Larne Abse Gogarty – författare

Usable Pasts zeros in on two periods in the United States that saw the state increase its financial support for socially engaged works of culture. In the 1990s the political artworks by Suzanne lacy, Rick Lowe, and Martha Rosler helped usher in an era of social practice art, while in the 1930s saw the creation of the leftist Cultural Front and its proliferation of experiential theatre, modern dance, and photography. By analyzing these trends and their relationship to one another this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics, and in so doing writes a new history of social practice art in the United States.From teenage mothers organising exhibitions that challenged welfare reform, to communist dance troupes choreographing their struggles as domestic workers, Usable Pasts addresses the aesthetics and politics of these attempts to transform society through art in relation to questions of state formation.

As we search for ways to imagine a life beyond capital and its drive to extinction, the dream of the institution as a critical refuge from existing social relations becomes less and less credible. Infrastructural Critique proposes a new materialist counter-praxis. By treating the contemporary art institution as a resource base and site of struggle, Vishmidt reanimates critique by connecting it to the effort to erode capitalist authority over the means of our existence, build power and seize resources for new practices of social invention. A tour-de-force of Marxist philosophy, art criticism, Milanese radical feminism and AppleTV+ dinosaur documentaries, this book, edited in the wake of the author's tragic early death, weaves in the gaps of theory and praxis to assess the main infrastructurally critical artmakers at work today. Approaching their practices as 'crystal drills' - at once means of seeing, and practical cutting implements - the text showcases the light-bending, life-shaping thinking of one of the most playful, politically radical theorists of her generation.