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Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century By Nato Thompson Melville House, 2015 165 pp./$20.00 (hb)
Anyone who has been involved in or has researched activist art in the past two decades is likely to be familiar with the work of Nato Thompson. As assistant curator at MASS MoCA, he co-edited, with Gregory Sholette, the catalog for the groundbreaking exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004-05), and as the chief curator of Creative Time, he edited the massive anthology Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 (2012). Whereas these previous books presented short essays by Thompson, this new book-length text provides readers with a better appreciation of the thoughts of one of the best-known and most whimsical activist curators. Seeing Power is a finely woven and detailed argument on the issues defining activist art today. With no endnotes, no bibliography, and no image captions, the book is a pleasant, user-friendly experience that discusses the work of leading socially engaged artists, including REPOhistory, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Growing Economy), Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Paul Chan, WochenKlausur, Yomango, William Pope.L, Rick Lowe, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Trevor Paglen.
From the start, Thompson tells us that Seeing Power is not a typical book about art and politics, but rather a combination of philosophy and practice, with observations based on twenty years of immersion in the activist milieu and the art world (vii). The productive tension between contemporary art and Thompson's approach to a distinctly American grassroots version of anarchist politics is the distinguishing feature of this undertaking. It is clear from the outset that the purpose of conjoining activism with art is to bring about radical social and subjective change. The capitalist system is throughout the text an ominous presence affecting all social institutions and in particular that of cultural production. Whereas from the title of the book one might have expected a Foucauldian lens through which to "see power," it is Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemonic contestation that is first evoked as a way to define the practices of everyday life and the alternative spaces that animate the text.
One of the main points of Peter Biirger's 1984 text, Theory of the Avant-Garde, is that the...