Political public art as performative response to crisis

Andrews, Stuart and Duggan, Patrick (2024) Political public art as performative response to crisis. Liminalities: a journal of performance studies, 20 (4).

Record type: Article

Abstract

That art is sometimes, perhaps often political is not a new idea; nor is the argument that such work might be considered an active agent in the world, especially in terms of offering critical perspectives on world events, situations and p/Politics. Nevertheless, there is little research on the position of political artwork as crisis response in a formal municipal or emergency planning sense (as opposed to representation of or reflection on a crisis). In this article, we ask how explicitly political public art practices (as opposed to protest performances, for example) can reveal the nature (political, social, cultural) of a crisis as that crisis is unfolding. In so doing, we will argue that explicitly political public art can and should be taken seriously as productively performative (active, constitutive, enacting, engaging) crisis response action.

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