Inspired by the Institute for the Future of the Book, Minor Compositions is launching a digital form for the forthcoming book Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation by Neala Schleuning.

Over the next month the entirety of the draft manuscript will be posted here: http://artpolitik.digress.it.

Comments and discussions will be integrated into revisions of the book before it is printed later this year (which will, as with all other Minor Compositions titles, be available for free download).

Cheers, stevphen


More information

Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation
Neala Schleuning

Artpolitik examines the relationship between art and politics, focusing on radical political aesthetics in western culture since the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing from Surrealism, Socialist Realism, the Situationist International, capitalist consumer aesthetics, and critical theory, Neala Schleuning elaborates a social anarchist approach to aesthetics.

Artpolitik is not a history of radical art production but an exploration of the core ideas inspiring radical art. This provocative book is guaranteed to both challenge and inform, reframing radical aesthetics for the challenges of the present. It features an exploration of ideas and techniques employed by artists for more effective communication of radical political ideas. Art has played a central role in revolutionary change throughout history, and our own times call for a revitalization of art in the service of liberatory politics. This book is an effort to understand how new ideas seeking to position themselves vis a vis the aesthetic tradition while simultaneously reflecting the transformation of political and social movement cultures in new directions.


Bio: Neala Schleuning is a writer and educator. She received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1978 with an emphasis in political philosophy and intellectual history. Fulbright Scholar to the Russian Federation, she is the author of many articles, higher education policy papers, films and radio productions, and several books, including America: Song We Sang Without Knowing (1983); Idle Hands and Empty Hearts: Work and Freedom in the United States (1990); Women, Community, and the Hormel Strike of 1985-86 (1994); and To Have and to Hold: the Meaning of Ownership in the United States (1997).

Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

Requisite fb page: http://www.facebook.com/artpolitikthebook

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia: http://www.minorcompositions.info


-- Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info

"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule." - subRosa Collective