Category Archives: Art

ART AND REVOLUTION – Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, by Gerald Raunig

“Art and Revolution investigates practices emerging in neighbouring zones where art and revolution overlap for a limited time, in more or less well developed forms. Yet even when their rapprochement fails, traces of the overlap can still be recognised. They will be analysed here through various practices, from Courbet to Russian Futurism and Constructivism, from the Viennese Actionists and the Situationists International to the PublixTheatreCaravan in Genoa.

Often activist practices are not included in the narratives and archives of political history and art theory, or only acknowledged when purged of their radical aspects. In order to break through these mechanisms of exclusion or recodification, an as yet missing theorisation of activist art practices has to develop with new concept-clusters connecting contexts in ways not previously acknowledged.

Gerald Raunig has written an alternative history of the “long twentieth century” that resists flat notions of linear progress current in the objectivistic historiography. Instead it chronicles the attempts that were made repeatedly to burst out of this constructed continuum. It will encourage a new generation of artists and thinkers to work towards the explosive nexus of art and activism.”

Edited by Semiotext(e) Active Agents, distributed by The MIT Press

DECOLONIZING NATURE – Contemporary Art and the Politics of Democracy, by T.J.Demos

“While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history, its visibility and significance has grown in relation to the threats of climate change and environmental destruction. By engaging artists’ widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe – and looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North – Decolonizing Nature offers a significant, original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics.

Art historian T. J. Demos, author of Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013), considers the creative proposals of artists and activists for ways of life that bring together ecological sustainability, climate justice, and radical democracy, at a time when such creative proposals are urgently needed.”

Edited by Sternberg Press

CRAFTING THE RESISTANCE – 35 Projects for Craftivists, Protestors, and Women who Persist, by Lara Neel and Heather Marano

“Knit, sew, and craft your way to self-empowerment!

Are you a Nasty Woman ready to smash the patriarchy wth a needle and thread? Proudly proclaim your feminism with your very own DIY Bleeding Heart T-shirt? Or stage a protest, wearing knitted Pussyhats?

Be part of the revolution by reclaiming the “domestic” arts of knitting, sewing, and more – to channel your feminist rage. With pictures, step-by-step instructions, patterns, and tips for crafters of all skill levels from beginner to advanced, Crafting the Resistance is the book for women’s rights activists on a DIY path to self-determination.

Put your homemaking and protesting skills to the test with girl-powered, easy-to-make, kick-ass projects such as:

  • “Snowflake” knitted wristers
  • Bleeding Heart T-Shirt
  • Clear vinyl protest tote bag to speed up security screenings
  • The Pussyhat as knitted hats, holiday ornaments, throw pillows, and cat beds
  • “Nasty Nag” zippered pouch and clutch
  • “Resist” knitted bookmarks

Take politics into your own hands, literally, and craft your message out into the world, Crafting the Resistance is the ultimate book tor DIY activists, empowered protestors, and any woman – or man – who is part of the resistance.”

Published by Skyhorse Publishing

DEATH OF THE ARTIST – Art World and their Dissidents Alternative Identities, by Nicola McCartney

“There exists a series of contemporary artists who continually defy the traditional role of the artist/author, including Art & Language, Guerrilla Girls, Bob and Roberta Smith, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and LuckyPDF.

In Death of the Artist, Nicola McCartney explores their work and uses previously unpublished interviews to provoke a vital and nuanced discussion about contemporary artistic authorship. How do emerging artists navigate intellectual property or work collectively and share the recognition? How might a pseudonym aid ‘artivism’? Most strikingly, she demonstrates how an alterative identity can challenge the art market and is symptomatic of greater cultural and political rebellion.

As such, this book exposes the art world’s financially incentivised infrastructures, but also examines how they might be reshaped from within. In an age of cuts to arts funding and forced self-promotion, this offers an important analysis of the pressing need for the artistic community to construct new ways to reinvent itself and incite fresh responses to its work.”

Published by I.B.Tauris

STRIKE ART – Contemporary Art & the Post Occupy Condition, by Yates McKee

“The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond.

What is the relation of art to the practice of radical politics today? Strike Art explores this question through the historical lens of Occupy, an event that had artists at its core. Precarious, indebted, and radicalised, artists redirected their creativity from servicing the artworld into an expanded field of organising in order to construct of a new – if internally fraught – political imaginary set off against the common enemy of the 1%. In the process, they called the bluff of a contemporary art system torn between ideals of radical critique, on the one hand, and an increasing proximity to Wall Street on the other – oftentimes directly targeting major art institutions themselves as sites of action.

Tracking the work of groups including MTL, Not An Alternative, the Illuminator, the Rolling Jubilee, and G.U.L.F., Strike Art shows how Occupy ushered in a new era of artistically-oriented direct action that continues to ramify far beyond the initial act of occupation itself into ongoing struggles surrounding labour, dept, and climate justice, concluding with a consideration of overlaps between such work and the aesthetic practices of the Black Lives Matters movement.

Art after Occupy, McKee suggests, contains great potentials of imagination and action for a renewed left project that are still only beginning to ripen, at once shaking up and taking flight from the art systems as we know it.”

Published by Verso Books