Art's Assemblies

Art's Assemblies presents a new political aesthetics for the present. Claudia Breger makes a case for art's power to act politically in significant, manifold ways by reconnecting twenty-first-century philosophical frameworks to the more boldly political aesthetics of European modernisms, particularly as developed in response to historical fascism. Thus, the book develops dialogues between recent work in actor-network theory, Black radical thought, neo-marxism, affect, and queer studies, and the twentieth-century tradition of Critical Theory, with literature, film, TV, and art installation examples from both contexts. As acts of political alignment as well as imaginative prefiguration, "e;art's assemblies"e; bring together heterogeneous elements and actions in (polyphonic) "e;political concert."e; This includes how artworks "e;track"e; and "e;trace"e; pieces of real-world materials even in fantastic contexts; how they work through unfinished histories of violence and dehumanization by "e;animating"e; archival documents; how they "e;fabulate"e; different historical accounts without engaging in the "e;forging"e; actions of fake news; and how they counter the accumulated nightmares surrounding us through practices of "e;dreaming"e; interwoven with actions of "e;drafting"e; or "e;demanding."e; In this challenging political moment, Breger's work speaks across disciplines to articulate a new vision of how art can engage with the world-and imagine different futures.