Usefulness in Contemporary Art and Politics

This article explores the emphasis on usefulness in contemporary art, focusing on social practice art in the United States and Europe through Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s establishment of the ‘Asociación de Arte Útil’ in 2011, and the rebranding of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) as a ‘useful museum’. The article addresses the affirmation of usefulness and ‘use values’ within these case studies and beyond in relation to Marxist, post-Marxist, and feminist theories of social reproduction and the state. By attending to issues of citizenship, race, and migration, the article asks how we should approach the aesthetic and political stakes of artworks that strive to be ‘useful’ through performing tasks associated with social reproduction as they have historically taken place in the home or via the welfare state

Anti-fascist Art Theory: A Roundtable Discussion

Taking the form of a conversation among three art theorists whose work focuses on contemporary art, culture and emancipatory politics on the left, this roundtable article begins from the question: what concepts and ideas can be drawn into an anti-fascist art theory today? The discussion opens by considering the ambivalence towards speaking about fascism in current debates beyond art and the complex positioning of art between (or rather, across) the status quo and its subversion; proceeds by examining the current technological apparatus as regards the mediation of subjectivity; looks at the articulation of sexuality and whiteness; and concludes by proposing that anti-fascism as a complex political position that crosses an art field sustained also by an attention economy must address the field’s structural procedures of exclusion while also maintain its focus on the specificity of fascist politics

Feeling and Form in Mark Bradford's American Pavilion

Mark Bradford describes his practice as “social abstraction”, defined as “abstract art with a social or political context clinging to the edges”. The article addresses Bradford’s exhibition Tomorrow is Another Day at the American Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale and considers the artist’s claim through the critical reception of his work alongside central debates within the history of modernism. It then explores how dispossession and racialization can be figured in relation to modernist myths such as the grid. Finally, in addressing the “social” in Bradford’s practice, the study questions the collaboration Bradford embarked on with Rio Terà dei Pensieri, an organisation supporting the reintegration of prisoners and people under criminal judgment in Venice, arguing that the reformism of that project cuts against Bradford’s use of myth as a mode of resistance