Living as form : socially engaged art from 1991-2011 / edited by Nato Thompson.
Contributor(s): Thompson, Nato
| Creative Time, Inc.
Material type: 
BookPublisher: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2012Description: 259 pages : illustrations (chiefly colour) ; 28 cm.Content type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeISBN: 9780262017343 (hbk.) :; 0262017342 (hbk.) :.Subject(s): Art and society -- History -- 20th century | Art and society -- History -- 21st centuryDDC classification: 701.03 | Item type | Current library | Call number | Copy number | Status | Barcode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General lending | MTU Crawford College of Art and Design Library Lending | 701.03 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 00196243 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A monumental, lavishly illustrated book that offers the first global portrait of a complex and definition-defying genre of cultural production.
Over the past twenty years, an abundance of art forms have emerged that use aesthetics to affect social dynamics. These works are often produced by collectives or come out of a community context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situations ranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with the texture of living, these art works often blur the line between art and life. This book offers the first global portrait of a complex and exciting mode of cultural production--one that has virtually redefined contemporary art practice.
Living as Form grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a thirty-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of color images. The artists include the Danish collective Superflex, who empower communities to challenge corporate interest; Turner Prize nominee Jeremy Deller, creator of socially and politically charged performance works; Women on Waves, who provide abortion services and information to women in regions where the procedure is illegal; and Santiágo Cirugeda, an architect who builds temporary structures to solve housing problems.
Living as Form contains commissioned essays from noted critics and theorists who look at this phenomenon from a global perspective and broaden the range of what constitutes this form.
Contributing authors
Claire Bishop, Carol Becker, Teddy Cruz, Brian Holmes, Shannon Jackson, Maria Lind, Anne Pasternak, Nato Thompson
Living as form / Nato Thompson -- Participation and spectacle: where are we now? / Claire Bishop -- Returning on bikes: notes on social practice / Maria Lind -- Democratizing urbanization and the search for a new civic imagination / Teddy Cruz -- Microutopias: public practice in the public sphere / Carol Becker -- Eventwork: the fourfold matrix of contemporary social movements / Brian Holmes -- Living takes many forms / Shannon Jackson -- Projects -- The Leonore Annenberg prize for art and social change.
Over the past twenty years, an abundance of art forms have emerged that use aesthetics to affect social dynamics. These works are often produced by collectives or come out of a community context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situations ranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with the texture of living, these art works often blur the line between art and life. This book offers the first global portrait of a complex and exciting mode of cultural production one that has virtually redefined contemporary art practice. Living as Form grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a thirty-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of color images. The artists include the Danish collective Superflex, who empower communities to challenge corporate interest; Turner Prize nominee Jeremy Deller, creator of socially and politically charged performance works; Women on Waves, who provide abortion services and information to women in regions where the procedure is illegal; and Santiágo Cirugeda, an architect who builds temporary structures to solve housing problems. Living as Form contains commissioned essays from noted critics and theorists who look at this phenomenon from a global perspective and broaden the range of what constitutes this form.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Publishers Weekly Review
Thompson's survey of the last 20 years of socially-engaged, participatory, and often politically active art attempts to contextualize and historicize this diverse array of works "that emphasize participation, challenge power, and span disciplines." Seeking to transcend the view that art is a commodity in a gallery, the artists and organizations presented here create work "that involves more people than objects, whose horizon is social and political change." In 2007, Paul Chan put on free performances of Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot" in New Orleans' hurricane-stricken Lower Ninth Ward, while raising funds for local relief agencies. Enacting a more generalized critique of U.S. foreign policy and capitalism, The Yes Men printed and disseminated false editions of major global newspapers, and invented the "Dow Acceptable Risk calculator" which determines "how many deaths are acceptable when achieving profits." Interestingly, projects and events that are not typically considered art, such as Wikileaks, the celebrations that took place in Harlem after Barack Obama was elected President, and the occupation by protesters of Cairo's Tahrir Square in the Spring of 2011are also included, in a sense divorcing the notion of art from that of the individual artist. "As art enters life," Thompson (editor, The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life) writes, "the question that will motivate people far more than What is art? is the much more metaphysically relevant and pressing What is life?" Photos. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.CHOICE Review
In this book/exhibition catalogue, curator Thompson frames a discussion of social practice. To begin, seven essays address participation, spectacle, civic imagination, micro utopias, and contemporary movements. The second section introduces 100-plus projects by artists and collectives engaged in this field, which extends beyond the studio and into everyday life (an arena that is also called relational aesthetics, social aesthetics, new genre public art, and dialogic art). The third portion signals the award of the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, given by the organization Creative Time. This is an excellent primer and overview of how art and activism have taken shape over the past two decades. Though visually appealing, it has a few typographical errors and lacks critical framing. Photograph captions fail to provide full information consistently. The notes appended to each essay are not sufficient to engage discussion, particularly in the absence of an overall bibliography that might point to external source material. Despite these shortcomings, this book will inspire further scholarship in the field through its foregrounding of artists, collectives, and participants as agents of social change. It will appeal to museums, galleries, and libraries collecting in the areas of fine art, sociology, and cultural studies. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through graduate students. J. Decker Georgetown CollegeAuthor notes provided by Syndetics
Nato Thompson is Chief Curator at the New York--based public arts institution Creative Time. He edited The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life and Becoming Animal (both published by the MIT Press) and curated the MASS MoCA exhibitions they accompanied.