Marco Baravalle in conversation with Gregory Sholette Episode #1 of the podcast serie No Land Ahoy! Drifting Conversations on Radical Art within the framework of The School of Mutation
Marco Baravalle talks to artists, curators and activists. From the phantom archive of activist art to the museo situado, from Afrofutirism to decolonisation of neoliberal museums, these constellations of radical art may help us trace possible routes through the drift of the present.
EPISODE #1 with GREGORY SHOLETTE
The conversation builds on Sholette’s forthcoming book The Art Of Activism, The Activism of Art (Lund Humphries) in which the author attempts an account of what he calls the phantom archive of activist art, namely a series of counter-histories of radical art from the 1960s to the present. Situationists in France and Argentinean pioneers of activist art are discussed, as well as the challenges posed to art and politics by the current condition that Sholette names unreality.
Profile
Dr. Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist and curator Imaginary Archive: a peripatetic collection of documents speculating on a past whose future never arrived. His art and research theorize and document issues of collective cultural labor, activist art, and decolonial historical representation after 1968. Sholette is also co-founder of the collectives, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (1980-1988); REPOhistory (1989-2000); and Gulf Labor Coalition (2010 ongoing), as well as the author of Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (2017); Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2011); Art As Social Action (with C. Bass: 2018), and the forthcoming book, The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art from Lund Humphries (2021). Along with his colleague Chloë Bass, Sholette co-directs Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY), a new, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded art and social justice initiative at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.