGORY SHOLETTE, 2022
* This is the introductory chapter to THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART (Lund Humphries... more * This is the introductory chapter to THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART (Lund Humphries, UK, 2022) *
Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and reflected forms of protest within their art practice itself. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art maps, critiques, celebrates and historicises activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to it. Gregory Sholette approaches his subject from the dual perspective of commentator (as scholar and writer) and insider (as activist artist), in order to propose that the narrowing gap separating forms of activist art from an aesthetics of protest is part of a broader paradigm shift constituted by the multiplying crises within contemporary capitalism and democratic governance across the globe.
Art Agenda Reports: e-flux, 2022
Exploring the social, political and curatorial aspects of the Documenta 15 controversy (2022), th... more Exploring the social, political and curatorial aspects of the Documenta 15 controversy (2022), this essay first published by e-flux for Art Agenda Reports argues that the Indonesian collective ruangrupa critically intervened in the acclaimed event in Kassel, Germany, occupying and opening-up its structure, before the mainstream art world sought to shut it down as an act of reprisal and warning to future attempts at curating "badly" as resistance.
Resistance Anew: Artworks, Culture & Democracy , 2022
It appears to be particular and perhaps even unique to the field of the visual arts, especially o... more It appears to be particular and perhaps even unique to the field of the visual arts, especially over the past century, but especially the past 50 years, that those who labor within it feel an obligation to oppose, reject, boycott, and sometimes engage in combat against the same establishment that they in turn depend upon as producers. Try to imagine any other cohort of highly educated professionals doing the same thing. Given this is a primary
condition of artistic work, it has inevitably generated a resistant response from art’s institutional sector. This paper offers a brief history of this
love/hate (or perhaps hate/love?) relationship between art and state/private/religious management, along with a few thoughts about how this complex affair continues to inform and to shape contemporary art in the 21st century. Published to accompany a major exhibition held at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne during spring 2022 (18 February - 15 May),
Imagining Resistance : Visual Culture and Activism in Canada, 2011
Clowns always speak of the same thing, they speak of hunger; hunger for food, hunger for sex, but... more Clowns always speak of the same thing, they speak of hunger; hunger for food, hunger for sex, but also hunger for dignity, hunger for identity, hunger for power. In fact, they introduce questions about who commands, who protests, and who laughs, all necessary dispositions in a precarious age of neoliberal, enterprise culture. This 2011 essay is a chapter in the book Imagining resistance: Visual culture and activism in Canada, edited by Kirsty Robertson and J. Keri Cronin (Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2011). pp 38-59.
ISBN 9781554583119
Electra Magazine, 2021
This op-ed style essay examines the wildly exaggerated claims made for Non-Fungible Tokens or NFT... more This op-ed style essay examines the wildly exaggerated claims made for Non-Fungible Tokens or NFT artworks. Above all, it questions the NFT's peculiar reversal of digital media's inherent interchangeability by turning back to the centuries-old legacy of individual authorship and visionary private property. "NFT Fever: Is it Time for a Great Refusal 2.0?," was originally written for and published by the Portuguese cultural journal, Electra Magazine, and is hereby updated with some important corrections to the technical details. https://www.fundacaoedp.pt/en/content/electra-magazine
In fiamme: La performance nello spazio delle lotte [1967-1979], 2020
The concept of Art Worker first appeared in the US context in the 1930s, returning in the late 19... more The concept of Art Worker first appeared in the US context in the 1930s, returning in the late 1960s particularly amongst members of Art Workers' Coalition in New York City and similar, vanguard cultural groups. But what do we make of the curious transformation of this idea from the mid-20th century dissident outlook of Conceptual art where it served to a de-privilege the legacy of artist exceptionalism during a period of widespread social re-appraisal especially by disaffected young people, to the period of post-1968, the pessimism of the 1970s, followed by the rise of the neoliberal notion of creative worker where everyone was now supposed to work like an artist by "thinking outside the box"? This paper explores this question by focusing on the often agonizing self-critique of a small group of Marxian inspired artists in New York City who were determined to transform their practice into a form of cultural activism supportive of broader liberation struggles on the very cusp of the "free market" economic and ideological conversion of the 1980s.
