From text to action -- Park fiction, ala plastica, and dialogue -- The risk of diversity -- Programmatic multiplicity -- Art theory and the post-structuralist canon -- Lessons in futility -- Enclosure acts -- The twelfth seat and the mirrored ceiling -- The atelier as workshop -- Labor, praxis, and representation -- The divided and incomplete subject of yesterday -- Memories of development -- The limits of ethical capitalism -- The art of the locality -- Blindness and insight -- The (...) invention of the public -- The boulevards of the inner city -- Park fiction : desire, resistance, and complicity -- A culture of needles : project row houses in Houston. (shrink)

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 Myer 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. (shrink)