Categotry Archives: Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde
Edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

The avant-garde is dead… long live the avant-garde

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde offers a new way of analysing and theorizing the question of the avant-garde today. It is customary within art history and cultural history to argue that the avant-garde disappeared as an (anti)artistic gesture during the 1960s. The dissolution of the Situationist International in 1972 is often presented as the endpoint in the history of the avant-garde. The implosion of the ’68 revolt – quickly in France, after a long process of revolt and counter-revolt in countries like Italy – effectively ended the attempt to use art as a vehicle for a transformation of capitalist society. This book contributes to the discussion of the avant-garde today by discussing whether it is still relevant for a contemporary anti-systemic critique and analysing different instances where the avant-garde has creeped into protests and social experiments outside art and art institutions.

Includes essays from Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Esther Leslie, Abigail Susik, Natasha Gasparian, Marina Vishmidt, Yves Citton, and Gene Ray

Bio: Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is Professor in Political Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Playmates and Playboys at a Higher Level: J.V. Martin and the Situationist International (2014), Crisis to Insurrection (2015), After the Great Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties (2018), Trump’s Counter-Revolution (2018), Hegel after Occupy (2018) and Late Capitalist Fascism (2022). Continue reading →

Crisis to Insurrection. Notes on the ongoing collapse
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

The crisis runs deep. The economies of the US and Europe are in profound crisis and the developing economies are also beginning to feel its effects. Everywhere it is workers who are paying the price. The crisis is being socialized and austerity is the order of the day; the crisis is used as a pretext for further savings and cuts. In other words, capital has intensified the class war. But the proletariat has started moving. The revolts in North Africa and the Middle East have challenged the neoliberal world order and its division of the world, and the ‘movement of the squares’ in Southern Europe and Occupy in the US have picked up the baton and joined the new protest cycle. Even though dictators have been toppled in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the protests continue. This is also the case in Greece, Spain and Portugal where people reject the austerity programs. There are protests in Bulgaria and Bosnia. In Syria the civil war is raging. In China the number of strikes continue to rise. In Turkey the youth reject Erdogan’s neoliberal ‘success’ and urban restructuring and in Brazil ‘the dangerous classes’ have taken to the streets. There are a variety of protests going on – the ones in the West are defensive, the ones in the rest of the world offensive and reformist – but together they are knocking a hole in the neoliberal world order. The old mole is back. Continue reading →