BALTIC+

Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991-2011

Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991-2011
Library Shelf Location 07.THOM
Publication Date
Description

Over the past twenty years, an abundance of art forms have emerged that use aesthetics to affect social dynamics. These works are often produced by collectives or come out of a community context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situations ranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with the texture of living, these art works often blur the line between art and life. This book offers the first global portrait of a complex and exciting mode of cultural production--one that has virtually redefined contemporary art practice. Living as Form grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a thirty-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of color images. The artists include the Danish collective Superflex, who empower communities to challenge corporate interest; Turner Prize nominee Jeremy Deller, creator of socially and politically charged performance works; Women on Waves, who provide abortion services and information to women in regions where the procedure is illegal; and Santiago Cirugeda, an architect who builds temporary structures to solve housing problems. Living as Form contains commissioned essays from noted critics and theorists who look at this phenomenon from a global perspective and broaden the range of what constitutes this form. Contributing authorsClaire Bishop, Carol Becker, Teddy Cruz, Brian Holmes, Shannon Jackson, Maria Lind, Anne Pasternak, Nato Thompson. Contents: Living as form / Nato Thompson -- Participation and spectacle: where are we now? / Claire Bishop -- Returning on bikes: notes on social practice / Maria Lind -- Democratizing urbanization and the search for a new civic imagination / Teddy Cruz -- Microutopias: public practice in the public sphere / Carol Becker -- Eventwork: the fourfold matrix of contemporary social movements / Brian Holmes -- Living takes many forms / Shannon Jackson -- Projects -- The Leonore Annenberg prize for art and social change.

ISBN 9780262017343
Quantity 1
Pages 259 p. : col. ill. ; 26 cm.
Author Nato Thompson
Format Hardback
Publishers MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., Creative Time, New York
Categories Surveys of Modern & Contemporary Art, Art by Subject, Social Practice
Keywords Community, Life, Society, Participation, Activism, Social issues
Language English

Other Artists

Other Recent Books