Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art

by Grant H. Kester

Overview

In Beyond the Sovereign Self Grant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in The Sovereign Self, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. Among others, Kester analyzes the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper, experimental practices associated with the escrache tradition in Argentina, and indigenous Canadian artists such as Nadia Myre and Michèle Taïna Audette, showing how socially engaged art catalyzes forms of resistance that operate beyond the institutional art world. From the Americas and Europe to Iran and South Africa, Kester presents a historical genealogy of recent engaged art practices rooted in a deep history of cultural production, beginning with nineteenth-century political struggles and continuing into contemporary anticolonial resistance and other social movements.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478027478
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/17/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Grant H. Kester is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, author of The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, and coeditor of Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010, all also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction  1
I. Within and Beyond the Canon
1. The Incommensurablity of Socially Engaged Art  33
2. Escrache and Autonomy  54
II. From Object to Event
3. Dematerialization and Aesthetics in Real Time  85
4. The Aesthetic of Answerability  105
III. A Dialogical Aesthetic
5. Social Labor and Communicative Action  137
6. Our Pernicious Temporality  171
7. Being Human as Praxis  202
Conclusion. Beyond the White Wall  229
Notes  235
Works Cited  255
Index  271

Editorial Reviews

With characteristic thoroughness, Grant H. Kester articulates the radical potential in challenging the cherished notion of art’s autonomy. Centering dialogic and activist art practices, he insightfully argues that the social labor of cultural resistance necessarily operates in generative forms of collectivity and dissensus.

Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology - Jennifer A. González

"[Kester's] passion for this topic and his commitment to research is evident, and this title will serve as a record as we see the world change along with the next generation of artists."

ARLIS/NA - Eboni Jones-Stewart

"A re-affirmation of the politicised and activist artistic and aesthetic practices that have been at the core of Kester’s scholarship to date. . . . an insightful, well-documented and often convincing critique of a certain idea of aesthetic autonomy; Kester’s is a ‘strong’ theory, the strength of which lies in its reading and re-evaluation of key philosophical and art theoretical texts, more so than in the heuristic purchase it demonstrates on artistic—and political—practice, past or present."

Radical Philosophy - Steyn Bergs

In a superlative demonstration of a hypothesis in action, Grant H. Kester’s definitive study Beyond the Sovereign Self effectively melts down, then reimagines our stagnated concepts of aesthetic autonomy and avant-gardism in a dauntless bid to retheorize the increasingly entangled, if not indistinguishable, realms of twenty-first-century social activism and art.

The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art - Gregory Sholette

"Kester’s ambition in Beyond the Sovereign Self, and by implication, in the entire two-volume work, is quite extraordinary. . . Kester’s ambitious work serves as a timely and substantial appreciation of socially engaged art, bearing witness to an exemplary understanding of its radically democratic essence in all its complexity."

Journal of Cultural Management and Policy - Björn Borsteinsson

Beyond the Sovereign Self serves to clear the space for another kind of art history, one focused on dialogical, not dialectical, approaches. In a world where subaltern subjects are more empowered than ever to speak, he reminds artists and art historians of the need to listen.

Theory & Event - John Zarobell

"In a superlative demonstration of a hypothesis in action, Grant H. Kester's definitive study Beyond the Sovereign Self effectively melts down, then reimagines our stagnated concepts of aesthetic autonomy and avant-gardism in a dauntless bid to retheorize the increasingly entangled, if not indistinguishable, realms of twenty-first-century social activism and art."--Gregory Sholette, author of "The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art"

"With characteristic thoroughness, Grant H. Kester articulates the radical potential in challenging the cherished notion of art's autonomy. Centering dialogic and activist art practices, he insightfully argues that the social labor of cultural resistance necessarily operates in generative forms of collectivity and dissensus."--Jennifer A. González, coeditor of "Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology"

From the Publisher