[artinfo] Art and Social Change

[Afterall]

Afterall are delighted to invite you to the 
launch of Art and Social Change, a critical 
reader edited by Will Bradley and Charles Esche. 
The reader gathers together an international 
selection of artists’ proposals, manifestos, 
theoretical texts and public declarations that 
focus on the question of political engagement and 
the possibility of social change. The approaches 
represented are many and diverse, from Gustave 
Courbet’s involvement in the Paris Commune and 
the socialist art theory of William Morris to the 
hybrid activist practice associated with the 
twenty-first century ‘movement of movements’; 
from the political commitments of the Modernist 
avant-gardes to the rejections of Modernism in 
favour of protest, critique, utopian social 
experiment or revolutionary propaganda. Six 
specially commissioned essays – by Geeta Kapur, 
Lucy Lippard, John Milner, Gerald Raunig, Marina 
Vishmidt and Tirdad Zolghadr – further explore 
both the historical context and the contemporary 
situation.

During the launch we will be screening Nils 
Vest's Five Days for Peace (1978), a film about 
an intervention by the Danish street theatre 
collective Solvognen during the 1973 NATO summit 
in Copenhagen.
 
Art and Social Change is published by Tate 
Publishing in association with Afterall and is 
available online from 
<http://www.tate.org.uk/shop/product.do?id=34613>Tate 
Publishing and in selected bookstores in Europe 
and the US.

<http://www.ica.org.uk/>http://www.ica.org.uk/
<http://www.afterall.org/>http://www.afterall.org/