Usable Pasts

Larne Abse Gogarty is a Lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art. She writes about modern and contemporary art, and has recently published essays in Third Text, and the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsList of FiguresIntroduction: Historicising Social Practice1 The New Deal Imaginary2 The Stakes of Social Practice3 Prevented Futures and Usable Pasts1 Rehearsals for Real Life1 Performance and Critical Realism2 The Roof Is on Fire3 Code 334 Injunction Granted5 Conclusion: Legislation and Rehearsals2 Social Practice / Social Reproduction1 Introduction2 Cells in Organisms/Cogs in Machines3 Black and White at the Rockland Palace: The Body against the Belt4 Dance and Domestic Labour5 Expectations and Welfare Reform6 'Each Week We started with the Body'7 Expectations at Capp Street Gallery8 Conclusion: Reproducing Culture, Reproducing Life3 Housing, Homelessness and Documentary1 If You Lived Here …2 One-Third of a Nation4 Race, Nation and Usable Pasts1 Documentary and Nationalism2 Blackness and the Limits of a Usable Past3 Project Row HousesCoda: Utility and Social PracticeBibliographyIndex

“[A] well-researched [...] exploration of how large-scale, social justice-oriented art has evolved in the United States.”—Holly Bass, Dance Chronicle