Avant-Gardes in Crisis : Art and Politics in the Long 1970s

"Charts underexamined genealogies of minoritarian aesthetic responses to the multiple crises of the long 1970s"-- Provided by publisher Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Avant-Gardes in Crisis Institutionality and Anti-Institutionality amid Institutional Collapse Minoritarian and Radical Avant-Gardes Becoming Minor in the Long 1970s Genealogies of Crisis Notes I. Enclosures Chapter 1 Against Possession Property Personhood Notes Chapter 2 The Poetics of Drift: Coloniality, Place, and Environmental Racialization Blight: Race and Environment The Color Line and the Dialectic of Development Life in the Ruins: Drifting on the Ghost Ship Coda: The Last Black Man in San Francisco Notes Chapter 3 Pansexual Public Porn: Trans Gender Docu-Porn in the Long 1970s Is Pornography Harmful to You? Ourselves, in the Pursuit of Pleasure Safe Sex Notes Chapter 4 The Ethics of Provocation: Censoring the Past in German Cold War Punk Official Regimes of Morality Punk and Fascism The Moral Code of the West German Punk Scene OHL as Ethical Subject and the Indexing of Heimatfront Conclusion Notes II. Infrastructures Chapter 5 Indexing Post-Fordism at P.S. 1 The Dual Crises of the Art Institution and the Keynesian State Embracing the Ruins at P.S. 1 The Social Practice Art of Rooms Notes Chapter 6 Under the Figure of the Palm Tree Notes Chapter 7 I Felt Like a Machine: Martha Rosler’s Aesthetics of Survival A Complex Relationship with Technology The Trough of Techno-Fascism What’s in This Stuff? Conclusion Notes Chapter 8 Yayoi Kusama’s Immaterial Drive Bodies That Matter Bodies That Move Bodies That Meme Notes III. Commitments Chapter 9 Sandinista! The US Avant-Garde’s Response to Central American Upheavals in the Long 1970s I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. Notes Chapter 10 The Making of New Narrative: Gay Liberation and the Poetics of Revolutionary Agency The Making of New Narrative Gay Liberation and New Narrative Sincerity, Militancy, Crisis Workers and Queers of the World, Unite! Conclusion Notes Afterword On Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Untitled Notes Contributors Index Avant-Gardes in Crisis claims that the avant-gardes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are in crisis, in that artmaking both responds to political, economic, and social crises and reveals a crisis of confidence regarding resistance's very possibility. Specifically, this collection casts contemporary avant-gardes as a reaction to a crisis in the reproduction of life that accelerated in the 1970s—a crisis that encompasses living-wage rarity, deadly epidemics, and other aspects of an uneven management of vitality indexed by race, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, class, and disability. The contributors collectively argue that a minoritarian concept of the avant-garde, one attuned to uneven patterns of resource depletion and infrastructural failure (broadly conceived), clarifies the interplay between art and politics as it has played out, for instance, in discussions of art's autonomy or institutionality. Writ large, this book seeks to restore the historical and political context for the debates on the avant-garde that have raged since the 1970s. Introduction: Avant-gardes in crisis / Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Andrew Strombeck -- Against possession / Sarah Dowling -- The poetics of drift : coloniality, place, and environmental racialization / Samia Rahimtoola -- Pansexual public porn : trans gender docu-porn in the long 1970s / RL Goldberg -- The ethics of provocation : censoring the past in German Cold War punk / Priscilla Layne -- Indexing post-Fordism at P.S. 1 / Andrew Strombeck -- Under the figure of the palm tree / Jennifer Wild -- I felt like a machine : Martha Rosler's aesthetics of survival / Matt Tierney -- Yayoi Kusama's immaterial drive / Shannon Finck -- Sandinista! : The U.S. Avant-garde's response to Central American upheavals in the long 1970s / Javier Padilla -- The making of new narrative : gay liberation and the poetics of revolutionary agency / David W. Pritchard -- Afterword: On Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Untitled / Jean-Thomas Tremblay