Recommended by Shannon Jackson, Professor of TDPS and Rhetoric.
"Recalling earlier histories while focusing on a variety of socially-engaged groups working now, Kester develops the concept of 'dialogue' as a conceptual term and as an operative structure within contemporary art practice."
"Situation is part of the Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Arts series of readers which interrogate major themes in contemporary art with readings, writings, and works from artists, curators, and philosophers."
"The French economic philosophers Chiapello and Boltanski argue that the 'new spirit of capitalism' claims to offer its workers new opportunities to create flexibly spontaneous lives within corporate structures and, furthermore, has incorporated what used to be 'aesthetic critique' into the very motor of those operations."
Recommended by Shannon Jackson, Professor of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and Rhetoric and author of Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics.
"In this book, Lehmann coins and elaborates the term 'postdramatic theatre' to name a brand of theatrical experimentation that resists cathartic narrative, that deconstructs canonical texts, that replaces dramatic characters with sculptural figures, that moves outside of a proscenium space, and that approaches politics from a post-Brechtian stance that re-imagines rather than rejects the signature forms of the culture industry."
"Participation is part of the Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Arts series of readers which interrogate major themes in contemporary art with readings, writings, and works from artists, curators, and philosophers."
Recommended by Shannon Jackson, Professor of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and Rhetoric and author of Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics.
"Returning to the work of Antonio Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe argue that the concept of hegemony offers the most helpful tool in combating the orthodoxies of Leninist Marxism. Their concept of 'antagonism' has been taken-up a great deal in contemporary art circles, sometimes repressing the fact that term emerged from a book on 'socialist strategy.'"
Recommended by Shannon Jackson, Professor of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and Rhetoric and author of Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics.
"This collection of essays and reviews includes Fried’s famous 1967 polemic, 'Art and Objecthood,' the terms and interlocutors of which surface at many different points throughout the project of Social Works."
"In this perhaps overly-cited book, Bourriaud tracks a range of contemporary gallery-based art work where—rather than oil, canvas, or clay—'inter-subjectivity' is the substrate of the art event. For someone like me, such inter-subjective material resonates with the inter-relational practice of performance."
Recommended by Shannon Jackson, Professor of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and Rhetoric and author of Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics.
"The Risk Society, the first of many books on this topic by Beck, explores how the language of 'risk' animates contemporary economic and social spheres. Beck underscores how this language celebrates the capacity of private individuals to 'flexibly' create their own lives at the same time that it masks the 'precarity' they often encounter when those lives take an unforeseen turn."
