“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