More Art in the Public Eye, 2020
We are witnessing today the full-on return of socially engaged cultural activism, not only amongs... more We are witnessing today the full-on return of socially engaged cultural activism, not only amongst embedded movement artists and community-based cultural workers, but by professionally trained, MFA-bearing artists who refuse the conventional opposition separating art from politics, from current events, and from life in general. Still, what makes this return of a highly politicized cultural consciousness so very robust and far-reaching today? [* Originally entitled, "Can a Transformative Avant-Garde Art Survive in a World of Lolcats, Doomsday Preppers, and Xenophobic Frog Memes? Do We Have a Choice?" ]
UPFRONT a journal by PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution) , 1984
Virology enters this 1984 text written just as I was discovering Derrida's ideas (in English), so... more Virology enters this 1984 text written just as I was discovering Derrida's ideas (in English), so please pardon the datedness of this, but I start off with a startling and prescient quote by biologist Lewis Thomas: "the viruses, instead of being single-minded agents of disease and death, now begin to look more like mobile genes. We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party."
Free LIbre: Technologies, Arts and the Commons, 2019
A series of remarkable gains by organized museum workers in the United States is now in danger of... more A series of remarkable gains by organized museum workers in the United States is now in danger of being erased. I am writing this on April 11 2020, as all "non-essential" businesses, including museums, have been physically shuttered in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The result over the past few weeks is that hundreds of museum workers, many who are newly unionized, have being furloughed, or layed-off, even as the depth and longevity of the crisis remains uncertain. This short paper was generated during a far more hopeful moment as museum staff from the New Museum and Guggenheim to the LA Museum of Contemporary were unionizing in an effort to secure and protect their typically precarious jobs from the uncertainties of the marketplace. It was also a time, only weeks ago now, that sales of art soared into the billions. And what I argued then is that the cultural workers' drive to self-organize can in part be traced back to the practice of institutional critique, an artistic methodology studied by this generation of museum staff as they pursued their degrees in art or art history (BFA, MFA, MA or PhD). First presented at the University of Nicosia Research Foundation in Cyprus, this text was written for the "UnConference" organized by Evanthia Tselika and her associates in the summer of 2019. More about that event and other presentations can be found here: http://www.unrf.ac.cy/files/unconference-proceedings-phygital.pdf
Art in the Pursuit of Social Change: 1967-1987, 2011
The title of this essay, which was written for a book about the Peace Press published by The Cent... more The title of this essay, which was written for a book about the Peace Press published by The Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles, comes from an awkward discovery by Josh MacPhee and the late Dara Greenwald in 2008. While researching materials for an exhibition they were curating about social movement art for Exit Art (NYC not-for-profit gallery now closed) they came across a post-it note "not cool enough to catalog" attached to posters in the PAD/D Archive at the Museum of Modern Art. Using this anecdote as a jumping-off point this essay attempts to invert the usual way such movement culture is discussed by suggesting that well-known artists such as Andy Warhol or Richard Serra drew upon an ethereal body of fugitive posters, radical Left imagery and political graphic visual tropes that constitute a "phantom archive" informing both "professional" and informal art works when it comes to making a "statement." [From: Kaplan, Ilee, et al. Peace Press Graphics 1967-1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change. University Art Museum, California State University, 2011. ]
Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, 2017
Challenging ideas about class, debt, and labor as set forth by such arts and culture writers as D... more Challenging ideas about class, debt, and labor as set forth by such arts and culture writers as Dave Beech, Ben Davis, Coco Fusco, Kerstin Stakemeier, Marina Vishmidt and Hans Abbing among others, this essay proposes that "there are exactly as many artists as the system requires for reproducing itself." It was written for the book Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (Pluto Press 2017).
Art As Social Action: An Introduction To The Principles and Practice of Teaching Social Practice Art, 2018
This is the concluding essay written for the book Art As Social Action: An Introduction To The Pr... more This is the concluding essay written for the book Art As Social Action: An Introduction To The Principles and Practice of Teaching Social Practice Art with Chloë Bass and Social Practice Queens (Skyhorse Press 2018) and it is both a personal and theoretical reflection on the peculiar pedagogical qualities and quandaries of teaching socially engaged art in an academic, college level context.
Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, 2017
The practice of repurposing resources that already exist—versus innovating or engineering new... more The practice of repurposing resources that already exist—versus innovating or engineering new ones—is an area of significant overlap between contemporary art and twenty-first-century capitalism. Low-risk and relatively low-cost, the process of creative reuse generates fantastic value-adding possibilities. Or so it seems. For even as real estate speculators and city planners discover the value of high culture for upgrading urban infrastructures, so too have a growing number of contemporary artists learned to mimic and perhaps intentionally mistranslate neoliberal enterprise culture's urban strategies into a repertoire of exonomic tools and “art+realty” hybrids that game the system against itself. Whether post-Fordist capitalism now resembles art or vice versa, virtually everything we thought we knew about “serious” culture has been peeled away with astonishing force, leaving behind a raw, and in some ways vulnerable thing: a bare art world, fully congruent with the political and economic emergency that marks our contemporaneous present.
FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism issue #s 12/13, 2019
In January 2018, at the request of Grant Kester editor and founder of FIELD: A Journal of Sociall... more In January 2018, at the request of Grant Kester editor and founder of FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, I asked several dozen associates around the world if they would submit a report about current, local conditions of cultural innovation and resistance, especially in opposition to the rise of extreme Right wing politics since the 2016 Brexit and US elections. One year later these reflections have been collected in a double issue of FIELD numbers 12 and 13 and available online at: http://field-journal.com/issue-12?cat=30 . This essay serves as the introduction to this special issue. I wish to thank Grant Kester for encouraging me to organize this project, along with his remarkable team of UCSD based editors –Erika Barbosa, Noni Brynjolson, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Jonah Gray, Alex Kershaw and Jordan Rosez- as well as the outstanding artists, intellectuals and activists who contributed their insights in the form of thirty-six international reports including:
Ireland (Dublin)
Emma Mahony
UK (Plyymouth)
Kim Charnley
Poland (Warsaw)
Kuba Szreder
Serbia (Belgrade)
rena raedle
Australia (Melbourne)
Nikos Papastergiadis
Germany (U. Zeppelin, Friedrichshafen)
Karen van den Berg
France (Paris)
Vanessa Theodoropoulou
S. Africa (Cape Town)
Nkule Mabaso
Mexico (Puebla)
Alberto López Cuenca
Colombia (Bogotá)
Jimena Andrade, Victoria Argoty, Daniel Castellanos,
Camila Cifuentes, Miguel Estupiñán, María Gamarra,
Guerthy Gutiérrez, Susana Lyons, Silvia Valderrama,
Esthefanny Yague, Nicolás Vargas.
US Great Lakes Region,
Dan S Wang
Brazil (São Paulo )
Andre Mesquita
Sweden (Gothenburg)
Fredrik Svensk
Russia (St. Petersburg)
Dmitry Vilensky & Chto Delat?
Puerto Rico/S.Bronx,
Libertad Guerra & Monxo Lopez
China (Hong Kong)
Bo Zheng
West Coast (Bay Area),
Jeffrey Skoller
Palestine/Gaza,
Amin Husain & Nitasha Dhillon
S. Korea,
Heng-Gil Han
Italy (Venice)
Marco Baravalle
Philadelphia
Nato Thompson
Indigenous Canada
Lindsay Nixon
India
Mriganka Madhukaillya
Bangladesh
Katatare Prajapati Collective
Networked World
Chloë Bass
NATO Alliance
Marc Leger
Hungary
Kata Benedek & Ágnes Básthy
European Academic Precariousness
Carlos Garrido Castellano
Manifesto: A Moderate Proposal exhibition catalog by Ciara Ennis and Jennifer Vanderpool., 2018
For well over one hundred years, at regular punctuated intervals, and perhaps even before you fin... more For well over one hundred years, at regular punctuated intervals, and perhaps even before you finish this sentence, someone somewhere in the world is preparing to detonate an artistic manifesto. The objective is clear enough: carve out a yawning cavity within the otherwise predictable topography of art historical tropes and social norms. Meanwhile, at this strange and uncanny present moment, President Trump is at best a third-rate Marinetti whose digital declarations ping-pong across a planet tethered together by networks of immeasurable fiber optic cable, concrete arteries of automobile-choked highway, containerized shipping channels, privatized public spaces, real estate laws, reality TV politics, and a pharmaceutically infantilized global population.
An essay commissioned for the exhibition, "A Moderate Proposal," and published by the Pitzer College Art Galleries, 2018, curated by Ciara Ennis and Jennifer Vanderpool: https://www.pitzer.edu/manifesto/
This is the penultimate chapter of Nick Thurston and Maik Fieltz's book Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US, 2018
Along with the social antagonism that fully networked culture fosters with its panoptic vulnerabi... more Along with the social antagonism that fully networked culture fosters with its panoptic vulnerability to surveillance and self-obsessive tendencies (such as sharing one’s privacy with thousands of others as well as corporate marketing specialists), there are also no barricades or prohibitions that prevent assemblies of authoritarian and white supremacist bodies from similarly using networked culture to assemble in an effort to eclipse (or to affirm) their own dark matter obscurity. And this is precisely what we have seen over the past few years across the globe, at an accelerating pace.
An inner link has always connected the artistic avant-garde with acts of insurgency carried out b... more An inner link has always connected the artistic avant-garde with acts of insurgency carried out by socially disenfranchised populations insofar as both embrace the possibility of an emancipated future that is radically at odds with the present (picture Gustave Courbet
helping to topple the Vendome Column in
1871), except something about such historical repetition and reenactment at this time –a moment best described as an uncanny present: a present unfamiliar in its very presentness (Rebecca Bryant)– cries out for something like verification. The essay (published in ASAP Journal 3.2 2018) asks is such a thing as proof of authenticity even possible?
