Radical resonances : art, self-organised cultural activity and the production of postcapitalist subjectivity, or, Deferred self-inquiry of a precarious artworker, 2008-2011

• Main Author: Abbott, Andrew Derek Ross
• Published: University of Leeds 2012
• Subjects: 700.92
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.581446

The thesis and portfolio of practical work presents a parallel inquiry into socially transformative art practice and the evaluative framework proper to it. It explores how art contributes to a better world and the form such practice takes in an increasingly expanded, 'precarious' and interdisciplinary sphere. The varied nature of the work under question leads to the adoption of a structure that distinguishes practices by their operation in different spaces or ecologies: the individual, social and structural. A further distinction is made between those practices that self-identify as art (and the institutional, market-led and capitalist framework this can entail), and those that either actively disavow or go unrecognised as art due to their distance from the signifying apparatuses of the discipline. This 'informal' art practice is referred to as 'self-organised cultural activity' and opens up on to discussions of the relative merits of DIY practices including music, self-publishing, political activism and so on. The thesis demonstrates how these often distanced and apparently contradictory practices find resonance and whose accumulative effect contributes to the conditions for a paradigmatic shift that would constitute 'postcapitalism'. The connecting thread between these sites and practices is their potential for effecting change at the level of the individual via a subjectivising aesthetic rupture. Contextualised by poststructuralist, postanarchist and Autonomist Marxist political philosophy and debates in contemporary art criticism and theory, the thesis and dossier of practice contribute to a richer understanding of - and expanded language with which to discuss - the relation between art and politics. It draws links between normally unconnected practices, identifying the often overlooked or underplayed aesthetic experience within socially engaged art and the political resonances of aesthetic experience, attending to gaps in thought and practice around art and social change.