Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art

by Larne Abse Gogarty

Overview

Usable Pasts zeros in on two periods in the United States that saw the state increase its financial support for socially engaged works of culture. In the 1990s the political artworks by Suzanne lacy, Rick Lowe, and Martha Rosler helped usher in an era of social practice art, while in the 1930s saw the creation of the leftist Cultural Front and its proliferation of experiential theatre, modern dance, and photography. By analyzing these trends and their relationship to one another this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics, and in so doing writes a new history of social practice art in the United States.

From teenage mothers organising exhibitions that challenged welfare reform, to communist dance troupes choreographing their struggles as domestic workers, Usable Pasts addresses the aesthetics and politics of these attempts to transform society through art in relation to questions of state formation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642599008
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	05/02/2023
Series:	Historical Materialism
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Larne Abse Gogarty is a Lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art. She writes about modern and contemporary art, and has recently published essays in Third Text, and the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Figures

Introduction: Historicising Social Practice
 1 The New Deal Imaginary
 2 The Stakes of Social Practice
 3 Prevented Futures and Usable Pasts

1 Rehearsals for Real Life
 1 Performance and Critical Realism
 2 The Roof Is on Fire
 3 Code 33
 4 Injunction Granted
 5 Conclusion: Legislation and Rehearsals

2 Social Practice / Social Reproduction
 1 Introduction
 2 Cells in Organisms/Cogs in Machines
 3 Black and White at the Rockland Palace: The Body against the Belt
 4 Dance and Domestic Labour
 5 Expectations and Welfare Reform
 6 'Each Week We started with the Body'
 7 Expectations at Capp Street Gallery
 8 Conclusion: Reproducing Culture, Reproducing Life

3 Housing, Homelessness and Documentary
 1 If You Lived Here …
 2 One-Third of a Nation

4 Race, Nation and Usable Pasts
 1 Documentary and Nationalism
 2 Blackness and the Limits of a Usable Past
 3 Project Row Houses

Coda: Utility and Social Practice

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"From Dance of the Washerwomen and Living Newspapers in the 1930s, to artist Rick Lowe’s collaborative reimagining of a defunded Black neighborhood in modern-day Houston, Larne Abse Gogarty’s Usable Pasts is exactly what it claims to be: a superbly narrated history of the socio-economic conditions that make today’s surge of socially engaged art possible.
Working against cultural amnesia, Larne Abse Gogarty’s work is precisely that: a smart deep dive into the historical and structural conditions that make today’s surge of socially engaged art possible.
To paraphrase Lucy R. Lippard: we would be a lot further along if we had more studies like Usable Pasts."
– Professor Gregory Sholette, Queens College, Art Department, CUNY

"Neither a partisan nor an opponent of aesthetic 'usefulness', Larne Abse Gogarty rather brings the concept into long-overdue dialectical focus. By showing its interrelationships with the state, law, social reproduction, race and urban rebellion as well as its own immanent 'non-contemporaneity' (Bloch), her book makes a major contribution both to a revived Marxist art theory and a communist art history freed from the blinkers of comfortable nostalgia. Full of insightful close analysis of art practices as well as big-picture argument, this book is for any reader looking to confront the realities of political artmaking in a world of ever more contradictions and determinations – and to leave behind the stale verities of formalism versus engagement." – Dr. Marina Vishmidt, Goldsmiths, University of London, author of [Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital] (Brill, 2018)

From the Publisher