Sur les affinités esthétiques et intellectuelles entre l'art contemporain et les théories du complot.
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
La collection « On the Antipolitical », éditée
par
Ana Teixeira Pinto, se consacre à l'étude historique du processus de
dépolitisation envisagé dans le contexte
néocolonial
présent.
Larne Abse Gogarty enseigne l'histoire et la théorie de l'art à la Slade School of Fine Art, Londres. Ses recherches portent notamment sur les pratiques artistiques collectives aux États-Unis entre les années 1930 et 1990, sur les théories liées au marxisme, à la race et au genre. Membre du collectif éditorial de Cesura//Acceso, elle contribue régulièrement à la revue Art Monthly.
