On Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: An Introduction

Abstract

In this introduction to the volume, editors Natalie Alvarez, Claudette Lauzon, and Keren Zaiontz examine current directions in art activism in the Americas in the aftermath of what Micah White calls the ‘constructive failure’ of Occupy Wall Street. Art activists, the editors argue, are meeting the shifting demands of activism through the creation of sustainable spaces and adaptable tactics that exceed the space-time of the street protest or direct action itself. The editors examine the ways in which this turn toward sustainable strategies enacts a ‘prefigurative politics’ designed to bring a desired future into being. But they also take stock of the centuries-long and ongoing forms of Indigenous land-based activism, which enacts what might be called a ‘refigurative politics’ that makes manifest the ‘already-(continuing)-and’ of Indigenous rights to sovereignty and self-determination. Their overview of chapter contributions traces how art activists are deploying strategic, sustainable tools—through networked technologies and digital activism, cross-sector alliances and relationships, and readymade tools, to name a few—in order to generate alternative social configurations and collective futures. Alvarez, Lauzon, and Zaiontz conclude by identifying how the book’s ten artist pages, interspersed throughout the collection, unsettle any stable definitions of art activism while offering new ways of thinking and feeling about the mobilizing power of creative collaboration and activism.