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radical cultural practice and what are its theoretical premises? The following reviews the recent writings of several prominent art theorists in the field of socially engaged art: Gerald Raunig, BAVO, Gregory Sholette, Oliver Ressler, Grant Kester, Critical Art Ensemble, Nato Thompson, Yates McKee, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt. Each offers a highly sophisticated leftist analysis of the current mediation of art and politics. Transversal concatenations One of the most challenging models of
Precarious objects is a book about activism and design. The context is the changes in work and employment from permanent to precarious arrangements in the twenty-first century in Italy. The book presents design interventions that address precarity as a defuturing force affecting political, social and material conditions. Precarious objects shows how design objects, called here ‘orientation devices’, recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life. Three microhistories illustrate activist repertoires that bring into play design, and design practices that are grounded in activism. While the vitality, experimental nature and traffic between theory and praxis of social movements in Italy have consistently attracted the interest of activists, students and researchers in diverse fields, there exists little in the area of design research. This is a study of design activism at the intersection of design theory and cultural research for researchers and students interested in design studies, cultural studies, social movements and Italian studies.
close to the Partido Comunista Português (PCP, Portuguese Communist Party), was appointed Prime Minister. In response to this election, a NATO naval fleet purposefully remained a few miles away from the port of Lisbon. For some, the warning was clear: if the air had become ‘too’ red, a military intervention could have been an option.12 These thrilling weeks were masterfully shot in Robert Kramer’s film Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal. More militant than Le fond de l’air est rouge, this 1977 documentary provides one of the most engaging and poignant 239
Organization (NATO) tankers south of the city of Kunduz. Two US bombers detected the convoy and sent the video material to the German troops who were responsible for the region in question. During the proceedings later initiated by the German Federal Prosecutor General, the officer in command, Colonel Georg Klein, stated that an informant on the ground had told him that the persons visible around the vehicles in the video were all insurgents. This turned out to be untrue. The Taliban had abandoned the tankers to civilian looters from the surrounding area after getting stuck
‘totalitarianism’ and revolutionary violence, or as part of anarchist objections to constituted forms of state power. In his 1993 text Spectres of Marx , Jacques Derrida addressed the political consensus that the fall of Soviet communism represents the end to any viable political alternatives to free-market capitalism. 35 The book came as a response to the 1990 declaration by George H.W. Bush of a New World Order to be led unilaterally by the United States, with as its first missions the invasion of Iraq and the NATO bombing of ex-Yugoslavia. Francis Fukuyama, then deputy
World Trade Organisation in Seattle. This event, as Nato Thomson noted, ‘marked a critical moment in progressive political history because the rallying cry was not against a specific government, but against the intangible and relatively abstract international finance organizations that so perfectly represented the shift toward an unchecked, diffuse, international power’.15 By 2001, the first World Social Forum, convened in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in opposition to the World Economic Forum in Davos, would famously proclaim that ‘another world’ – distinct from
the repressive Milošević regime. Uros Cvoro notes that shortly before the performance, from March to June 1999, the NATO-led airstrikes against Serbia took place, with citizens taking part in state-organised anti-NATO demonstrations, acting as human shields to protect bridges from being destroyed. 58 Musical performances similar to Apollo 9 were fairly commonplace events at that time; such events countered the prevailing image of Serbia in the media: ‘while on the one hand, Serbia appeared as a country led by a dictator engaged in ethnic cleansing and unwilling
artists’ demands for social engagement? One of the purposes of AOI was to address the shift from ephemeral project work – the type of institution-based projects that were discussed by Andrea Fraser in the mid-1990s as ‘service work,’ and characterised by Gregory Sholette and Nato Thompson as ‘interventionist art’ – to the development of long-term infrastructures, and thus the name Artist Organisations. 26 This tendency towards extradisciplinary self-institutionalisation explains the choice of artists who were invited: Concerned Artists of the Philippines, Immigrant
Media’. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. These aesthetic and semiotic manoeuvres also informed the practice of a variety of visual and multimedia artists and artist collectives, who in 2004 inspired the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art survey exhibition The Intervensionists: Art in the Social Sphere and related catalogue, The Intervensionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. The show brought together artists operating in socially engaged practices, creating public ‘interventions’ rather than artworks. Curator Nato Thompson defines tactics as a
refuses to ‘work’ in order to produce, preferring instead to dance, drink, day-dream, converse and hang out. Starting in the late 1980s, however, a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ sought to appropriate the countercultural spaces that had previously been invested by such artists in the 1950s and 1960s with a potential for liberation, if not revolution, at the margins of a conformist organisation geared towards efficiency 215 216 The light years, 1991–2009 and productivity. Evidence of this shift could be observed in 1990s advertising which, as Nato Thomson noted in 2004