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17.10.24 Join us for the somewhat belated launch of our book, Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital (Palgrave Macmillan). We will be in conversation with Larne Abse Gogarty, John Roberts and Stevphen Shukaitis about irony and critique, artistic labour and the legacy of the avant garde. Blurb and bios below. The event is free to attend, but please sign up here.

Book Launch: Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital

Contemporary art relies on an expansionist, modernist ideal and still progresses through a critique of earlier forms of democratisation. But beneath this democratic drive, lurks a creeping crisis. Under neoliberalism, criticality has become a zone of value production. A self-deprecating irony, exposing and re-enacting this position of impotence, is one of the few gestures left in the arsenal of critical art. Against this irony, this book pits overidentification. This term has been taken to mean a kind of parodic mimicry of institutional power. Using a broad tapestry of sources, from political philosophers to art theorists, from post-Marxist critiques of labour to ethnographic studies, it proposes an interpretation of overidentification that does not collapse into ironic posturing. The authors differentiate this from bad faith flirting with taboo aesthetics by focusing on practices grounded in a genuine identification with power that ushers the kind of excess implied by overidentification. It is these forms of overidentification that destabilise the metastasis of liberal-democracy. Staging forms of critique not so readily absorbed into the structure of the present, these subversive performances herald a future beyond the democratic paradox.

Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London. She works as a lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She is the author of What We Do Is Secret Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (2023) and Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (2022). She has published in journals and magazines including Art Monthly, New Socialist, Tate Papers, Third Text, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton and leader of the Research Cluster ‘Art Philosophy and Social Practice’. His books include Photography and its Violations, (2014); Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, (2015); and The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech, 2002)

Stevphen Shukaitis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. Since 2009 he has coordinated and edited Minor Compositions (http://www.minorcompositions.info). His publications include Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009) and The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016).

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London-based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. They are the authors of Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and Sound Strategies: Music as Ideological Apparatus (forthcoming, Strange Attractor | MIT, 2025). They work as lecturers in Art at University of the Arts London, the University of Reading and the Royal College of Art.

In Defence of the Art Student Essay

11.4.24 We are speaking at the launch of Public Art and the Economics of Imagination on Thursday 18.4.24:

Public Art and the Economics of Imagination

Thursday, April 18th 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM

Pelican House
144 Cambridge Heath Road
London

What is the role of public art in shaping our collective imagination, how does economics influence what kind of art is allowed in our public spaces, and where are the opportunities for radical new types of creative activity that can shift what seems possible? ?Join us for the launch of a new project from artist Toby Tobias Kidd, Future Narratives Lab and Art School Plus, that will explore all of these questions and more, including a podcast series in collaboration with Kings College London, and an article in the latest issue of Stir Magazine.

Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Lecturers at Royal College of Art, University of Reading and Chelsea College of Arts, and authors of Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Ella Snell, Founder of Art School Plus, specialist in public realm art, Associate for Cultural Associates Oxford, and Trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation

Alex Parry, from the Collectivising Studio Practice project, exploring peer-to-peer care structures around the the artist studio as a micro care system ?More to be announced

2.3.24 We are speaking at the book launch for Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care by Dr. Adam Walker at Manchester Metropolitan University on Friday 8.3.24:

Book launch: Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care

Join us at 4pm on 8th March to celebrate the launch of the new book Art, Labour Text and Radical Care by Dr Adam Walker, published by Routledge. Through developing an ethical-methodological approach of ‘radical care', Art, Labour Text and Radical Care explores how critical artistic practice might contribute to the materialisation of more equal, more collectively fulfilling, possibilities of being. The chapters trace a set of interweaving lineages perpetuating inequalities: through labour, the body, and onto-epistemology. Art’s all too frequent a-criticality, cooption, or even complicity amidst these lineages is observed, and radical care and the disruptive arttext are developed as twin aspects of an alternative, resistant framework. Alongside a presentation by Adam sharing some of the book’s core arguments,

Dr Danielle Child and Drs Pil and Galia Kollectiv will share some of their research, after which there will be a panel discussion chaired by David Osbaldeston focussed on art’s present position and alternative possibilities within structures of labour. The presentations and discussion will be followed by drinks and light refreshments. All welcome.

Adam Walker is an artists and writer, and Lecturer in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. Their practice is research-led, critically and reflexively considering structures of inequality, not least their own complicit position amidst these. Text sits at the centre of their practice, including its extensions into digital terrains as code and data. Interruption and impropriety are sought: subtexts and counter-texts which might interrupt dominant textual flows. Adam’s work has been exhibited, performed, published and commissioned by institutions including the ICA, Tate, Tyneside Cinema, Coventry Biennial, Serpentine Gallery, Ma Bibliothéque and NEoN Digital Arts Festival within the UK, Skelf and Hoax online, Yermilov Centre, Izolyatsia and the House of Cinema in Ukraine, and Adana Archaeological Museum in Turkey.

Danielle Child is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Deputy Head of Postgraduate Arts and Humanities Centre (PAHC) at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research adopts an historical materialist approach to explore the relationship between contemporary art and capitalism through the lens of labour. This interest includes social (collective, participatory and public) artistic practices, contracted labour (the ‘invisible hands’ of production) in art, and contemporary art and social class. She has published articles in Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Art & the Public Sphere and Sculpture Journal. Danielle is co-Lead (with Dave Beech) on the AHRC-funded Mapping Creative Labour in Contemporary Art network and co-host (with Sarah Scarsbrook) of the podcast Classed Acts. Her book Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism was published in January 2019 with Bloomsbury Academic and she is currently working, as editor, on The Routledge Companion to Art and Capitalism.

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London-based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their work addresses the legacy of modernism and the relationship between art and politics. Through their performance, film and sculptural installations, they have been interrogating the organisation of labour and the manifestations of ideology in late capitalism. They have had solo shows at Centre Clark, Montreal, Te Tuhi Center for the Arts, New Zealand and The Showroom Gallery, London, and presented live work at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Berlin Biennial and Kunsthall Oslo. They are the authors of Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital (2023), published by Palgrave Macmillan and they work as lecturers in Fine Art at University of the Arts London, the University of Reading and the Royal College of Art.

Book Launch: Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital

In Defence of the Art Student Essay

Public Art and the Economics of Imagination

Book launch: Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care

Songs of Worship and Dismay