Space and Culture

Issue 6 of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest documents the work of artists deeply engaged with communities, labour and rights struggles.  It has some noteworthy articles ranging from Daniel Tucker and Nato Thompson on a community documentation project which records town hall  meetings on urban and regional art strategies,  in this issue focusing on the Los Angeles event; Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom’s proposal for a regional Midwest Radical Culture Corridor; Kate Rich on ‘feral trade;’ an extensive section on artists and war including war art; and Karla Diaz’s incisive piece on the relation between (SMS) texting and contemporary graffiti which I’ll be teaching from for sure.  Some of the material is full of self-consciously put-together sentences, but these are worth reading through.  One strategy is a first read for keywords and ‘good ideas’ (for thought or action): the cutting edge of contemporary theory is well represented in this issue and is rendered into practice.  After acclimatizing in this way, one can go back and pick out the details reading sections as they are of interest, and finally a third read attempts to ‘put it all together’ concentrating on Introductory comments and sections which synthesize or give an overview of the whole book.   Just one of the key notions in this text is the ‘precariat’ (the lumpen who consider themselves to be doing well but are in fact flexibly employed and therefore in a precarious economic situation) . Cost: $US15.

- Rob