Getting Art and Life Together

Abstract

as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 Edited by Nato Thompson MIT Press/Creative Time Books, 2012 280 pp./$39.95 (hb) In tin: summer of 2011, Manhattan public commissioning organization Creative Time launched a new initiative to document and present engaged art made since the 1990s. project, dubbed Living as Form, was curated by Nato Thompson, best known for his 2004 exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Sphere at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and more recently, as chief curator at Creative Time. Living as Form includes an online archive, lecture series, exhibition, traveling exhibition, and book. Including such a vast network of components has been a feature of many of Thompson's curatorial endeavors, from Paul Chan's staging of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to the 2008 election season Democracy In America: The. National Campaign projects. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Thompson's book, as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991 2011 is representative of the overall project and will have the most implications for our understanding of history. first text, by Creative Tune president and artistic director Anne Pasternak, contextualizes the project within the organization's long history of commissioning work like Gran Fury's series of AIDS activist advertisements Kissing Doesn't. Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, which ran on public buses in the 1980s. In the following text, Thompson introduces his curatorial vision of focusing on strategic and deeply invested more than on the temporary disruptions of his past work on interventionist art. Next is a series of essays that complicate and complement this curatorial vision by Carol Becker, Claire Bishop, Teddy Cruz, Brian Holmes, Shannon Jackson, and Maria Lind--all significant contributors to recent discourse around public, social, and political art. final 150 pages of this beautifully designed full-color book are dedicated to project profiles of groups, individuals, actions, campaigns, and events. featured 107 projects in the book were selected by Thompson and a curatorial advisory hoard made up of twenty-seven groups and individuals (several of whom are either catalog authors or participating artists). are complemented by an online Social Practice Archive of over 350 projects, and the nomadic version of as Form--a self-contained hard drive of allows each host venue to show selections and add their own local to the archive. This open-ended archive of art, project descriptions, and documents signifies both a pragmatic: acknowledgement of the limitations of the conventional curatorial process to be inclusive and a reticence to commit to the exclusion that can make exhibits coherent. Eschewing coherency, this effort attempts, in Thompson's words, to make the category of socially engaged bigger (26). This includes curious additions such as WikiLeaks, Tahrir Square, the. …