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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.
Price: $165.00
Pages: 228
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Historical Materialism Book Series
Publication Date:
24 March 2022
ISBN: 9789004297142
Format: Hardcover
"From Dance of the Washerwomen and Living Newspapers in the 1930s, to artist Rick Lowe’s collaborative reimagining of a defunded Black neighborhood in modern-day Houston, Larne Abse Gogarty’s Usable Pasts is exactly what it claims to be: a superbly narrated history of the socio-economic conditions that make today’s surge of socially engaged art possible.
Working against cultural amnesia, Larne Abse Gogarty’s work is precisely that: a smart deep dive into the historical and structural conditions that make today’s surge of socially engaged art possible.
To paraphrase Lucy R. Lippard: we would be a lot further along if we had more studies like Usable Pasts."
– Professor Gregory Sholette, Queens College, Art Department, CUNY
"Neither a partisan nor an opponent of aesthetic 'usefulness', Larne Abse Gogarty rather brings the concept into long-overdue dialectical focus. By showing its interrelationships with the state, law, social reproduction, race and urban rebellion as well as its own immanent 'non-contemporaneity' (Bloch), her book makes a major contribution both to a revived Marxist art theory and a communist art history freed from the blinkers of comfortable nostalgia. Full of insightful close analysis of art practices as well as big-picture argument, this book is for any reader looking to confront the realities of political artmaking in a world of ever more contradictions and determinations – and to leave behind the stale verities of formalism versus engagement." – Dr. Marina Vishmidt, Goldsmiths, University of London, author of [Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital] (Brill, 2018)
Working against cultural amnesia, Larne Abse Gogarty’s work is precisely that: a smart deep dive into the historical and structural conditions that make today’s surge of socially engaged art possible.
To paraphrase Lucy R. Lippard: we would be a lot further along if we had more studies like Usable Pasts."
– Professor Gregory Sholette, Queens College, Art Department, CUNY
"Neither a partisan nor an opponent of aesthetic 'usefulness', Larne Abse Gogarty rather brings the concept into long-overdue dialectical focus. By showing its interrelationships with the state, law, social reproduction, race and urban rebellion as well as its own immanent 'non-contemporaneity' (Bloch), her book makes a major contribution both to a revived Marxist art theory and a communist art history freed from the blinkers of comfortable nostalgia. Full of insightful close analysis of art practices as well as big-picture argument, this book is for any reader looking to confront the realities of political artmaking in a world of ever more contradictions and determinations – and to leave behind the stale verities of formalism versus engagement." – Dr. Marina Vishmidt, Goldsmiths, University of London, author of [Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital] (Brill, 2018)
Larne Abse Gogarty, PhD 2015, University College London, 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.