Art's Assemblies

Claudia Breger makes a case for art's power to act politically in significant, manifold ways by reconnecting twenty-first-century philosophical frameworks to the more boldly political aesthetics of European modernisms, particularly as developed in response to historical fascism. Thus, the book develops dialogues between recent work in actor-network-theory, radical Black thought, neo-marxism, affect, and queer studies, and the twentieth-century tradition of critical theory, with literature, film, TV, and art installation examples included. As acts of political alignment as well as imaginative prefiguration, "art's assemblies" bring together heterogeneous elements and actions in (polyphonic) "political concert." This includes how artworks "track" and "trace" pieces of real-world materials even in fantastic contexts; how they work through unfinished histories of violence and dehumanization by "animating" archival documents; how they "fabulate" different historical accounts without engaging in the "forging" actions of fake news; and how they counter the accumulated nightmares surrounding us through practices of "dreaming" interwoven with actions of "drafting" or "demanding." In this challenging political moment, Breger's work speaks across disciplines to articulate a new vision of how art can engage with the world-and imagine different futures.