Art Rebellion: The Aesthetics of Social Transformation

Description

Art has always been central to moments of great social change. From the avant-garde to the ages of revolution, the act of rebellious creation has been crucial to bringing people and ideas together. However, in an increasingly fractured world characterised by upheaval and crisis, what role can art play in ushering in transformation? Malcolm Miles offers a guide to contemporary art and activism, setting it firmly within the context of the avant garde and its legacies in the postwar period. He explores the rise of direct action to replace representational politics in organizations like Occupy and Extinction Rebellion, and in the movements to destroy or remove statues of slavers, and finds parallels in anti-institutional art practices. By engaging with the significant theoretical innovations of the last 50 years - modernism, postmodernism and contemporary critical thinking - Miles provides both an overview of political aesthetics and an introduction to how art activism works in its most memorable moments in history. Art Rebellion argues that beauty is radically other to the dominant society; that power relations can be transformed; that protest cultures and contemporary art grow together; and that art has a crucial interruptive role in forming new, more equal and just, realities.

Malcolm Miles is Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth, UK. He is the author of Art, Space and the City (1997), Urban Avant-Gardes (2004), Cities and Cultures (2007), and Urban Utopias (2008), Herbert Marcuse: an Aesthetics of Liberation (2011), Eco-Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Limits to Culture (2015).

Art Rebellion stands up to an art-indifferent public and suggests-gently-that it may be possible for avant-garde art to change the world. This is in itself a rebellion, which Miles lays out with scholarly precision, humility, humor, and an acute sense of the aesthetic and the political at once. * Brinda Bose, Dr, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India * Malcolm Miles' Art Rebellion covers a wide range of issues, themes, and movements involving the conjunction of art and politics. The comprehensive scope of the book and relevance to contemporary political and aesthetic issues make this a highly significant and timely book. * Douglas Kellner, Distinguished Research Professor of Education, UCLA, USA *