Journal of Aesthetics & Protest

Preview here

This is the sixth issue of Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, titled Theory in 3 Acts: I Love To We, Antiwar Survey Respondents, and Another Theory Section. I ordered this and it's on its way. Amy Franceschini, Fritz Haeg, Ben Schaafsma and Andrew Boyd are among the contributers. All issues are viewable/readable for free on-line.

The Subversive Imagination

This book is full of SO MANY amazing essays. Herbert Marcuse and the Subversive Potential of Art by Carol Becker totally affected me when I read it years ago. I even remember where I was when I read it (in the chair in the corner of my room in Halifax). As I was reading, I was listening to Destroyer's album, Theif (forget which song), and he was singing about the exact same stuff! I will never forget how much my mind got blown by that combo. I will try to find those lyrics...

Ha, Ha, Ha

I know this is not explicitly social-practicy, but I think it touches on a lot of the same vibes. For the most part it is really weird (actually NOT funny), to read about jokes. However, there is some great stuff, including Dave Hickey's statement about how allowing art to be 'bad, silly and frivolous' is liberating. A lot of amazing artists are featured, including Hamza Walker who is on his way to PMMNLS to lecture on Dec 1.

Here's what the back says:
Ever since the Dadaists, humour in one or more of its guises - absurd, ironic, tragi-comic, mordant, gothically dark, deadpan, camp or kitsch - has frequently surfaced as a subversive, troubling or liberating element in art. This anthology traces humour's role in transforming the practice and experience of art from the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, through Fluxus and Pop, to the diverse, often uncategorizable works of some of the most influential artists today.

Failure!: Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices!

Failure!: Experiments in Aesthetics and Social Practices

Edited by Nicole Antebi, Colin Dickey, and Robby Herst

The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press presents this book. It's a new collection of essays, interviews and artwork that together offer a minor history of failure. Tracing the idea of failure through contemporary art, activism and social protest movements, literature and philosophy, the work in Failure! cuts against a notion of forward progress by instead exploring various dead-ends on the timeline of history. Failure! gives us ways to map our lives in relationship to improper paths.

Group Work

Co-written and edited by the three current members of the art group Temporary Services, Group Work is a thorough investigation of groups of artists, activists and musicians in the form of interviews and short profiles. Temporary Services interviews the band The Ex, Pedro Bell from the band Funkadelic, AA Bronson from General Idea, ex-members of Political Art Documentation/Distribution, and current members of the groups Haha, Wochenklausur, and What, How and For Whom, asking questions specific to artists who work in groups. Each interview is prefaced by a brief introduction to the group’s history, major events and shows, and current status, and gives context on who is being interviewed and why. -Katy Asher