Anarchist Currents in Contemporary Art

ANARCHIST CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY ART

This session explores anarchism’s ‘aesthetic of tension’ in contemporary art that is socially engaged, anarchist identifying, and geared toward challenge and disruption. This tension involves self-actualization and transformative modalities. It thrives on qualities of contestation at the same time as it seeks to intensify ruptures that are generative, unleashing imaginative freedoms that find their indexical grounding in the artwork’s relational power and communicative efficacy. What lies at the core of the anarchist tension? Italian activist Alfredo Bonanno characterized it as a relationship of engagement, a continual reversing of theory into action and action into theory which refuses closure. Arising from an ontological positioning that is self-constituted, dynamic, relational, and critical of authoritative origins, this tension aspires to extend the freedom it embodies into the world as a social force. Its paths are tactical and multiple: residing in the flux of contestation, it signals anarchism is an empowering idea, one that orients itself toward the future, rather than atrophying in the present, because the conditions for its realization are ever-changing. Most importantly, it contributes to anarchism’s allure, its means of building affinities that draw others toward a social vision that has no end goal or final reckoning. Thus, anarchism’s aesthetic of tension unfolds along social continuums the activist artist creates, working within society from an engaged stance of immediacy that broaches no deferrals.