Bad deeds are actions that occur seemingly outside what Deleuze called the “society of control.” ... more Bad deeds are actions that occur seemingly outside what Deleuze called the “society of control.” But what is the status of such acts in the modern capitalist era when artists who do seek freedom from racism, military conscription, environmental injustice, and oppressive laws encounter censorship, criminal indictment, incarceration, or worse? If the truest artistic act in an unfree society amounts to committing some type of crime then are bad deeds beautiful? (The Collective Bad is published in The Collective Good, edited by Michael Birchall and Geir Haraldseth and published in 2017 by Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger. My essay appears on pages 34 to 42.)
Welcome To Our Bare Art World, 2019
San Francisco's school board recently voted to essentially destroy a 1936 mural by Victor Arnaut... more San Francisco's school board recently voted to essentially destroy a 1936 mural by Victor Arnautoff because some parents of color find its representation of race troubling or even racist. This blog post from June 2019 includes responses to this decision from nine contemporary artists and intellectuals, eight are artists of color.
A 1996 interview with the late Tim Rollins who co-founded Group Material and Kids of Survival (KO... more A 1996 interview with the late Tim Rollins who co-founded Group Material and Kids of Survival (KOS), and who died prematurely this past December 2017. This interview, of which this only a lightly edited excerpt, was part of my research for my 2010 book Dark Matter and therefor never published in itself. Here we find Rollins with energy, optimism and ideas that sparkle into existence as if one were watching a meteor shower on a moonless night. Of particular interest is his insistence on the formal, some might even say formalist dimension of visual art as it intersects with politics, economics and social concerns.
Anti-immigration issues have driven United States domestic policy since at least the days of Chi... more Anti-immigration issues have driven United States domestic policy since at least the days of Chinese immigration in the late 19th century. Today the focus has shifted almost entirely to the nation’s southwest border. For the past 13 years Cruz has been drawing creative inspiration from these high density border regions where the detritus and the wealthy El Norte intersects with the imaginative needs of the developing self. Cruz waggishly describes the resource rich county of San Diego as the Home Depot of Tijuana. This is an interview I conducted with Cruz in the Spring of 2011 for Creative Time's Artists on the News series.
Liberation from the present, or extraction from the past for that matter, appears impossible toda... more Liberation from the present, or extraction from the past for that matter, appears impossible today because our image of any collective future is today an infinite extension of our ignoble present. Welcome to the weirdly mundane, or what political scientist Rebecca Bryant terms, “the uncanny present,” a present that is unfamiliar in its presentness. With only slight variation this claustrophobic now is like Freud’s symptom of repetition, except without an underlying trauma. Or perhaps more accurately, it is an eerie traumaless trauma: a flat, automated affect that whatever passes for social collectivity manufactures as the internalized, subjective accompaniment to Jodi Dean’s notion of “politics without politics.”
A dual book review of Bruno Bosteels’ The Actuality of Communism and Stevphen Shukaitis’ The Comp... more A dual book review of Bruno Bosteels’ The Actuality of Communism and Stevphen Shukaitis’ The Composition of Movements to Come (Sholette: 2015) Available online fro Critical Inquiry at: http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/that_which_must_not_be_named/
Some previous and some new additions for my Glorypedia, an ongoing homage to Ambrose Beirce (and ... more Some previous and some new additions for my Glorypedia, an ongoing homage to Ambrose Beirce (and Raymond Williams and Jorge Luis Borges) including definitions for: Dark Matter, Bare Art, Mockstitutions, the unpresent, and Monumenticide. (Nov. 2020)
A paper about art and debt given Jan. 23 at The Cooper Union for a conference organized by Noah F... more A paper about art and debt given Jan. 23 at The Cooper Union for a conference organized by Noah Fisher and Coco Fusco.
“Welcome to Our Art World” is the introductory chapter to my book Delirium and Resistance (Pluto ... more “Welcome to Our Art World” is the introductory chapter to my book Delirium and Resistance (Pluto Press 2017). Its argument pivots on the idea that high culture has been stripped clean of its mystery and illusions regarding any significant distance from capitalist markets. This subsumption leaves us to confront a “bare art world”: spectacular, shadowless, it is a space lacking neither depth nor negation. What then if any resistance is possible within this unconcealed nakedness where the 1% flaunts its wealth and power brazenly without the need for ideological cover? The answer is found within the very paradoxes of capitalism itself, only now these contradictions are turned-up full volume.