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Usable Pasts zeros in on two periods in the United States that saw the state increase its financial support for socially engaged works of culture. In the 1990s the political artworks by Suzanne lacy, Rick Lowe, and Martha Rosler helped usher in an era of social practice art, while in the 1930s saw the creation of the leftist Cultural Front and its proliferation of experiential theatre, modern dance, and photography. By analyzing these trends and their relationship to one another this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics, and in so doing writes 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.
Larne Abse Gogarty is a Lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art. She writes about modern and contemporary art, and has recently published essays in Third Text, and the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Introduction: Historicising Social Practice
1 The New Deal Imaginary
2 The Stakes of Social Practice
3 Prevented Futures and Usable Pasts
1 Rehearsals for Real Life
1 Performance and Critical Realism
2 The Roof Is on Fire
3 Code 33
4 Injunction Granted
5 Conclusion: Legislation and Rehearsals
2 Social Practice / Social Reproduction
1 Introduction
2 Cells in Organisms/Cogs in Machines
3 Black and White at the Rockland Palace: The Body against the Belt
4 Dance and Domestic Labour
5 Expectations and Welfare Reform
6 'Each Week We started with the Body'
7 Expectations at Capp Street Gallery
8 Conclusion: Reproducing Culture, Reproducing Life
3 Housing, Homelessness and Documentary
1 If You Lived Here …
2 One-Third of a Nation
4 Race, Nation and Usable Pasts
1 Documentary and Nationalism
2 Blackness and the Limits of a Usable Past
3 Project Row Houses
Coda: Utility and Social Practice
Bibliography
Index