Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9789004297142)

Usable Pasts addresses projects dating to two periods in the United States that saw increased financial support from the state for socially engaged culture. By analysing artworks dating to the 1990s by Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe and Martha Rosler in relation to experimental theatre, modern dance, and photography produced within the leftist Cultural Front of the 1930s, this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics in order to write a new history of social practice art in the United States. From teenage mothers organising exhibitions that challenged welfare reform, to communist dance troupes choreographing their struggles as domestic workers, Usable Pasts addresses the aesthetics and politics of these attempts to transform society through art in relation to questions of state formation.

Author: Larne Abse Gogarty
ISBN-10: 9004297146
ISBN-13: 9789004297142
Publisher: Brill
Language: English
Published: 03/24/2022
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover