ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics offers a thorough examination of the complex relationship between art and politics, and the many forms and approaches the engagement between them can take.

The contributors - a diverse assembly of artists, activists, scholars from around the world – discuss and demonstrate ways of making art and politics legible and salient in the world. As such the 32 chapters in this volume reflect on performing and visual arts; music, film and new media; as well as covering social practice, community-based work, conceptual, interventionist and movement affiliated forms.

The Companion is divided into four distinct parts:

  • Conceptual Cartographies
  • Institutional Materialities
  • Modalities of Practice
  • Making Publics

Randy Martin has assembled a collection that ensures that readers will come away with a wider view of what can count as art and politics; where they might find it; and how it moves in the world. The diversity of perspectives is at once challenging and fortifying to those who might dismiss political art on the one hand as not making sufficient difference and on the other to those embracing it but seeking a means to elaborate the significance that it can make in the world.

The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics brings together a range of issues and approaches and encourages critical and creative thinking about how art is produced, perceived, and received.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

part I|77 pages

Conceptual Cartographies

chapter 4|9 pages

The Choreopolitical

Agency in the Age of Control

chapter 5|14 pages

Thinking Contradictory Thoughts

On the Convergence of Aesthetic and Social Factors in Recent Sociologies of Art

chapter 6|8 pages

Becoming Revolutionary

On Russian Suprematism

chapter 7|8 pages

Failure Over Utopia

chapter 8|7 pages

What did You Hear?

Another Ten Theses on Militant Sound Investigation 1

part II|89 pages

Institutional Materialities

chapter 10|10 pages

Social Turns

In Theory and Across the Arts

chapter 11|8 pages

The Politics of Contemporary Curating

A Network Perspective

chapter 12|7 pages

Perverse Joy

The Paradoxes of Censorship

chapter 13|10 pages

Art is Garbage

chapter 15|11 pages

Evangelicalism and the Gay Movement in Singapore

Witnessing and Confessing Through Masks

chapter 16|14 pages

A Transformative Initiative for Achieving Cultural Equity

Community Arts University Without Walls

chapter 17|7 pages

Hapticality in the Undercommons

part III|67 pages

Modalities of Practice

chapter 18|10 pages

Charming for the Revolution

Pussy and Other Riots

chapter 19|6 pages

The Yes Men

chapter 24|7 pages

Toward Participatory Aesthetics

An Interview with Claire Bishop

part IV|72 pages

Making Publics

chapter 26|9 pages

Living Politics

The Zapatistas Celebrate their Twentieth Anniversary

chapter 28|6 pages

Dynamic Encounters and the Benjaminian Aura

Reflections on the New Media, Next Media, and Connectivity

chapter 29|10 pages

Seeking a Theater of Liberation

chapter 30|10 pages

By any Means Necessary

chapter 31|11 pages

If you Really Care about Change, why Devote your Life to Arts and Culture?

Reflections of a Cultural Organizer

chapter 32|12 pages

Pedagogies in the Oakland Projects