Anthony Gardner

From biennials and installations to participatory practices, contemporary art has come to embrace an aesthetic of democratization. Art's capacity for democracy building now defines its contemporary relevance, part of a broader, global glorification of democracy as, it seems, the only legitimate model of politics. Yet numerous artists reject the alignment of art and democracy -- in part because democracy has been associated not only with utopian political visions but also with neoliberal incursions and military interventions. It is just this paradox of democracy that Anthony Gardner explores in Politically Unbecoming, examining work from the 1980s to the 2000s by artists who have challenged democracy as the defining political, critical, and aesthetic frame for their work. In doing so, these artists also develop alternative artistic politics and practices that can remap the transformations in art and its politics since the end of the Cold War. The artists whose work Gardner examines all spent their formative years in Eastern or Western Europe, developing "postsocialist" practices in the wake of socialism's eclipse by neoliberalism (and inspired by nonconformist art from socialist-era Europe). All of these artists -- who include Ilya Kabakov, the art collective NSK, and Thomas Hirschhorn -- depend on participation between audience and artwork; yet for them, participation does not exemplify democratization but rather offers critical engagement with certain tropes of democracy. These artists, Gardner argues, enact an aesthetic that is "politically unbecoming" in two senses: in its withdrawal from overdetermined political categories of contemporary art; and in its perceived indecency in defying the "propriety" of democracy.

Postsocialist Art Against Democracy

Politically Unbecoming

Charles Green

"Provides a comprehensive global history of biennialization from the rise of the European star-curator in the 1970s and the emergence of mega-exhibitions in Asia in the 1990s to the current globalization of biennials"--

The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art

Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta

This innovative new history examines in-depth how the growing popularity of large-scale international survey exhibitions, or 'biennials', has influenced global contemporary art since the 1950s. Provides a comprehensive global history of biennialization from the rise of the European star-curator in the 1970s to the emergence of mega-exhibitions in Asia in the 1990s Introduces a global array of case studies to illustrate the trajectory of biennials and their growing influence on artistic expression, from the Biennale de la Méditerranée in Alexandria, Egypt in 1955, the second Havana Biennial of 1986, New York’s Whitney Biennial in 1993, and the 2002 Documenta11 in Kassel, to the Gwangju Biennale of 2014 Explores the evolving curatorial approaches to biennials, including analysis of the roles of sponsors, philanthropists and biennial directors and their re-shaping of the contemporary art scene Uses the history of biennials as a means of illustrating and inciting further discussions of globalization in contemporary art

Zdenka Badovinac

Eda Čufer

"This book is the generously illustrated, lavishly documented, critically narrated story of one of the most significant art collectives of the late 20th century. In 1984, three groups of artists in post-Tito Yugoslavia - the music and multimedia group Laibach, the visual arts group IRWIN, and the theatre group Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre - came together to form the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) art collective. Adopting the symbols, codes, appearances and discourses of facism, nationalism, state power, socialist realist and avant-garde art, and pushing the strategies of over-identification and subversive affirmation to their limit, NSK exposed the common foundations of various regimes, systems, and ideologies, while affirming that "art and totalitarianism are not mutually exclusive." Employing music, video, film, exhibitions, writing, graphic design, architecture, theatre, and public relations to probe the aesthetic possibilities of declining socialism and proliferating capitalism, NSK introduced an idiosyncratic version of postmodernism (the retro-avant-garde) into the globalizing cultural sphere."--Back cover.

Anthony Gardner

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