Led Art: Documents of Time: 1993-2003 (2020)

“In an extraordinary socio-political turmoil that shoved Yugoslavia into a war and complete international isolation during the 1990s, activity in culture and the arts was one of possible ways to survive and not be drowned in cataclysmic reality. Under those circumstances, in 1993 painter Nikola Džafo has found Led Art (Ice Art) group. Its projects bear the epithet of engaged art that resisted the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Led Art gathered more than 300 individuals in close to fifty projects during the ten-year activity period: artists, sociologists, art historians, journalists, scientists. This book covers the activities of the group and the chronology of the social and political events in the former Yugoslavia.”

Translated by Goran Mimica and Svetozar Poštić
Publisher Multi-media center Led Art, Novi Sad, 2020
ISBN 9788690537570
254 pages
via Struron

PDF (23 MB)

Art, Engagement, Economy: the Working Practice of Caroline Woolard (2020)

“Art, Engagement, Economy: the Working Practice of Caroline Woolard proposes a politics of transparent production in the arts, whereby heated negotiations and mundane budgets are presented alongside documentation of finished gallery installations.

Readers follow the behind-the-scenes work that is required to produce interdisciplinary art projects, from a commission at MoMA to a self-organized, international barter network with over 20,000 participants. With contextual analysis of the political economy of the arts, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the COVID pandemic of 2020, this book suggests that artists can bring studio-based sculptural techniques to an approach to art-making that emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue.”

Foreword by Patricia C. Phillips; introduction by Caroline Woolard; texts by D. Graham Burnett, Alison Burstein, Stamatina Gregory, Larissa Harris, Leigh Claire La Berge, Stephanie Owens, Cybele Maylone, Steven Matijcio, Sheetal Prajapati, Caitlin Rubin, Gabrielle Lavin Suzenski, and Caroline Woolard; interviews by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve and Tina Rivers Ryan.

Publisher Onomatopee, Eindhoven, November 2020
Creative Commons BY-SA License
ISBN 9789493148345, 9493148343
568 pages

Book website
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (287 MB, last section missing)
PDFs

Leigh Claire La Berge: Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (2019)

“The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others’ financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, August 2019
ISBN 1478004231, 9781478004233
xiii+261 pages

Reviews: Noni Brynjolson (Field J), Lee Painter-Kim (Women’s Studies), Amber Taylor (E3W).

Interviews with author: Andreas Petrossiants (e-flux, 2018, podcast), Wen Zhuang (LA Review of Books, 2020), Andreas Petrossiants (Brooklyn Rail, 2020), Pierre d’Alancaisez (New Books Network, 2021, podcast).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (11 MB)
Internet Archive (multiple formats)