Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde offers a new way of analysing and theorizing the question of the avant-garde today. It is customary within art history and cultural history to argue that the avant-garde disappeared as an (anti)artistic gesture during the 1960s. The dissolution of the Situationist International in 1972 is often presented as the endpoint in the history of the avant-garde. The implosion of the ’68 revolt – quickly in France, after a long process of revolt and counter-revolt in countries like Italy – effectively ended the attempt to use art as a vehicle for a transformation of capitalist society. This book contributes to the discussion of the avant-garde today by discussing whether it is still relevant for a contemporary anti-systemic critique and analysing different instances where the avant-garde has creeped into protests and social experiments outside art and art institutions.

Includes essays from Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Esther Leslie, Abigail Susik, Natasha Gasparian, Marina Vishmidt, Yves Citton, and Gene Ray.