On the aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy.
Written in the wake of the far-right populist turn in Europe, the US, and beyond, What We Do Is Secret addresses aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy, proposing a theory of conspiracy that is not primarily concerned with conspiracy theory. This inquiry takes shape across chapters on the politics of post-internet art aesthetics; the sublime and possessive individualism in recent "critical" art; Cady Noland's security fences, and silkscreens of the Symbionese Liberation Army; and mutuality, secrecy, and improvisation in the work of Ima-Abasi Okon. Larne Abse Gogarty discusses the relationship between culture and contemporary politics, following on from David Lloyd's proposition that through its compensatory qualities, the aesthetic sphere naturalizes forms of life lived under the rule of property. What kind of art can work against this? Can art exist as a conspiracy capable of corroding that rule?
"With stunning precision, Larne Abse Gogarty skewers the fallacies of flatly nihilistic fact-shoveling, post-internet, post- everything art, which preens about its capacity to lift a curtain on secret world workings using repurposed enemy tools. Tossing overboard the faux radicals as revamped liberals dealing in the already known, the author offers versions of a real beauty in art and critique in that which orients towards unmasking links in the chains of oppression. Prizing unruly associations, the book moves its thinking in spirals, drawing into one breath, which is a blow, the inner core of conspiracy and inspiration, consciousness and insurrection."
— Esther Leslie
"In a time of rampant conspiracy theories and actual criminal conspirators in power, what do we make of the conspiracy as a practice conceived from below? Across trenchant analyses that range from the contemporary resurfacing of fascist aesthetics to the radical work of artists including Cady Noland and Ima-Abasi Okon, Larne Abse Gogarty gives reason to believe that art can again be a space of insurgent interventions rather than one of liberal reconciliation."
— David Lloyd
The
On the Antipolitical series, edited by
Ana Teixeira Pinto, is devoted to the historical study of the depoliticization
process, situating it within the
neocolonial
continuum that animates the digital frontier as the new locus of settler
becoming.
Larne Abse Gogarty is Lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Her primary research interests lie in modern and contemporary art, as well as theories relating to Marxism, race and gender. She is in the editorial collective for Cesura//Acceso, a journal for music, politics and poetics. She regularly writes criticism, mainly for Art Monthly.
