Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art

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.

"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)

• AcknowledgmentsList of FiguresIntroduction: Historicising Social Practice1 The New Deal Imaginary2 The Stakes of Social Practice3 Prevented Futures and Usable Pasts1 Rehearsals for Real Life1 Performance and Critical Realism2 The Roof Is on Fire3 Code 334 Injunction Granted5 Conclusion: Legislation and Rehearsals2 Social Practice / Social Reproduction1 Introduction2 Cells in Organisms/Cogs in Machines3 Black and White at the Rockland Palace: The Body against the Belt4 Dance and Domestic Labour5 Expectations and Welfare Reform6 ‘Each Week We started with the Body’7 Expectations at Capp Street Gallery8 Conclusion: Reproducing Culture, Reproducing Life3 Housing, Homelessness and Documentary1 If You Lived Here …2 One-Third of a Nation4 Race, Nation and Usable Pasts1 Documentary and Nationalism2 Blackness and the Limits of a Usable Past3 Project Row HousesCoda: Utility and Social PracticeBibliographyIndex