Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice
Edited by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova and Rachael Rakes
MIT Press and BAK basis voor actuele kunst, 2021
Paperback, 8.5 x 5.5 in.
224 pages
$19.95
WPA Note:
This artist-organized text raises questions that connect to many of WPA's past and upcoming projects.
Description:
Combining handbook, dictionary, and anthology, investigations and examples of artistic practices aimed at social change.
This volume from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, combines handbook, dictionary, and anthology to investigate artistic practice aimed at achieving social change. With text and visual essays, definitions, exercises, interviews, and images, the contributors envision a praxis that is committed to experimenting with aesthetics and politics in ways that go beyond the conventions of Western modernity. These are practices that are interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and politically driven, offering ways of “being together otherwise.” Catalyzed by the work of artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, which focuses on radicalizing civic processes, Toward the Not-Yet imagines and enacts alternative ways of conceiving the present and future.
Contributors, among them notable artists, scholars, activists, and writers consider ways of participating in civic life, including “dreamscaping” and “radical listening”; the creation of safer spaces for humans and nonhumans; ways of radically shifting laws and policies; and tactics and methods of collective sanctuary. Toward the Not-Yet is part of BAK’s series of BASICS readers, debuting a SUPERBASICS variation that is larger, with more visual content.
About the Author(s):
Jeanne van Heeswijk is an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalize the local”. Her long-scale community-embedded projects question art’s autonomy by combining performative actions, discussions, and other forms of organizing and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their own futures.