Yates McKee: Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (2016)

“The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond

What is the relation of art to the practice of radical politics today? Strike Art explores this question through the historical lens of Occupy, an event that had artists at its core. Precarious, indebted, and radicalized, artists redirected their creativity from servicing the artworld into an expanded field of organizing in order to construct of a new—if internally fraught—political imaginary set off against the common enemy of the 1%. In the process, they called the bluff of a contemporary art system torn between ideals of radical critique, on the one hand, and an increasing proximity to Wall Street on the other—oftentimes directly targeting major art institutions themselves as sites of action.

Tracking the work of groups including MTL, Not an Alternative, the Illuminator, the Rolling Jubilee, and G.U.L.F, Strike Art shows how Occupy ushered in a new era of artistically-oriented direct action that continues to ramify far beyond the initial act of occupation itself into ongoing struggles surrounding labor, debt, and climate justice, concluding with a consideration of the overlaps between such work and the aesthetic practices of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Art after Occupy, McKee suggests, contains great potentials of imagination and action for a renewed left project that are still only beginning to ripen, at once shaking up and taking flight from the art system as we know it.”

Publisher Verso Books, London and New York, Feb 2016
ISBN 9781784781880, 1784781886
296 pages

Reviews: Marc James Léger (Marx & Philosophy, 2016), Philipp Kleinmichel (Radical Philosophy, 2018), Paloma Checa-Gismero (Field, 2016), John Ayscough (Visual Culture in Britain, 2017), Kristin Gecan (Chicago Review, 2016).
Discussion: Gregory Sholette, a.o. (e-flux supercommunity, 2016).
Book launch

Publisher
WorldCat

EPUB (6 MB)

Potlatch: bulletin d’information de l’Internationale lettriste, 1-29 (1954-1957) [FR, EN, RU]

Potlatch: bulletin d’information de groupe français de l’Internationale lettriste, later Potlatch: bulletin d’information de l’Internationale lettriste was a periodical of the Lettrist International published in 29 numbers from 22 June 1954 through 5 November 1957. It appeared weekly for the first 12 numbers, then monthly through the number 24, afterwards occasionally. The editors were André-Frank Conord (1-8), Mohamed Dahou (9-18, 20-22), Gil J Wolman (19), and Jacques Fillon (23-24). Several members, including Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, Mohamed Dahou, and Gil J Wolman went on to form the Situationist International.

Published in Paris, 1954-1957
via Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

PDFs (several pages missing)

Translations:
English (selected texts, n.d.)
Russian (selected texts, c2017)

Karen Kurczynski: The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up (2014)

“Danish artist Asger Jorn has long been recognized for his founding contributions to the Cobra and Situationist International movements – yet art historical scholarship on Jorn has been sparse, particularly in English. This study offers a synthetic account of the essential phases of this artist’s career. It addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and his collaborations with various artists’ groups from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. Situating Jorn’s work in an international, post-Second World War context, Karen Kurczynski reframes our understanding of the 1950s, away from the Abstract-Expressionist focus on individual expression, toward a more open-ended conception of art as a public engagement with contemporary culture and politics.”

Publisher Ashgate, 2014
ISBN 9781409431978, 1409431975
xiii+261 pages
via Situationist Library

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (13 MB)