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Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art

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Published Mar 2022

Larne Abse Gogarty

Author: Larne Abse Gogarty
Usable Pasts addresses projects dating to two periods in the United States that saw increased financial support from the state for socially engaged culture. By analysing artworks dating to the 1990s by Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe and Martha Rosler in relation to experimental theatre, modern dance, and photography produced within the leftist Cultural Front of the 1930s, this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics in order to write 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.

Biographical Note

Larne Abse Gogarty, PhD 2015, University College London, 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.

Readership

Students and scholars of contemporary art, social practice, radical aesthetics and histories of culture during the Depression, as well as artists, art students, curators and critics.

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