Art as Demonstration: A Revolutionary Recasting of Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Sven Spieker

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 360
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

How artists wield demonstration to question the status quo both aesthetically and politically, marshaling art and education as powerful agents of change.

Demonstration, in short, says: See here. It is the practice of pointing to something in order to explain or contest it. As such, Sven Spieker argues that demonstration has helped reshape art from the height of the Cold War to the late twentieth century, reformatting our understanding of how art and political engagement relate to each other. Focusing on Western Europe (especially Germany), Eastern Europe, and the United States, Art as Demonstration expands on contemporary discussions of art-as-protest, activism, and resistance. Spieker shows how a closer, more historical look at art’s connection with demonstration reconnects us with earlier efforts, notably by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, to marshal art for the purpose of instruction and engagement.

Art as Demonstration reconceives the history of postwar art in Eastern and Western Europe from the perspective of demonstration, understood formally (as a technique for showing and pointing) as well as politically (as protest, resistance, etc.). Close analyses of individual artworks reveal how the deployment of demonstration has changed over time. Spieker shows how “protest” and “resistance” organize art and artists not only politically but also and especially formally and aesthetically—a development of particular importance in the Cold War art and politics of Eastern Europe. The book illustrates how from the 1960s onward demonstration radically changed the way artists thought about art: no longer as an object but as a form of education.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
1: Introduction: Art-as-Demonstration in the 1960s and Beyond
Demonstration and the Didactic
2: Ostentatious Neutrality (Bernar Venet, Daniel Buren, Adrian Piper)
Adrian Piper’s “Food for the Spirit”
3: Burlesque Lecture Demonstration (Robert Morris, Walter Benjamin)
Walter Benjamin’s Retelling of Modernism
4: Film as Operation (Harun Farocki, Pawe Kwiek)
Paweł Kwiek: A Film Operator’s Demonstration
5: Taking It to the Street: Eastern European Art Demonstrations (Milan Knížák, Jiří Kovanda, Endre Tót, Mladen Miljanović, Ciprian Homorodean)
How to Survive Neoliberalism (Mladen Miljanovic, Ciprian Homorodean)
6: Learning from the Situation (Ulrike Meinhof, Clemens von Wedemeyer)
Clemens von Wedemeyer, Bambule Replay: Rushes (2012)
7: Instructions for Seeing (Bazon Brock, Włodzimierz Borowski)
Włodzimierz Borowski: The Audience as Failure
8: Teaching What Does Not Exist (Gnezdo, Ilya Kabakov)
Demonstration in Ilya Kabakov’s Work of the 1960s
9: Demonstration in Soviet and Post-Soviet Space (Extra-Governmental Control Commission, Radek Community, Chto delat)
Demonstrations as Trips Out of Town: Collective Actions
Taking Demonstration Back to the Streets: Extra-Governmental Control Commission, Radek Community
Reanimating the Dialectic: Chto delat’s Demonstration Politics
10: Postscript: The Migrant’s Hands: Between Demonstration and Archive in Sylvain George’s Qu’ils reposent en révolte (Des figures de guerre)
Acknowledgments
Notes
1 Introduction: Art-as-Demonstration in the 1960s and Beyond
2 Ostentatious Neutrality (Bernar Venet, Daniel Buren, Adrian Piper)
3 Burlesque Lecture Demonstration (Robert Morris, Walter Benjamin)
4 Film as Operation (Harun Farocki, Paweł Kwiek)
5 Taking It to the Street: Eastern European Art Demonstrations (Milan Knížák, Jirí Kovanda, Endre Tót, Mladen Miljanovic, Ciprian Homorodean)
6 Learning from the Situation (Ulrike Meinhof, Clemens von Wedemeyer)
7 Instructions for Seeing (Bazon Brock, Włodzimierz Borowski)
8 Teaching What Does Not Exist (Gnezdo, Ilya Kabakov)
9 Demonstration in Soviet and Post-Soviet Space (Extra-Governmental Control Commission, Radek Community, Chto delat)
10 Postscript: The Migrant’s Hands: Between Demonstration and Archive in Sylvain George’s Qu’ils reposent en révolte (Des figures de guerre)
Index