The Program in Media and Modernity Presents
Becoming Ungovernable: Contemporary Art, Decolonization, Antifascism
February 21st, 5:00PM
Room N107
BECOMING UNGOVERNABLE: CONTEMPORARY ART, DECOLONIZATION, ANTIFASCISM
Yates McKee
Respondent: Mostafa Heddaya
Yates McKee's Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition was published last year, chronicling the emergence of new formations of art and politics in the five years during and after Occupy Wall Street. In this talk, McKee will discuss what it means to write art history in the midst of social movements, and will update the trajectory laid out in Strike Art in light of the convergence of decolonial and anti-fascist politics in the face of Trumpism, with emphasis on the figures of "ungovernability" and the General Strike as they could pertain--however uneasily--to the increasingly agitated landscape of contemporary art within, across, and beyond art institutions per se.
Yates McKee is an art critic and historian whose work has appeared in venues including October, Grey Room, South Atlantic Quarterly, Texte Zur Kunst, Art Journal, and The Nation. He is the author of Strike Art (Verso, 2016), and adjunct instructor of art history at SUNY Purchase and Borough of Manhattan Community College, among other institutions.
Mostafa Heddaya is a PhD Student in the Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University.
