Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century

Art and Revolution investigates practices emerging in neighboring zones where art and revolution overlap for a limited time, in more or less well developed forms. Yet even when their rapprochement fails, traces of the overlap can still be recognized. They will be analyzed here through various practices, from Courbet to Russian Futurism and Constructivism, from the Viennese Actionists and the Situationist International to the PublixTheatreCaravan in Genoa. Gerald Raunig has written an alternative history of the “long twentieth century” that resists flat notions of linear progress current in objectivistic historiography. Instead it chronicles the attempts that were made repeatedly to burst out of this constructed continuum. It will encourage a new generation of artists and thinkers to work towards the explosive nexus of art and activism.