The Fevered Specters of Art

Examining the theories and practices of radical leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

This is the final chapter of a long-term project curated by Edit Molnár, Lívia Páldi, and Marcel Schwierin that started with a group exhibition at Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, in 2016. The show looked back on the epoch of Cold War radicalism and anticolonial revolution—an era characterized by a proliferation of ideas about how radical social change could permeate the globe.

The book, like the exhibition itself, presents a variety of approaches that, through specific events and historical contexts, survey the theories and practices of radical leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the relationship between politics and aesthetics. It also investigates the ways in which artists rethink the possibilities of new political subjects and how complex sociohistorical connections can be questioned and revisited in the realm of art.

Contributors

Stefanie Baumann, Felix Gmelin, Ho Tzu Nyen, Rajkamal Kahlon, Sarinah Masukor, Kirill Medvedev, Edit Molnár, Lívia Páldi, Rachel O'Reilly, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Marcel Schwierin, Catarina Simão, Suzanne Treister, Jan Verwoert

Nataša Ilić is a freelance curator and a member of the curators collective What, How & for Whom / WHW, a non profit organization for visual culture, formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb and Berlin.

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and theorist, based in Berlin.

Jan Verwoert lives in Hamburg and works as a freelance writer. He is a member of the advisory board of the Kunstverein Munich and Guest Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Academy of Umeå.Examining the theories and practices of radical leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the relationship between politics and aesthetics.