Toward a lexicon of usership (fragments) / Stephen Wright. The thirteenth place and the eleventh question: the artist-citizen and her strategies of devolution / Nancy Adajania -- Nationless state: a series of case studies / Ariella Azoulay -- Ambient perspective and the citizen's moving eyes / Amelia Barikin and Nikos Papastergiadis -- Notes on the question of audience / Bassam El Baroni -- Standing man / Manuel Beltran -- Another world / a conversation between David Graeber and Michelle Kuo -- Birth of the rebel citizen in Germany: season's greetings from Sarrazin / Tom Holert -- Art and the paradoxical citizen / Brian Holmes -- The politics of organized networks: the art of collective coordination / Geert Lovink -- Public happiness / A conversation between Elzbieta Matynia and Joanna Warsza -- A long walk to the land of the people: contemporary art in the spectre of spectatorship / Simon Sheikh -- Democracy's theater of cruelty / Jonas Staal -- Toward a lexicon of usership (fragments) / Stephen Wright.
Summary:
Future publics' includes contributions by artists, theorists, and activists who reflect on the emergence of radically new publics, whose origins in moments of social crisis and political uncertainty inspire them to question existing forms of collective organization, decision-making structures, and protocols for the construction of social value and cultural meaning. These future publics recognize that the institutions of political and cultural life cannot continue as usual, following the collapse of late capital's certitudes. Utopian yet pragmatic, insurgent yet self-critical, these publics resist being normalized into the official, conscriptive definitions of citizenship and instead contribute actively to the formation of new solidarities, cutting across conventional lines of class, region, ethnicity, and ideological affiliation. In the cultural field, future publics demonstrate a capacity for engagement that exceeds the passive observation of the 'viewer' or 'consumer'. While developing a genealogy for future publics, the contributors to this volume also assemble a vocabulary that points towards artistic practices and emergent groups staged outside the rigid institutions of public culture: they address, among other phenomena, rebel citizenry, cultural users, stateless states, and devolutionary platforms. The reader explores how the imaginative and intellectual labor of such formations has proposed new speculative forms of belonging and collaboration beyond the ones envisaged within the paradigm of 'contemporary art'.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.