ABSTRACT
Throughout this book – and principally through the examples of Graham, McBride, Rehberger and Gillick – my aim has been to demonstrate some of the most significant ways in which, over the last four decades, design has continued to offer to artists an exceptionally productive way into thinking through the relationship between contemporary art and capitalism. For their part, each of these artists may be said to illuminate different aspects of the political, social, aesthetic and experiential effects of a post-Fordist capitalism that has risen to dominance since the 1970s – what Harvey analyses as a flexible, financialised and globalised regime of accumulation marked by ‘greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation’. 1 In doing so, they reflect on such key dimensions of this regime as intensified corporate control of the built environment, widespread flexibilisation of labour and the accelerated production of novelty that sustains today’s diversified patterns of consumption.
