Brave New Avant Garde : Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics

Brave New Avant Garde is a collection of essays that ask the questions: what is an adequate model of contemporary avant garde practice and what are its theoretical premises? With this it asks the related question, echoing Alain Badiou: must the avant garde hypothesis be abandoned? Brave New Avant Garde stands in opposition to postmodern post-politics and the view that radical practice has no other future than its reduction to the workings of the free market in the form of the "simple process of cultural production" or to variations on the cultural politics of representation. Today's avant garde, formed in the wake of the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of the anti-globalization movement, represents a counter-power that rejects the inevitability of capitalist integration. The way out for artists in today's world of creative industries is defined in these pages as a psychoanalytically informed sinthomeopathic practice , a critical identification with prevailing conditions of production that avoids the surplus enjoyment of the ideology of postmodern pluralism. Introduction: The avant garde hypothesis -- Andrea Fraser and the subjectivization of institutional critique -- Community subjects -- In a way we are all Hokies: polylogue on the socio-symbolic frameworks of community art -- A brief excursus on avant garde and community art -- Welcome to the cultural goodwill revolution: on class composition in the age of classless struggle -- The subject supposed to over-identify: BAVO and the fundamental fantasy of a cultural avant garde -- The revolution will (not) be aestheticized -- From artistic activism to geocritique: a few questions for Brian Holmes. Brave New Avant Garde provides an unexpected exploration of critical strategies for anticapitalist cultural theory and practice.