Description
Book SynopsisIn
Beyond the Sovereign Self Grant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in
The Sovereign Self, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. Among others, Kester analyzes the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper, experimental practices associated with the escrache tradition in Argentina, and indigenous Canadian artists such as Nadia Myre and Michèle Taïna Audette, showing how socially engaged art catalyzes forms of resistance that operate beyond the institutional art world. From the Americas and Europe to Iran and South Africa, Kester presents a historical genealogy of recent engaged art practices rooted in a deep hist
Trade Review“In a superlative demonstration of a hypothesis in action, Grant H. Kester’s definitive study
Beyond the Sovereign Self effectively melts down, then reimagines our stagnated concepts of aesthetic autonomy and avant-gardism in a dauntless bid to retheorize the increasingly entangled, if not indistinguishable, realms of twenty-first-century social activism and art.” -- Gregory Sholette, author of * The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art *
“With characteristic thoroughness, Grant H. Kester articulates the radical potential in challenging the cherished notion of art’s autonomy. Centering dialogic and activist art practices, he insightfully argues that the social labor of cultural resistance necessarily operates in generative forms of collectivity and dissensus.” -- Jennifer A. González, coeditor of * Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1
I. Within and Beyond the Canon
1. The Incommensurablity of Socially Engaged Art 33
2. Escrache and Autonomy 54
II. From Object to Event
3. Dematerialization and Aesthetics in Real Time 85
4. The Aesthetic of Answerability 105
III. A Dialogical Aesthetic
5. Social Labor and Communicative Action 137
6. Our Pernicious Temporality 171
7. Being Human as Praxis 202
Conclusion. Beyond the White Wall 229
Notes 235
Works Cited 255
Index 271
