Radical History And The Politics Of Art

By (author) Rockhill Gabriel
Description:
Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, Rockhill demonstrates that art and politics are not fixed entities with a singular relation but rather dynamically negotiated, sociohistorical practices with shifting and imprecise borders. Radical History and the Politics of Art proposes a significant departure from extant debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics," and the result is an impressive foray into the force field of history, in which cultural practices are meticulously analyzed in their social and temporal dynamism without assuming a conceptual unity behind them. Rockhill thereby develops an alternative logic of history and historical change, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. Engaging with a diverse array of intellectual, artistic, and political constellations, this tour de force diligently maps the various interactions between different dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in precise fields of struggle.
Table of contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: Art and Politics in the Time of Radical History Part I. Historical Encounters Between Art and Politics 1. For a Radical Historicist Analytic of Aesthetic and Political Practices 2. Realism, Formalism, Commitment: Three Historic Positions on Art and Politics Part II. Visions of the Avant-Garde 3. The Theoretical Destiny of the Avant-Garde 4. Toward a Reconsideration of Avant-Garde Practices Part III. The Politics of Aesthetics 5. The Silent Revolution: Ranciere''s Rethinking of Aesthetics and Politics 6. Productive Contradictions: From Ranciere''s Politics of Aesthetics to the Social Politicity of the Arts Part IV. The Social Politicity of Aesthetic Practices 7. The Politicity of ''Apolitical'' Art: A Pragmatic Intervention Into the Art of the Cold War 8. Rethinking the Politics of Aesthetic Practices: Advancing the Critique of the Ontological Illusion and the Talisman Complex Conclusion: Radical Art and Politics-No End in Sight Notes Index
Review quote:
Direct and uncompromising in his views, Rockhill sets forward a political philosophy of aesthetics, that is at once sensuous and pragmatic. The research is based on German and French works in their original articulation, and the analyses themselves take up not what is thematic but, better, what is couched in contradiction. The book will be a strong contribution to a practical-both theoretical and historical-appreciation of aesthetics and politics. -- Tom Conley, Harvard University Art feels too impossibly urgent for it not to matter to the shape of our living together; yet locating where the join between life and art is, precisely, has proved elusive. In this invaluable study, Gabriel Rockhill vanquishes the myth that either there is some privileged moment - of form, content, or effect - uniting art and politics or there is none. With subtlety and analytic rigor, Rockhill demonstrates the nexus connecting - or separating - art and politics is always bound to the dense weave of social practices located at concrete historical times in specific geographical locales. Along the way Rockhill provides a scintillating new analysis of the avant-garde, and the most acute analysis of Jacques Ranciere''s aesthetic theory I have come across. Anyone interested in the question of art and politics will want to read this book. -- J. M. Bernstein. New School for Social Research Much has been written about the relationship between art and politics. "How may one reunite what was originally separated?" is a question that foregrounds a deep-seated sophism that is the cause of major misunderstandings, for art and politics have never been different entities and one understands nothi